Empowering Millennials Working in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs)’ Affective Wellbeing: Role of Volition, Justice and Meaning at Work

Working in SMEs can be especially stimulating and challenging to millennial employees who will soon be the biggest generation serving the workforce. This paper addresses the impact of work volition and organisational justice on the affective wellbeing of millennial employees. It seeks to better understand the role meaningful work has on millennials’ affective wellbeing. Using a sample of 403 millennial employees working in SMEs, this paper employs a quantitative data analysis approach using SPSS PROCESS. The results suggest that work volition (in regards to sub dimensions of volition and structural constraints) significantly predicts better affective wellbeing among millennial workers. While organisational justice, in relation to interactional and distributive justice, positively predicted millennials’ affective wellbeing. Meaningful work was found to mediate all paths in the relationships of work volition and organisational justice with affective wellbeing. Implications of this paper include promoting affective wellbeing of millennials by providing more transparency and opportunities to express as well as cultivating a good match between employee-employer promises, processes, and work expectations. This study also highlights the important role of promoting meaning at work to enable millennial workers to thrive in their careers.