Quality of Work Life

What Quality of Work Life is

Quality of Work Life (جودة الحياة في العمل, abbreviated QWL and also written Quality of Working Life) is a research concept about the quality of what employees experience at work. The literature defines it through dimensions that vary from one researcher to another, such as working conditions, pay, growth opportunities, relationships and the connection between work and the rest of life. This is our own wording of what we read. It is not a literal definition from one source, and we do not claim that a single agreed definition exists.

The concept is a research description and not a verdict on any particular establishment. What follows introduces it and its limits. It does not conclude that raising quality of work life improves performance, retention or satisfaction, nor that it fails to, and it does not describe the reality of Saudi establishments.

The sources we checked

We verified the bibliographic data of the works below in Crossref, except for Walton’s work, which we did not find recorded there. The records cover the existence of the works and their publication details, and not their content. We dropped hyphens from the English titles, following our writing rule:

• Walton. The article “Quality of working life: what is it?” in Sloan Management Review, volume 15, issue 1, 1973, pages 11 to 21. Its details come from the citation note in the abstract of the Azarbouyeh and Jalali Naini study as OpenAlex displays it, and ProQuest indexing (Fall 1973) matches them. We did not verify them in the publisher record.
• Azarbouyeh and Jalali Naini. The article “A study on the effect of teleworking on quality of work life” in Management Science Letters, volume 4, issue 6, 2014, pages 1063 to 1068, identifier 10.5267/j.msl.2014.5.027.
• Beaumont. The article “Industrial Accidents: A Useful Indicator of Working Life?” in International Journal of Manpower, volume 2, issue 2, February 1981, pages 19 to 25, identifier 10.1108/eb044857.
• Lau and May. The article “A win win paradigm for quality of work life and business performance” in Human Resource Development Quarterly, volume 9, issue 3, September 1998, pages 211 to 226, identifier 10.1002/hrdq.3920090302. Crossref lists the second author as Bruce E. May, where Bruce is a given name and May is the surname.
• Sirgy, Efraty, Siegel and Lee. The article “A New Measure of Quality of Work Life (QWL) Based on Need Satisfaction and Spillover Theories” in Social Indicators Research, volume 55, issue 3, September 2001, pages 241 to 302, identifier 10.1023/a:1010986923468.
• Van Laar, Edwards and Easton. The article “The Work Related Quality of Life scale for healthcare workers” in Journal of Advanced Nursing, volume 60, issue 3, 2007, pages 325 to 333.
• Singh, Jena and Mohanty. The article “Quality of work life in the globally changing workplace An exploration” in Siddhant A Journal of Decision Making, volume 17, issue 2, 2017, pages 207 to 215.
• Ramawickrama, Opatha and Pushpakumari. The article “Quality of Work Life, Job Satisfaction, and the Facets of the Relationship between the Two Constructs” in International Business Research, volume 10, issue 4, March 2017, identifier 10.5539/ibr.v10n4p167.
• Wang, Touré and Poder. A systematic review titled “Measuring quality of life at work for healthcare and social services workers: A systematic review of available instruments” in Health Care Science, volume 2, issue 3, June 2023, pages 173 to 193, identifier 10.1002/hcs2.53.
• Hackman and Oldham. The article “Motivation through the design of work: test of a theory” in Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, volume 16, issue 2, August 1976, pages 250 to 279.

We read the abstracts of Azarbouyeh, Beaumont, Lau, Singh, Ramawickrama, Van Laar and Wang as OpenAlex displays them, and we read the text of none of these works. We saw neither the abstract of the Sirgy and colleagues work nor the text of Walton’s work. We list Hackman and Oldham because their work belongs to the job design literature that neighbours the topic. We found no source that connects it to the concept, so we attribute to it no view on quality of work life. We did not use consulting company pages as a source for any effect or benefit.

Is there a single definition of quality of work life?

The abstracts we read contain no single agreed definition. According to the abstract of Singh, Jena and Mohanty (2017), definitions and theoretical models have followed one another since the concept came into use more than 30 years before that abstract was written in 2017, in an effort to address the problems it faces. The same abstract adds that the lack of agreement on the proposed solutions led to a new definition, inspired by research on a related concept.

According to the abstract of Van Laar, Edwards and Easton (2007), earlier research on a group of work related quality of life scales produced inconsistent factor structures and inadequate measurement properties.

The systematic review by Wang, Touré and Poder (2023) counts 13 instruments that measure quality of work life among healthcare and social services workers, selected from 8178 records. According to the abstract, the common aspects that were considered are work conditions, job satisfaction, stress at work, relationship or balance, and career development. The abstract does not say how many of the 13 instruments cover each aspect. This describes what one abstract presents about one group of workers and is not a judgement on the whole concept.

