**2. Subjective staff well-being as a social action**

## **2.1 Subjective well-being as an emotional regulator of labor behavior and personnel acceptance of innovations**

The phenomenon of SW is not new in psychology in general and in labor psychology in particular. It has been studied in two main directions: hedonistic and eudemonic [22]. Depending on the driving forces behind the emergence and development of SW, the authors have proposed a set of SW indicators. A multidimensional model of SW, including affective, cognitive, social, professional, and psychosomatic dimensions, has been proposed [23]. Many specific socio-psychological conditions and factors of subjective well-being/disadvantage at work have been revealed: from an employee's life satisfaction and his cognitive and motivational characteristics to the vulnerability level of a manager's narcissism [24–26]. Companies develop programs that include professional training opportunities, satisfaction of the employee's out-ofwork needs, and appreciation programs, including through digital platforms [27].

The issue of activity, however, is a key one. At the same time, the problem of formation of values, which are predictors of behavior, as a rule, management does not pay enough attention, and in science the psychological mechanisms of their formation are not studied enough to successfully solve the actual managerial problems. This is especially true of adults with pre-labor attitudes and, most importantly, their practices of attaining happiness, which are of the hedonistic rather than eudemonic type. The importance of work to the individual makes it clear that, in seeking to ensure the emotional well-being of staff, managers can contribute to or place a barrier to human happiness, depending on the specifics of the individual's experiences in the workplace. Modern theories of personality help to understand the mechanisms of the emergence of one type of happiness or another. A. Maslow's theory shows the specificity of deficit and higher needs [28]. And recognizing the correctness of this theory in the sense that ontogenesis is the formation of needs in a certain sequence, it is also known that, for one reason or another, the formation of the personality of a considerable number of people is limited to the satisfaction of deficit needs. And only some of them have stable dominant higher needs associated with the search for and giving personal meaning to their lives and its individual components. Outstanding Russian researchers of personality and activity, A.N. Leontiev and B.F. Lomov, have shown that in adult people, the basis of personality is a wealth of connections with the outside world and oneself, represented in an individual hierarchy of motives. The system-forming activity factor "motive-goal" determines a person's behavior on the basis of choosing among competing motives [29, 30].

The hierarchical model of motivational organization as the basis of personality allows us to understand the specifics of the experience of happiness and how the concept of subjective well-being can be correlated with happiness. As Aristotle believed, happiness is the possession of that which is most valuable. And in accordance with the model of the hierarchical organization of the motivational sphere, a person experiences happiness when he has achieved (or received due to various circumstances) the satisfaction of that need, which corresponds to the highest motive in his personal motivational hierarchy. But the satisfaction of less significant personal needs also matters. It is no coincidence that there is an expression: to experience complete happiness. Satisfaction of needs, the motives of which are located at lower levels in the motivational hierarchy, gives the feeling of happiness, which is stronger, the more significant the motive is. Therefore, it is more appropriate to correlate SW with a specific activity or sphere of human activity, personally significant, but still

not the most basic. Thus, knowing the hierarchical dynamic, but at the same time rather stable structure of personality, it is possible to predict which activity will make a greater contribution to the experience of happiness. Certainly, the satisfaction of basic deficit needs provides a sense of well-being and an understanding of the need to maintain it, but with a minimization of intellectual and physical effort. The dominant higher needs are not necessarily related to self-realization and the search for meaning in work activities. But this is just the case when a person can experience happiness, not only SW in labor, because creative labor opens up maximum opportunities for self-fulfillment compared with most other areas of human efforts. Nevertheless, a large proportion of workers are committed not only to labor, but also to other values, such as family, healthy living, charity, care for the environment, and in these cases the dominant higher needs satisfied in several highly significant areas will create an integrated experience of happiness, which, apparently, is true happiness, at least according to Aristotle. It can be reasonably assumed that an employee's behavioral activity will be the higher, the more highly situated the motives are. This is another reason to engage in giving labor and, if it is a matter of adopting innovations, higher meanings. A.N. Leontiev called values the higher motives with a sense-making function.

In recent years, there has been strong evidence that the human capital of a company is personnel with a predominance of positive work-related emotions combined with work activation. Such employees are more engaged, demonstrating performance and quality of work. Negative work-related effects with low rather than high activation prove to be more closely associated with negative work behavior [31].

Whether SW in work activity provides readiness to accept innovations is a question with an ambiguous answer, although there is evidence that the attitude to achieve happiness, provided by the feeling of SW, has its effects in human social relations, health, life, and work satisfaction [32].

