Does Happiness Really Matter? Exploring Employee Wellbeing Recent Research Trends: A Bibliometric Analysis using R

The concept of wellbeing has been widely acknowledged as a national measure of productivity in both developed and developing countries. The health and wellbeing of an employee, whether physical, mental, or emotional, has a significant impact on the quality and success of a company. This study aims to elucidate the trend of employee wellbeing studies from 2012 until 2022. It provides bibliometric review to unravel the emerging trends in employee wellbeing research in the wake of mental health issues globally, and in doing so, ascertain the cohesions and disparities in these themes with respect to employee wellbeing approaches. The objectives of this study are to explore the most productive authors, papers, journals, countries, and affiliations used in the field as well as to identify and provide potential agenda for future research in this context. A bibliometric analysis was conducted using Biblioshiny, from Bibliometrix R package. Analysis of bibliometric data provides valuable understanding into the present and future trends in employee wellbeing. The most productive contributors, most productive countries, authors, and affiliations, and most cited papers on employee wellbeing were all included in this study. Through this, researchers may gain a new perspective and understanding of the issue to improve their research insights and focus. Furthermore, it also benefits organisations in ensuring the health and happiness of their employees and help to retain them. This study only uses the SSCI index in the WOS database for data retrieval on employee wellbeing. It excludes other indexes such as ESCI etc. Upcoming research may consider expanding by using other indexes and reputable databases. Further directions for future research can be gathered from this review's discussion of annual publication trends as well as authors who constantly publish highly cited papers, affiliations, and countries with the highest productivity levels.


Introduction
The concept of wellbeing has been widely acknowledged as a national measure of productivity in both developed and developing countries (Caicedo et al., 2010;Ip, 2009;Miller, 2016).Additionally, on 25 th September 2015, at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, the world leaders have agreed to adopt the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (2030 Agenda).This is a worldwide commitment to more sustainable, resilient, and inclusive development, comprised of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets.Achieving the SDGs comprehensively will require mobilising resources, such as manpower, capacity building, and physical space, as well as funding.Five clusters are involved: inclusivity, wellbeing, human capital, environment & natural resources, and economic growth.The cluster of wellbeing includes Goal 3 of the SDGs, which is improved health and wellbeing (Economic Planning Unit Prime Minister's Department Malaysia, 2021).Moreover, due to the COVID-19 pandemic spread throughout the world, many people may not have noticed that employees' health and wellbeing were given as much attention as they had been in the past.
Employee well-being is a key element for both the individual performance and the performance of the organisation (Chumg et al., 2015;Kianto et al., 2016).Lin et al (2014) found that employee wellbeing will have an effect towards employees' job performance.According to their study, employees' job performance can be improved when the individuals' wellbeing is developed.Otherwise, individuals with low level of wellbeing will lack of work focus that would lead to poor work performance.Furthermore, employee wellbeing is now receiving more attention from scholars in Asian countries, and evidence suggests that employee wellbeing is relatively crucial in Chinese organisations (Chumg et al., 2015(Chumg et al., , 2016;;Huang et al., 2016;Ip, 2009).Over time, findings from a number of countries have shown that the approach taken to managing people will have an impact on product quality, productivity, profitability, financial and non-financial performance and the overall return to shareholders in the organisation (Huang et al., 2016).This has shown that employee wellbeing matters and can be a very important part of the role of human resources in improving both employees and employers (Li & Li, 2020).
Then again, there are still space to extend the bibliometric research that focused particularly on employee wellbeing.Therefore, a bibliometric analysis of the employee wellbeing is used in this study to provide a contemporary and comprehensive overview of the research citation and productivity performance in this field.Measurement and mapping of existing research through bibliometric citation analysis are conducted.The outcomes contribute to the field of employee wellbeing.To establishing a bibliometric output for the field, and identifying potential directions for future research, this study scrutinizes through previously published papers on employee wellbeing in the WOS database.As a result, we have two research objectives dedicated for this study which include to: 1. explore the most productive authors, papers, journals, countries, and affiliations in the field.2. identify and provide potential agenda for future research in this context.
In particular, the study's findings give rise for both academia and industry.This study provides a comprehensive overview of the research domain for scholars and practitioners interested in employee wellbeing.It introduces readers to the key studies, authors, affiliations, concepts, and methods in the field.The identified concepts and methods can be used by organisations and regulatory authorities to enhance employee health, wellbeing, and satisfaction, optimise resource use, and organisational performance and productivity of the employees.

