Viewing archives for Cause And Effect

The growth and collapse of autonomy at work

Redzo Mujcic and Andrew Oswald

Abstract

Humans hate being monitored. Autonomy is prized—including by research scientists. Yet little is known about a fundamental issue in the modern world: What is happening to job autonomy in today’s workplaces as people move from youth on to middle age and then on to older ages? It would be natural to believe that individuals in the second half of their careers would be the senior ones with high autonomy. We provide evidence that such a belief is wrong. This study uses longitudinal data on hundreds of thousands of randomly sampled individuals, in three rich countries, who are followed through their working lives (n > 400,000). Workers’ feelings of job autonomy trace out a smooth concave parabola, increasing up to midlife, until approximately the surprisingly early age of 40, and then collapsing over the ensuing twenty to 30 y of a person’s working life. This is apparently not an illusion. We show that objective measures of autonomy—signified by managerial and supervisory job titles, for example—behave in a matching, hump-shaped way. As a further check, consistent qualitative evidence is given: a survey we ran asking managers about their experiences. We believe this paper’s results represent a foundational, essentially unknown, and intrinsically cross-disciplinary puzzle.

Wellbeing profiles and their relationships to gender, homeownership, income, marriage, and education: Exploring hedonic and eudaimonic wellbeing in the East

Wanying Zhou, Dan Jiang, Ros McLellan, Hanxin Qian, and Honglie Wu

Abstract

Prior research has not yet to establish a clear understanding of the relationship between hedonic wellbeing (HWB) and eudaimonic wellbeing (EWB), particularly how they manifest within individuals. Moreover, it remains unclear whether HWB and EWB operate similarly across different cultural contexts. This study applies Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) to identify distinct wellbeing profiles among 1,283 residents (51.1% male) in a major coastal and capital city in China, spanning all ten districts. Five wellbeing profiles emerged: extremely low EWB, extremely low HWB, slightly low WB, slightly high WB, and extremely high WB. Notably, unlike findings from Western studies, no divergent wellbeing profiles—such as high HWB combined with low EWB, or vice versa—were observed in the Chinese sample. Multinomial logistic regression further revealed that homeownership was one of the strongest predictors of wellbeing, even after controlling for income. These findings contribute to the ongoing debate on the HWB-EWB relationship and suggest that cultural, cognitive, and linguistic differences may shape how individuals conceptualize and internalize wellbeing. This study offers valuable insights for policymakers and researchers seeking to promote wellbeing in a holistic manner, emphasizing the need to consider social and cultural contexts when evaluating wellbeing frameworks.

The impact of employee volunteering

Dr Florencio Portocarrero (LSE) presented findings from a field experiment on employee volunteering at the latest of the Wellbeing Research Centre’s Seminar Series.

He examined the knock-on effects of an employee volunteering intervention on both levels of wellbeing as well as other indicators of company performance, including levels of employee engagement and retention.

Watch the full presentation on the Centre’s YouTube channel.

Author Talks: Are your employees happy at work?

McKinsey & Company

In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey’s Vanessa Burke chats with Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, director of the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, about Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters: The Science Behind Employee Happiness and Organizational Performance (Harvard Business Review Press, Spring 2025), coauthored with INSEAD assistant professor George Ward. De Neve shares data analysis on the feelings and motivations of millions of job seekers and identifies key drivers that influence their workplace well-being. He explains why workplace well-being varies across companies and provides evidence-based ideas for business leaders who seek to improve productivity, recruitment, and retention.

Acts of kindness can make you happier and healthier, researchers say

CNBC

“People consistently and universally underestimate the kindness of others,” says Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, editor of the report and director of the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford. But the truth is, it happens more often than people realize.

“In the United States, only 30% of people think the wallet will be returned when lost,” says De Neve. “The reality is about 60% of wallets get returned when lost.”

Are young people today really the saddest generation of the modern era?

Daily Telegraph

One of those studies is the World Happiness Report, produced by a team that includes Prof Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, the director of the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford. He agrees with Prof Duffy. Across the western world, the happiness benefit that comes with youth “has really disappeared in today’s generation,” he says. The extent of the change is the most obvious in children currently at school, where “that first leg of the U-curve where people report being happiest in their teens is literally gone”. People in their 20s, meanwhile, are “living their midlife crises right now”. Someone my age is about as happy as the average 45-year-old was in the year 2000, Prof De Neve estimates.

Money Can Buy Happiness — This Oxford Philosopher Says Charities Should Pay Attention

Inside Philanthropy

Foundations and nonprofits measure impact and effectiveness in various ways, but happiness per dollar isn’t typically one of the metrics used.

Maybe it should be.

