Work-family balance, role integration and employee well-being

Researchers have long been interested in understanding the antecedents of subjective well-being, which has been generally defined as how people evaluate their lives (Diener et al., 2003, p. 404). A number of studies have adopted a top-down approach to predicting subjective well-being, whereby a person's dispositional characteristics influence the level of life satisfaction that the person experiences (see Heller et al., 2004). On the other hand, there is also evidence for a bottom-up process whereby a person's levels of satisfaction with specific life domains (e.g., work, marriage, etc) are combined to form an overall level of satisfaction with one's life in general (Heller et al., 2004). © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.