Abstract

This paper starts from the following question: is employee well-being a topdown or a bottom-up process? In other words, who is responsible for it? A number of theories exist and many support the principle of well-being driven by good leadership. This paper takes a different tack. It develops a model of well-being where well-being is seen as the final result of a process that involves all the individuals who work in an organization at each level of the hierarchical structure. The paper argues that employee well-being can not be reduced to a psychological question, instead, it is, above all, a logical, gnoseological and epistemological issue. For this reason it is suggested that it cannot depend on a single manager or just on a few of them. The paper reviews the literature about methodological individualism, dispersed and tacit knowledge, the fallibility of human nature, limited rationality, the distribution of power in organization.