Measuring the quality of the working environment: The job characteristics approach

This chapter presents some principles that underpin the measurement of the quality of the working environment proposed by these Guidelines and describes how these principles can be operationalised. It argues that the quality of the working environment should be defined in terms of a number of job characteristics that could be observed by a third party at the level of individual workers. Other approaches to the notion of the quality of the working environment used in the literature, such as job satisfaction and the person-job fit approach, should be understood as measuring not the quality of the working environment per se, but rather how the working environment, alongside a range of other factors (such as earnings and personal circumstances), might have an impact on workers’ well-being.