Theory and Evidence of the Effects of Psychosocial Well-Being in Collaboration

Few aspects of life are more important to human experience than psychological health. Individuals experience the world through their own, unique sense-making processes, and so reality, from a subjective point of view, very much is the private, psychological result of those internal processes. How healthy people are, psychologically and socially, constitutes a primary lens through which they make sense of their life experiences. It determines generalized perceptions about the self and the world—from the worth of one’s own life, to the level of threat out in the world, to the trustworthiness of other people. This dissertation expands our understanding of the implications of psychological and social well-being to one more frontier: collaboration. 

In three chapters, I develop theory and provide evidence of the effects of psychosocial well-being in fostering effective collaboration. In Chapter 1, I propose an integrated definition and theoretical structure of psychosocial well-being, providing a common future direction for extant disparate perspectives. I define psychosocial well-being as an individual’s level of psychological health, evident by how they feel about themselves and their life in terms of their experiences of happiness and fulfillment in life. In addition, I develop the Effects of Psychosocial Well-Being in Collaboration (EPiC) model, which integrates theory from multiple disciplines to describe the process through which an individual’s psychosocial well-being shapes both their own and their fellow collaborators’ experiences, contributions, and effectiveness in collaboration. I employ the EPiC model to advance several propositions and describe the model’s implications for organizational collaboration to guide future research and practice. 

In Chapters 2 and 3, I provide empirical evidence that supports the theoretical structure of psychosocial well-being and the EPiC model proposed in Chapter 1. The studies leverage the complementary strengths of multiple methods, spanning laboratory, academic, and high-stakes field settings (i.e., emergency healthcare). The empirical work of Chapters 2 and 3 provide evidence, confirmatory of the EPiC model and its implications, that individuals’ psychosocial well-being positively influences the trust they have for their collaborators, their collaborative contributions, and ultimately, the satisfaction and performance of their teams.