The abstract of Ramawickrama, Opatha and Pushpakumari (2017) adds that the boundaries of the concept are themselves under study. Their desk research concluded that quality of work life and job satisfaction are different but related concepts, and it found four aspects of the relationship between them: job satisfaction as a dimension of quality of work life, as not a dimension of it, as coming before it, and as a result of it. We choose none of these four. It appears that anyone who uses the term needs to define what is meant by it before measuring.

What are Walton’s eight dimensions?

An article from 1973 is attributed to Richard Walton, and later works present it as a framework of 8 conceptual categories. According to the abstract of Beaumont (1981), the abstract presents the eight categories as, in Walton’s view, a framework for analysing the salient features that make up quality of working life, and the abstract names safe and healthy working conditions among them. The abstract of Azarbouyeh and Jalali Naini (2014) lists the eight variables in Walton’s model. The wording below is our selection, and the labels vary between the works that relay the list:

• Adequate and fair compensation.
• Safe and healthy working conditions.
• Opportunity for continued growth and security.
• The social relevance of work life.
• Total life space.
• Social integration in the work.
• Constitutionalism in the work organization.
• Human progress capabilities. This is the wording in the abstract, and we cannot tell whether it is a literal copy of Walton’s label, and we take no position on how closely it follows Walton’s text.

We did not read Walton’s text, so we do not explain what he means by each category. It is not clear to us, for example, how he defines constitutionalism. It is enough for our purposes that the list, judged by its headings alone, covers pay, working conditions, growth and social integration, and is therefore not limited to a single item.

Which measurement tools have been published?

We identified two specific scales through publication data or abstracts. The first is the work of Sirgy, Efraty, Siegel and Lee (2001). Its title points to a scale based on need satisfaction and spillover theories. We did not read its abstract or its text, so we do not list its dimensions or its number of items. We do not define spillover either, since we have not seen the authors’ explanation of it.

The second is the scale of Van Laar, Edwards and Easton (2007) for healthcare workers. According to its abstract, it has 23 items and six factors that emerged from analysing survey data collected in 2003 from 953 workers. The factors listed in the abstract are job and career satisfaction, general wellbeing, the Home Work Interface, stress at work, control at work and working conditions. The authors call it one of the most succinct yet psychometrically valid and reliable quality of working life scales in the literature, which is how they describe their scale and not an independent judgement.

The six factors differ from Walton’s eight dimensions in number and in naming, which is an example, in our reading, of dimension sets differing between sources. According to the abstract, the scale was designed for healthcare workers, and the abstract does not make clear whether it suits another sector.

What do the sources relay about quality of work life and company performance?

The abstract of Lau and May (1998) tests hypotheses about the effect of a company’s perceived quality of work life image on its market and financial performance. The study compares sales growth, asset growth, return on equity and return on assets between two groups of public companies: 58 companies ranked among the best companies to work for in the United States, and 88 companies drawn from Standard and Poor’s top one hundred. The abstract gives no indication of whether the two groups overlap.

According to the abstract, the results are presented as showing that companies with high quality of work life can also enjoy exceptional growth and profitability. The abstract does not make clear how the quality image was determined, other than that the first group was ranked among the best companies to work for, and we do not know whether other factors such as sector and size were controlled. A comparison between two groups does not show the direction of the relationship, which is our inference, so we attribute no effect to it.

How does it differ from related concepts?

• Employee wellbeing: Wellbeing describes the employee’s condition at work in its physical, psychological, financial and social aspects. The fuller treatment of wellbeing is in Employee Wellbeing. The sources do not make clear whether researchers treat either concept as part of the other, so we take no position.
• Balance between work and life: Balance concerns the division of time and energy between work and everything else. The glossary entry Work Life Balance treats the split of time and energy between work and the rest of life in more detail. The categories “Total life space” in Walton and “Home Work Interface” in Van Laar and colleagues sit next to this subject, and we have nothing that settles whether they match it.
• Employee engagement: Engagement is a mental and emotional attachment that shows up as effort beyond what is required. Attachment to the job and the employer has its own entry, Employee Engagement. Quality of work life, by contrast, describes the quality of the work experience, and our sources give nothing that ties one to the other.
• Job design: Hackman and Oldham wrote on job design, and none of the sources we read links their work to quality of work life, so we treat it as neither part of the concept nor separate from it. The five characteristics of the Hackman and Oldham model are set out in Job Characteristics Model.
• Satisfaction at work: Job satisfaction is related, and we do not settle where it sits relative to quality of work life, since the abstract of Ramawickrama and colleagues gives four aspects of the relationship between them.

