Well-Being Labour: How Surveillance Architecture Converts Organizational Well-Being Programmes into a Source of Harm

Abstract

Despite significant corporate investment, workplace well-being interventions show no significant benefit, and some leave participants worse off than non-participants. Existing theoretical accounts explain why programmes fail; none predict why they sometimes actively harm. We introduce wellbeing labor, the cognitive and emotional effort expended performing, displaying, or reporting psychological well-being for organizational audiences and data systems under structural compulsion rather than authentic generation. We develop a two-stage mechanism linking mandatory well-being programmes and individual-level surveillance to degraded authentic flourishing. Stage 1 establishes that surveillance converts well-being participation from autonomously motivated to externally regulated. Stage 2, the paper's core contribution, argues that chronic behavioural inauthenticity under institutionally instrumentalized surveillance corrupts the psychological substrate of authentic flourishing across both organizational and personal contexts, resisting recovery through resource restoration alone. Four propositions derive from this mechanism, culminating in the central claim: Well-being programmes produce positive outcomes under low surveillance and null or negative outcomes under high surveillance. Theoretical contributions, intervention implications and the ethics of organizational well-being monitoring are discussed.