Work Environment, Job Satisfaction, and Perceived Stress as Correlates of Emotional Well-being among Middle-Class Working Women

Description

Shourya Prashar and Rajeev Kumar (Department of Psychology, Amity University Punjab, Mohali, India)

Emotional well-being among working women. A public health issue. This phenomenon has acquired serious importance, especially in urban India, which is witnessing an unprecedented increase in the entry of women in paid employment. Middle-class working women (defined as women with annual income of 3-6 lakh employed in full time formal jobs) face a peculiar double burden: the demand to perform at high levels in occupationally demanding work systems, along with maintenance of household and family roles rooted in traditional gender ideology. The study of emotional well-being in women is hence not only a research priority but also a social imperative. The present research was undertaken to systematically explore the relationship of work environment, job satisfaction and perceived stress on emotional well-being among middle-class working women in urban India. The subjects (N=108), 25-45 years of age, purposively selected from different work settings (education, health care, Information Technology, banking & finance, Government Sector) in Chandigarh and Ambala, filled-up a set of standard psychometric tools: Minnesota satisfaction questionnaire, Sheldon Cohen, Tom Kamarck, and Robin Mermelstein’s Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) and The Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale in addition to a questionnaire comprising the demographic details. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and Spearman’s rank-order correlation, used after confirming the non-normal distribution of data through the Shapiro-Wilk test. Findings indicated that 62% of the women had moderate job satisfaction, 88.9% had moderate perceived stress, and 66.7% had moderate emotional well-being. A significant positive correlation between job satisfaction and emotional well-being was found (rs = .418, p < .001). Higher job satisfaction showed higher emotional well-being. Contrary to most theoretical assumptions, there was no statistically significant direct correlation between perceived stress and emotional well-being in this group of women. The finding bears an important implication for occupational psychologists, HR managers and policy makers.