Unpacking Warehouse Worker Well-being: Experiences, Antecedents, and Leadership Behaviours

Abstract

Warehousing is one of the most physically demanding, repetitive, and closely monitored work environments in the supply chain. Warehouse workers handle heavy goods, perform monotonous tasks, and operate under intense performance monitoring, often in cold, windowless spaces. Despite these challenging working conditions, research and industry have primarily focused on optimising warehouse processes and improving productivity, whereas the well-being of warehouse workers has received considerably less attention. Warehouse workers are often treated primarily as a resource to be allocated efficiently, with limited regard for how they experience their work. At the same time, workloads keep rising due to shorter order handling windows and growing competition driven by e-commerce and globalisation. Although automation and digitalisation are advancing, human workers remain essential to warehouse operations, which makes their well-being a highly relevant research topic. This PhD dissertation aims to advance understanding of warehouse workers' well-being, first by exploring the concept broadly and then by examining in depth one specific factor that shapes it: leadership. The dissertation pursues three research objectives, addressed through three qualitative studies, all grounded in a constructivist perspective. This means that well-being and leadership are approached as concepts that are experienced, interpreted, and socially constructed, rather than as fixed, objective facts to be measured. The first study examines how various aspects of the order picker job, including monotony, activity level, and time pressure, influence employee well-being. Existing order-picking planning models primarily account for physical factors, while psychosocial factors remain underexplored and narrowly defined. Based on 44 semi-structured interviews conducted in six Flemish logistics companies, this study proposes an expanded range of psychosocial factors and broadens the "worker health" outcome in the conceptual framework of Grosse et al. (2015). This leads to the introduction of warehouse worker well-being as a three-dimensional construct, encompassing psychological, physical, and social aspects. While many well-being antecedents from the literature are reflected in the interview data, the study also identifies new antecedents specific to the warehousing context, such as the exemplary role of the team leader and frustrating interactions on the work floor. The second study builds on these findings by zooming in on leadership, which emerged as a particularly important factor in the first study. Using the same interview data, this study examines how leadership relates to order pickers' well-being, with specific attention to transformational and empowering leadership, identified in the literature as the most potent predictors of employee well-being. The findings show that most components of these leadership styles are indeed present in the data. However, additional components emerge that are not yet described in existing literature, such as feeling respected and being treated equally compared to colleagues. The third study moves beyond specific leadership styles and instead examines concrete leadership behaviours displayed by frontline managers, who interact directly with warehouse workers on a daily basis. Through an embedded single-case study combining interviews, observations, and documents, this study investigates which leadership behaviours are expected to support workers' well-being, from a nested perspective that includes warehouse workers, frontline managers themselves, and higher management. Relational-oriented behaviours, such as fostering emotional safety, being helpful, and communicating clearly, emerge as central across all three groups. However, differing expectations reveal two underlying tensions: balancing a people-centred approach with a results-driven orientation, and determining the appropriate level of strictness. Together, these three studies contribute to the literature by conceptualising warehouse worker well-being as a multidimensional construct, identifying new antecedents specific to the warehousing context, and offering a novel, nested perspective on leadership behaviours. Practically, the findings offer logistics companies concrete insights for developing better employee well-being policies and for improving the training, recruitment, and support of frontline managers.