Managers in the management of employees should consider on what basis it is expedient to create SW for effective solution of labor tasks, because without such understanding the personnel can stay in a state of SW, for example, in the system of good interpersonal relations of clan culture, avoiding to show initiative or participating in innovative activity. In a bureaucratic UC, SW can be achieved and maintained when a staff member follows all the prescriptions and regulations without going beyond them.

The key basis of SW as applied to labor activity in turbulent conditions should be the desire of the employee for progressive technological and organizational changes against the background of positive emotions connected with labor. SW is an important emotional subjective regulator of labor activity as a whole and personnel's acceptance of innovations, in particular, because administrative management and even rational self-regulation, based on understanding by a labor subject of necessity of innovations as a condition of viability of the company in the modern turbulent world, do not solve the problem of resistance to their introduction.

Under the conditions of innovations, introduction an employee, who has not acquired stable higher needs and corresponding values due to the peculiarities of upbringing and previous experience, needs to find meaning in life as a whole, its separate spheres, including work, is important in itself, as it opens to a person the goals and means of their achievement. Understanding of meaning is based on the trichotomy of purpose, coherence, and significance. Coherence means a sense of comprehensibility and one's life making sense. Purpose means a sense of core goals, aims, and direction in life. Significance is about a sense of life's inherent value and having a life worth living [33]. Giving meaning increases the level of experiencing positive emotions [34]. Positive emotions experienced in the workplace and their

*Subjective Well-Being at the Workplace as a Social Action: Opportunities for Management… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.106595*

intensity create a sense of being able to regulate affective experiences as a form of relationship control [35].

However, meanings are very different and not all of them contribute to the development of a person as a personality and to the improvement of his labor competence and efficiency. In the context of Industry 4.0, which is based on innovation, the employee needs to go through the transition from one class of meanings to other classes. The first class of meanings, which are the most natural and understandable, are typical of the known and definite world. These meanings refer to individual and social identity, simplify, and structure the world. We must move on to the second and third classes of meanings. The second class includes the meanings of the abnormal, chaotic, illogical, innovative—the unknowable world. It includes those meanings that arise to challenge the integrity of our current known or deterministic world. And to the third class belong the meanings of the connection of the known and the unknown, the meanings that arise in the course of voluntary exploratory behavior. These are existential meanings inherent in individual experience.

Independent transition to the second-grade meanings is possible, but not guaranteed. Training, supervision, and the work of a mentor are necessary here. The transition to the third class of meanings requires the predominance of internal motivation over external motivation. Getting pleasure from such movement fixes the acquired meanings that form the basis of innovative values and determine the active position of an employee against the background of the sense of subjective well-being strengthened not so much by the approval of management as by the realization of the correctness of the choice made, personal renewal, and readiness for further development.

The tasks of SW management make relevant not only studies of the content and structural organization of this phenomenon, but also the implementation of a functional approach, including the development of a model of its determination. T. Parsons' theory of social action [36] may serve as a basis for such a model. This is explained by the fact that SW is an interactive process, in which both external and internal factors play their role.

The subject of labor activity is influenced by its objective factors, which include the conditions of labor activity, which include managerial conditions that manifest themselves in the features of OC and managerial practices implemented by company management.

Since SW is presented to the employee emotionally and has a pronounced positive emotional coloring, he naturally does not remain passive, but in one way or another with a certain level of activity and success aspires to that position in the system of objective physical circumstances and social relations, the totality of which gives him this feeling of SW as opposed to disadvantage.

The employee is able to comprehend his position in the organization, interpret events affecting his position in it and emotional states, look for solutions to arising problems, respond to management requirements, respond to its requirements and expectations as he understands them, improve social relations, develop the necessary competences. He tries to change his position in the organizational conditions, adjusting or resisting the organizational circumstances, can build strategies of behavior, leading, in his opinion, to the improvement of SW in the company. To a large extent, he is guided by subjective experiences of well-being/disadvantage. Depending on his values and motivation, he can to a certain extent reconcile with objective indicators of the quality of working life in the form of remuneration for work, not quite comfortable conditions of working activity. Instability of SW phenomenon in time is clear: organizational conditions and corporate requirements change, family circumstances

of an employee change, as a result of which his labor motivation and labor involvement change. SW is a complex multilevel phenomenon with a complex external and internal determination: from the culture of society and OC to job satisfaction or emotional exhaustion and psychosomatic tension [23].