How can quality of work life questions be asked within an establishment?

The questions below are ours, written to make the dimension headings given in the sources more concrete. They are not items from a published scale, and a single answer does not describe an employee:

• Working conditions: Do the tools, the place and the working hours match what the employee needs to carry out the tasks?
• Growth and career path: Does the employee know the next step open to them, and what is needed to reach it?
• Relationships and social integration: Does the employee find people to cooperate with when needed, and is their voice heard in the team?
• The connection between work and the rest of life: Does the work schedule leave room for what matters outside work, and is the employee told in advance about changes that are asked of them?

We think answers are best read as a trend over several weeks and not as a verdict from one meeting, because an answer given in a busy week does not necessarily represent the other weeks.

A worked hypothetical example: one number for an establishment with two departments

Take a hypothetical establishment with 50 employees who answered one question on a scale from 1 to 5, where a higher number means stronger agreement: “My working conditions suit my life outside work.” The question and the figures are ours and do not come from a published scale. The first department has 40 employees with an average answer of 4.0, and the second has 10 employees with an average of 2.0.

The establishment wide average is (40 × 4.0 + 10 × 2.0) ÷ 50 = (160 + 20) ÷ 50 = 180 ÷ 50 = 3.6. That is below the first department’s average by 4.0 minus 3.6, which is 0.4 points, and above the second department’s average by 3.6 minus 2.0, which is 1.6 points. If the average of the two averages is taken without weighting by headcount, it is (4.0 + 2.0) ÷ 2 = 3.0. The figures 3.6 and 3.0 come from the same data and differ only by the choice of aggregation method.

The calculation shows that a single number for the establishment hides a gap of 4.0 minus 2.0, which is 2.0 points, between the departments, and that the second department represents only 10 ÷ 50 = 20% of respondents. The figures are hypothetical, chosen to show the method of calculation, and do not represent an establishment or a study. We do not know the aggregation method used by the published scales we listed, so we do not attribute either figure to any of them. Read the example as an arithmetic exercise and not as a measure of any employee’s quality of work life.

What is the role of HR?

HR teams may use the dimension headings given in the sources as topics for a conversation with managers, with one question for each topic: what do we actually know about it in our establishment, and what do we not know yet? In our view, no assessment of or decision about an employee should rest on answers to these questions.

Anyone who wants to measure has to fix first which definition and which set of dimensions to adopt, and to name its source in the report, which is our judgement, since the sources we read do not agree on one set. We found no Saudi study of the concept that we adopt, so we do not use these sources to describe the reality of any Saudi establishment.

Mistakes to avoid, in our estimate

• Reducing it to one number: Teams rely on a single average for the whole establishment, and in the worked example that average hides a gap between two departments.
• Attributing an effect without a source: Writers claim that raising it increases productivity or reduces resignations, with no named source. The only abstract we read that presents data on this topic compares two groups of companies and does not show the direction of the relationship. The abstract of Singh and colleagues asserts that improving quality of work life improves family life and the performance of enterprises, without giving data, and we do not adopt that.
• Reducing it to a list of perks: Walton’s dimensions and Van Laar’s factors, as the abstracts describe them, are broader than perks, since they include working conditions, growth, relationships and stress.
• Moving a scale to a group it was not designed for: According to its abstract, the scale of Van Laar and colleagues was designed for healthcare workers.

What are the limits of the concept, and what do we not know about it?

• Dimensions not standardised: The abstracts we read list different sets of dimensions and a disagreement about where job satisfaction sits among them.
• Texts whose content we do not know: We did not read Walton’s text or the abstract of Sirgy and colleagues, so how they defined the concept remains unclear to us.
• Effect not examined: None of the studies we read tests the effect of a quality of work life programme on the performance of a specific establishment. What we read is a comparison between two groups of companies.
• Saudi context not examined: We know of no Saudi study of the concept that we adopt.

What does the evidence allow?

The evidence does not allow us to conclude that quality of work life raises performance, retention or satisfaction, or that it does not. All we have are publication data and abstracts of a limited number of works. We attribute to a source no effect other than the one the abstract of Lau and May describes, and we mention the claim in the abstract of Singh and colleagues without adopting it.

The better course, in our view, is to treat the term as a research concept with more than one definition: settle what is meant by it before using it, and examine each dimension against the facts of each establishment. What is decided after that depends on the definition adopted and on the establishment where it is measured.