That’s the argument being put forth by Michael Plant, founder and research director of Happier Lives Institute (HLI), a nonprofit that promises to help donors “convert your cash into a happiness multiplier.” It does this by identifying the most cost effective charities — as measured by their ability to increase the happiness and wellbeing of those they reach.

Wellbeing in small-scale societies

Prof Victoria Reyes García (Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies) shared findings on subjective wellbeing among small-scale societies at the latest of the Wellbeing Research Centre’s Seminar Series.

Her work examines the levels of, and factors to support, life satisfaction and other measures of subjective wellbeing among indigenous peoples and local communities across 19 globally distributed sites.

Watch the full presentation on the Centre’s YouTube channel.

Longitudinal Relationships Across Bullying Victimization, Friendship and Social Support, and Internalizing Symptoms in Early-to-Middle Adolescence: A Developmental Cascades Investigation

Qiqi Cheng, Kathryn Mills-Webb, Jose Marquez, and Neil Humphrey

Abstract

Current understanding of the longitudinal relationships between different aspects of peer relationships and mental health problems in early- to mid-adolescence is limited. In particular, the role played by gender in these developmental cascades processes is unclear, little is known about within-person effects between bullying victimization and internalizing symptoms, and the theorized benefits of friendship and social support are largely untested. Addressing these important research gaps, this study tested a number of theory-driven hypotheses (e.g., interpersonal risk model, transactional model) regarding longitudinal relationships between bullying victimization, friendship and social support, and internalizing symptoms. The study sample was N = 26,458 adolescents (50.6% girls, average age 12 years 8 months (SD = 3.58 months) at baseline) attending k = 176 schools in Greater Manchester, England. Separating within-person effects from between-person effects, a random-intercept cross-lagged panel model (RI-CLPM) was applied to three annual waves of data. Analyses revealed that developmental cascade pathways varied across gender, as follows: higher rates of bullying victimization led to increased internalizing symptoms (partially for girls, fully for boys) and lower levels of friendship and social support (for girls only); higher levels of friendship and social support did not confer any protection against future bullying victimization (for girls or boys) but did lead to reduced internalizing symptoms (partially for girls, but not for boys); and, higher levels of internalizing symptoms led to increased rates of bullying victimization (for boys only) and lower levels of friendship and social support (partially for girls, fully for boys). Evidence of reciprocal relationships between bullying victimization and internalizing symptoms (for boys only) and between internalizing symptoms and friendship and social support (for girls only) was also found. Effect sizes of developmental cascade pathways varied but were mostly in the moderate-to-large range relative to the empirical distribution of cross-lagged effects in existing studies (i.e., 50th to 75th percentile). Sensitivity analyses indicated that findings were largely robust to a number of researcher-led analytic choices. The current study indicates that approaches to prevent or reduce the effects of bullying victimization should be prioritized, given the consistent evidence of its substantial role in increasing internalizing symptoms for both genders, in addition to its deleterious impact on girls’ friendship and social support. Preregistration: This study was preregistered at https://osf.io/xrwfq. The study design, hypotheses, and target analyses were registered.

Longitudinal relationships across sleep, physical activity, and mental wellbeing in early-to-mid-adolescence: a developmental cascades investigation

Jose Marquez, Margarita Panayiotou, Reihaneh Farzinnia, Qiqi Cheng, and Neil Humphrey

Abstract

Purpose Sleep (SL), physical activity (PA), and wellbeing (WB) are three factors linked to positive development in adolescence. Despite theoretical support and some empirical evidence of developmental associations between these factors, few studies have rigorously investigated reciprocal associations over time separating between-person and within-person effects, and none have investigated all three in concert. Thus, it remains unclear how the interplay between SL, PA and WB unfolds across time within individuals. This study examines this question in the crucial early-to-mid-adolescence developmental transition.

Method Separating between- and within-person effects, a random-intercept cross-lagged panel model was fitted to a dataset of N = 27,949 adolescents (age 12/13 at first timepoint) from Greater Manchester, England, using a three-by-three design (three annual timepoints: T1, T2, T3; three variables: SL, PA, WB).

Results Analyses revealed gender-specific developmental cascade pathways. Specifically, we found positive reciprocal associations between SL and WB for girls (at T1→T2), whereas for boys, SL positively predicted WB (at both T1→T2 and T2→Τ3) but WB did not predict SL. We also found that WB predicted PA for boys (at T2→T3) but this finding was sensitive to model specification and yielded a smaller effect than other cross-lagged pathways.

Conclusion Our results highlight the importance of sleep as a driver of adolescent wellbeing, and the role of gender in developmental cascade processes. Study strengths, limitations, and implications are discussed.