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

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Preprints.org
DOI
10.20944/preprints202512.1501.v1

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 paper traces the historical evolution of work/er wellbeing across three overlapping strands—occupational safety and risk mitigation, a remedial organisational/occupational psychology focus on distress, and contemporary holistic and positive approaches, synthesises how semantic drift, interdisciplinary language gaps, and recurrent category errors contribute to conceptual and definitional disarray, and proposes an integrative meta-framework and conceptual map to help resolve this state of affairs. The framework distinguishes overall wellbeing from work-related wellbeing domains, separates 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. The paper concludes with a forward agenda.

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