Successful Wellbeing at Work Conference
Friday 30 September 2011
Kingston Business School’s Centre for Research in Employment, Skills & Society (CRESS) held a very successful one-day conference on the subject of Wellbeing at Work in Central London on the 21st September 2011.
Organised by Professor Yannis Georgellis, newly appointed Director of CRESS, the conference brought together international experts in the fields of behavioural economics, organisational and social psychology, health and social work, and Human Resource Management.
Keynote speakers included Professor Stephen Garcia from the University of Michigan in the USA who talked about the link between ranks, social comparisons and wellbeing and Professor Oded Stark who explained how a worker’s sense of ‘relative deprivation’ allows firms to increase profits by setting unequal wage rates for equally productive workers. Professor Andrew Clark from the Paris School of Economics addressed the question whether job quality has been falling overtime and why. Professor Mustafa Ozbilgin’s thought-provoking talk on the link between diversity and wellbeing at work was followed by a lively Q&A session and audience participation. Professor Yehuda Baruch from Rouen Business School and Middlesex University looked at the changing nature of the contemporary career and the impact of this on people’s wellbeing at work
Delegates came from both academic and practitioner backgrounds and the conference was an opportunity to discuss the latest research findings on wellbeing at work and how these findings can be implemented in the workplace to make a real difference to employee and organisational wellbeing.
Feedback included:
“An excellent conference, with different perspectives, and high quality impact. I learned a lot (and had fun too – the best possible combination).”
“Thank you very much indeed to the Kingston University team for organising such an excellent conference last Wednesday. I really did enjoy it and I learnt a lot.”
“I enjoyed meeting the other speakers, faculty, and graduate students, and it was a comfortable interdisciplinary setting to interact with colleagues across economics, behaviour economics, and organization studies.”
The presentations from the conference can be found below:
Title : Job Quality and Worker Commitment: Evidence from OECD Countries (PDF)
Speaker : Andrew E. Clark (PSE and IZA)
Title : Diversity management and wellbeing: an instrumental relationship (PDF)
Speaker : Mustafa Özbilgin
Title : The changing nature of contemporary career: a multi-level analysis (PDF)
Speaker : Professor Yehuda Baruch
Title : Life satisfaction and self-employment: A matching approach (PDF)
Speaker : Martin Binder
Title : What’s my QoWL?: Development of a tool to provide feedback on the Work- Related Quality of Life (WRQoL) scale to individual employees
Speaker : Mr Simon Easton & Dr Darren Van Laar
Title : Unionism and Peer-Referencing (PDF)
Speaker : Georgios A. Panos and Ioannis Theodossiou
Title : Relative income gains and losses and subjective well-being in Europe (PDF)
Speaker : Nick Tsitsianis and Ya Ping Yin
Title : Rankings and Social Comparison: Implications for Competition, Fairness, and Nonverbal Expression (PDF)
Speaker : Stephen Garcia
Title : Political Preferences Matter: The Impact of Preference Matching on Job Satisfaction in the Public Sector (PDF)
Speaker : Vurain Tabvuma, Hong T. M. Bui, and Fabian Homberg
Title : Social comparisons and the firm’s profit: An advantage of setting unequal wage rates for equally productive workers (PDF)
Speaker : Oded Stark
Title : Internet use, workplace organizational practices and job well-being: A European perspective (PDF)
Speaker : Ludivine Martin
The next conference is in April 2012 and is on the subject of ‘Skills in the workplace ‘. CRESS are holding this conference in conjunction with CEDEFOP (European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training). For further information or to register an early interest please contact Professor Yannis Georgellis.
