Autonomy and well-being at work: old hypotheses and new preliminary findings

Does job autonomy/discretion positively affect people wellbeing at work? Or, contrarily, does it impact negatively? Or does the former both increase and decrease the latter?Mainstream psychosocial organization research posits that the greater is the autonomy at work, the greater is the wellbeing in the workplace. At least implicitly, the hypothesis was first put forward in the late thirties. Since then, it has been almost uninterruptedly developed until today.After a brief review of the mainstream hypotheses, the present paper focuses attention on some attempts to challenge them. More specifically, the hypothesis by Thompson (1967) thatorganizational members not always perceive the opportunity of exercising discretion as a positive factor, and the researches and studies on the organizational antecedents of workaholism.The resulting overall picture suggests to further reflect on the impact of job autonomy/discretion on people wellbeing at work. The present paper tries to make a contribution in this direction by testing whether and how job autonomy increases and/or reduces psychological-emotional discomfort at work of the university and technical-administrative staff of a medium-sized Italian university. The preliminary findings show that in the work setting under investigation, job autonomy affects people wellbeing at work in a way that is more complex than that was to be expected on the basis of mainstream hypotheses.