Uncertainty Amidst Change: The Impact of Privatization on Employee Job Satisfaction and Well-Being

The literature on the effects of critical life-events on health and well-being has remained prolific since Holmes & Rahe’s (1967) formative work on their development of the Social Readjustment Rating Scale. Since then, credence has generally been given to the view that favourable perceptions of major life-events may evoke different reactions to those viewed negatively. The original premise made no distinction between uplifts and downfalls, and viewed individuals as passsive homogeneous victims of life’s ‘slings and arrows’, without any volition to act on the environment which caused such hardship. Holmes & Masuda (1974) developed this work further and constructed their ‘Schedule of Recent Experiences’ (SRE) which not only asked whether subjects had experienced a specific event, but also asked on how many occasions that event was experienced. The likelihood of more extreme events occurring on more than one occasion in the recent past are rare (e.g. death of a spouse). The underlying proposition behind this seminal work, that major changes in our daily lives are shown to increase the probability of illness, has yet to be effectively disconfirmed (Bhagat 1983, Billings & Moos, 1982).