Literature Review
Employee wellbeing has been given an attention lately.In general, emotional, financial, and physical health, or simply the wellbeing of employees, is still the most common concern encountered by employees.While nothing is done to alleviate income disparities, a rising number of 'working poor' or people who are employed but whose wages are below a certain poverty level because of low-paying occupations and low household income that indicate the threat to wellbeing (Guest, 2017).Besides that, most empirical studies to date have examined employee wellbeing as a mediator (Khoreva and Wechtler, 2018;Salas-Vallina et al., 2020, 2021;Sivapragasam and Raya, 2018) and have used multiple dimensions of wellbeing as the dependent variable (Guerci et al., 2022;Zhang et al., 2020) rather than unidimensional.Following the urgency to develop more studies on employee wellbeing, this bibliometric study can assist to overcome the paucity of research on employee wellbeing in helping employees to adjust and flourish under unstable working environment (Carnevale and Hatak, 2020) and changing the nature and environment of work support (Guest, 2017).
Prior bibliometric analysis on employee wellbeing emphasizes on specific issue including but not limited to entrepreneurship wellbeing (Sánchez-García et al., 2018), job insecurity of nurses (Prado-Gascó et al., 2021), financial wellbeing (Thomas & Gupta, 2021) and work life balance (Rashmi & Kataria, 2021).Likewise, the past study by (Ali et al., 2021) examined the same research focus of this study but limited to the use of Scopus database and usage of VOSviewer as its tool.

Materials and Methods
The bibliometric analysis has gained its popularity and moved into the cross-disciplinary from information science previously to business research presently (Donthu et al., 2021).Moreover, it is not just a trend among researchers but also a manifestation of its function which is to handle large volume of scientific data and producing high research impact.It has gained its popularity in the field of library and information sciences which uses statistical tools to evaluate previously published academic papers and this analysis is relatively new in business research and in certain circumstances its does not make full use of its potential (Ahmi & Mohamad, 2019;Donthu et al., 2021).Additionally, analysis techniques in bibliometrics includes plentiful descriptive statistics for citation data and network analysis based on citation and frequency.This tool enables researchers to identify research clusters, gain insights into current research interests, and discover new trends in a field of study.Following a systematic literature search, which included bibliometric citation analysis (i.e., to identify the most influential and cited journals, papers, affiliations, authors, keywords), this analysis used a four-step approach (Figure 1).Furthermore, bibliographic keywords and authors' trend analysis were analysed to summarise and identify new research directions.On the other note, in this study, the Web of Science (WOS) database was used to collect the data from the articles' journals for the bibliometric analysis.Without hesitation, WOS is considered as the most authoritative database for scholarly papers of the highest quality.There are almost 15,000 journals and additional 50 million articles accessible.The PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-analysis) review procedure was utilised to collect articles from WOS on investors' decision-making in the Asian market.The PRISMA review procedure is divided into three stages: identification, screening, and inclusion and exclusion criteria (Figure 1).In the first step, the research performed a systematic examination of the literature, using the WOS database and the advanced search option to locate relevant terms.To help focus the study's scope, the following string were used where research topics are the main area searched: TI=(("employee wellbeing*" OR "employee wellbeing*" OR "employee wellbeing*")).The first search generated a total of 382 articles.After undergoing the exclusion and inclusion process (Table 1).The 382 articles were then analysed in the second phase according to a variety of criteria, including (1) publication year, (2) document type, (3) web of science category, (4) web of science index, and (4) language, which removed a total of 86 articles.To perform the bibliometric analysis, the study selects research papers written in English and indexed in the SSCI -WOS database.The study considers papers related to business, management, communication, and other social sciences interdisciplinary to confirm the relevancy of data related to employee wellbeing.The study used papers over the past ten years (2012 -2022) to ensure the subject's quality, compactness, and relevancy.This brings only 296 articles included for the bibliometric analysis.The Bibliometrix R software was used to run the analysis for this study.The tool aids in mapping citations, productivity, co-citations, and co-occurrences of scientific works, as well as in constructing network connections from the retrieved article in WOS (Aria & Cuccurullo, 2017).

