Deriving a Composite Indicator to Measure Well-being at Work in European Union Countries

The objective of this paper is to display how the exposure to psychosocial risk factors impact on workers’ well-being as much as the physical risk factors, in particular showing the strength of the effect of exposure to selected risk factors existing in the workplace on workers’ well-being. Following the framework proposed by EU-OSHA (2013) and applying statistical procedures to the European Working Conditions Survey data, we analysed how and to what extent physical risk factors and psychosocial risk factors impact on health and well-being of workers in European workplaces. More in particular, we carried out Ordered Probit models to measure the effect of specific items operationalising the physical and the psychosocial risk factors and subsequently run a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to identify two separate synthetic indicators of physical risk factors and psychosocial risk factors respectively, to analyse their impact on health and well-being.