Applying information theory to small groups assessment: emotions and well-being at work

This paper explores and analyzes the relations between emotions and well-being in a sample of aviation personnel, passenger crew (flight attendants). There is an increasing interest in studying the influence of emotions and its role as psychosocial factors in the work environment as they are able to act as facilitators or shock absorbers. The contrast of the theoretical models by using traditional parametric techniques requires a large sample size to the efficient estimation of the coefficients that quantify the relations between variables. Since the available sample that we have is small, the most common size in European enterprises, we used the maximum entropy principle to explore the emotions that are involved in the psychosocial risks. The analyses show that this method takes advantage of the limited information available and guarantee an optimal estimation, the results of which are coherent with theoretical models and numerous empirical researches about emotions and well-being.