Browsing by Author "Nel, Ashleigh"

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    Experimental design evaluating the impact of a wellbeing initiative on blue-collar employee engagement, burnout and psychological capital
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2022-12) Nel, Ashleigh; Bailey, Lisa; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences. Dept. of Industrial Psychology.
    ENGLISH SUMMARY: Businesses have been successful in reaching their economic objectives and realising new innovations that have contributed to the modernisation and sophistication of society. However, the prioritisation of economic growth has developed alongside poverty, and prosperity alongside environmental damage. Additionally, there is a global paradigm shift from traditional capitalist business practice to responsible global capitalism. This has increased pressure on organisations to be strategic partners in achieving real socio-economic change and not purely economic growth. The implication of this is that businesses have begun identifying the priority needs and challenges of the surrounding disadvantaged communities, from which some of their employees derive, in order to contribute to alleviating their socio-economic challenges. This is based on the premise that when the home environment of the employee is supportive and conducive to health and wellbeing, performance and engagement at work will increase. Furthermore, employee work engagement is on a global decline, costing organisations significantly in terms of low productivity, high absenteeism, less innovation, poor customer service, and high recruitment and training costs. This has led to an urgent need for research into a broader based model that addresses the less traditional factors hampering employee work engagement and perpetuating burnout. The South African workforce is facing multiple challenges, two of which include poverty and low work engagement contributed to by a lack of physical and psychological resources. To date, the wellbeing of employees has been managed through short-term Employee Assistance Programmes or health programmes that have lacked in the impact of empowering employees with the tools they require to take ownership of the challenges they are facing. This study aimed to investigate the impact that a multi-dimensional blue-collar employee wellbeing initiative would have on blue-collar employees’ psychological capital, work engagement and burnout. The model of ethical, proactive business practice that this thesis proposes is unique and cuts across multiple disciplines and fields of research, contributing to its necessity of investigation and validation. This research addresses increasing employee work engagement through a multi-dimensional wellness initiative, in the context of the global trend of responsible global capitalism and the unique political, economic and social context of South Africa. Research was conducted within a retail company using the mixed model repeated measures and analysis of variance research methodology on two sample groups: the control sample group that received no exposure to the multi-dimensional wellbeing initiative, and the experimental sample group which was exposed to the multi-dimensional internal wellbeing initiative, Love My Journey. The change in employee work engagement, burnout and psychological capital was measured through the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES), Compound PsyCap Scale (CPC-12 Scale) and the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (CBI). It was hypothesised that the multi-dimensional wellbeing initiative would have a positive impact on the experimental group’s wellbeing. This null hypothesis (hypothesis 1) could not be rejected. This was the primary outcome of the study. It was further hypothesised that this positive impact on psychological capital would have a positive impact on work engagement and a negative impact on burnout. Additionally, there was no significant difference between the levels of work engagement or burnout of the control group and experimental group, therefore the null hypothesis for hypothesis 2 and hypothesis 3 could not be rejected. The limitations of the study are discussed, recommendations are presented for further research and preactical managerial implications are discussed.