Cutting Through the Clutter: Cleaning the Lens on Work-Related Wellbeing Concepts

Work-related wellbeing research is increasingly constrained by conceptual and terminological clutter. Labels such as worker wellbeing, employee wellness, wellbeing at work, occupational health, quality of working life, and other terms are often treated as synonyms, defined at different levels of abstraction, or operationalised through proxies, limiting cumulative theory and cross-study comparability. This conceptual, semantically-focused, critical paper demonstrates the ways in which legacy terminology, interdisciplinary language gaps, issues with the overarching concept of wellbeing and category errors contributed to the current conceptual and definitional disarray. It then proposes a conceptual map to help resolve this state of affairs. The framework distinguishes overall wellbeing from work-related wellbeing, separates life-domain labels from wellbeing components, clarifies population segmentations, and offers unified set of definitions to these wellbeing constructs. This conceptual work is intended to improve construct selection, specification, and measurement in both research and applied settings. This paper concludes with a future agenda.