Developing a Concept of Workplace Well-Being for Greater China

The aim of this paper is to construct a notion of well-being in the workplace applicable to Taiwan society as an example of the Chinese cultural communities. The construction involves the following steps. Different domains of the well-being in the workplace are identified based on the results of workplace research. A set of integrative values combining universal values and Chinese values is constructed to serve as the ground for constructing the components of workplace well-being. Both the universal portion and the Chinese portion have a generic and a workplace-specific portion as their integrative parts. The values in effect help to define specific contents of the components, thus making them relevant and applicable to the Chinese culture. The construct serves as the basis to develop specific indicators to measure, monitor and assess well-being in the workplace. The construct of workplace well-being forms a part of the general well-being in business which contains various well-beings associated with the multiple stakeholders in the business communities—customers, shareholders, citizens, competitors, communities, and the environment. In today’s globalized business environment, this construct is especially significant when more multinationals are operating with an increasingly multicultural workplace where people with different cultures communicate, cooperate and interact.