eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

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This explanatory study analysis the underlying rationales of Finnish organizations to provide wellness services to their employees. Although being currently a very actual topic, corporate wellness has not been comprehensively studied from managerial perspective. In order to intervene to the decreasing employee wellbeing, the topic has to be brought into the organizational context. Thus, this study links the corporate wellness to the International Human Resource Management literature.

The data used in this study was collected by an online questionnaire sent to Finnish organizations’ HR managers and CFOs. The data consisting of 148 responses was then analyzed by using two multivariate data analyzing techniques. First, factor analysis was conducted in order to identify the underlying rationales relating to corporate wellness services. These underlying rationales were secondly altered to cluster analysis resulting two opposing corporate wellness market segments.

The findings of the study indicate that the Finnish employers either take a progressive or suspicious stand towards managing employee wellbeing depending on the internationalization stage of an organization. Whereas the progressive wellness service providers view the wellness services from employee perspective leaving it to employee to decide which services to consume, where and when, the suspicious wellness service providers adopt a somewhat ignorant top-down perspective and are only willing to fulfill the obligatory responsibilities of an employer.

This study also contributes to the existing literature by providing an overall view on corporate wellness market in Finland. By revealing that there exist two different customer segments in Finnish corporate wellness market and by demonstrating that on contrary to the earlier studies, it might not be the organization size that after all determines the rationale to provide wellness services, but rather the internationalization stage of an organization, this study deepens and enriches the somewhat limited corporate wellness literature conducted from organizational perspective.