Descriptive Analysis
This study examined employee wellbeing research that was published from 2012 to 2022.The study looks into a sample of 296 relevant studies published in 166 publication outlets over the last 10 years (Table 2), written by a total of 880 authors, with an average of 2.97 citations per document.The majority of authors are part of multi-authored studies (860 authors), while single-authored studies engaged 20 authors.

Main Information
In 2012, the first paper in the WOS database deliberating the practice of employee wellbeing appeared in many sources, documents, and references.Obviously, the number of publications is increasing by 3.86 percent every single year.Employee wellbeing articles from 2012 to 2022 is displayed in Table 2, which includes data on the median number of years between publication and citation, as well as the average number of citations per article and the average number of citations per year.The author's number of appearances and number collaboration index can also be seen in Table 2.

Annual Publication Trends
The Figure 2 below displayed the annual trends in publication volume, citations, and citations per document throughout the year of 2012-2022.The data collected from bibliometric analysis confirms that in 2020 and 2021, about 40 and 55 articles have been published on employee wellbeing.While in the first half of 2022, 34 articles have already been published in the field.Hence, it is expected that the number of articles in employee wellbeing will increase by end of 2022.Since employee wellbeing has been given much attention lately and included in the Sustainability Development Goals (SDG), consequently the growing research trends in this area are expected to happen.

Most Productive Authors
The Table 3 below displayed the main information regarding the top 20 most productive authors based on h-index, g-index, m-index, as well as their total citation that has been cited by others.It can be concluded that Bekker AB and Schaufeli WB have the highest number of total citations in employee wellbeing studies with 288 citations.This follows by Boxall P with 190 total citations and Ilies R with 178 cited articles.However, the other authors in the top 20 have below than 100 number of citations.
Furthermore, h-index plays a vital role in determining the productivity of the author's work.Accordingly, the number of citations is more prominent than the number of papers published (Hirsch & Buela-Casal, 2014).As can be seen in the Table 3 below, Bekker AB and Kinnunen U are both with the highest h-index of 5. On the other hand, g-index is either equal to or greater than h-index Egghe (2006) and m-index is another variant of h-index that shows the average h-index per year since its first publication.As h-index tends to increase throughout the career length, comparing it with those new researchers will not be fair.Hence, m-index takes into consideration comparing authors who work in the same field but have significantly different career lengths.It assumed that research activity has been continuous since its first publication (Ahmi & Mohamad, 2019).As such Kuriakose V and Sreejesh S are among new authors with satisfactorily m-index of 0.5 as compared to other established authors in the field.

Most Productive Papers
The Table 4 below shows the most widely and locally cited articles.The number of citations received from the most cited papers specified the article's productivity.The more the data were downloaded, it will indicate as a higher annual count in the global citation count.The article entitled "Employee Well-Being And The HRM-Organizational Performance Relationship: A Review Of Quantitative Studies" by Van

Most Productive Countries
As can be seen in Table 5, it shows the information about top 20 most productive countries.All the 20 countries have published at least 10 articles.Netherlands produces the highest total citations with 1074 citations on employee wellbeing research followed by the USA, Australia, China, United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Finland, New Zealand, and Singapore.Separately, Greece, Japan, Iran, Sweden, and Belgium are among the countries with low total number of citations which is below 100.On the same note, illustration of total citations for the top 10 countries can be referred to Figure 3.

Discussion
This bibliometric analysis study that focusses on employee wellbeing research trend undoubtly shows that there are significant numbers of publications emerged for the past decades and lead to the increase demand for upcoming research in this area.Scholars in this field have contributed a lot of research ideas and contributions with regards to the study of employee wellbeing.The most productive authors such as Bekker AB, Schaufeli WB and Boxall P were the well-known authors in management field with highest citations and h-index.This clearly defined that they are still actively involved in this research area and there is a lot of room for new researchers to collaborate and build networking with these authors to keep the number of publications in this area increasing.Furthermore, other researchers should cite these productive author's work and expand more ideas and contributions to this field.
Besides that, the paper entitled "Employee Well-Being and the HRM-Organizational Performance Relationship: A Review of Quantitative Studies" by Van De Voorde; Paauwe; Van Veldhoven (2012) gained the highest total citations of 380 with 34.55 total citations per year and paper from Boxall and Macky (2014) with the paper entitled "High-Involvement Work Processes, Work Intensification and Employee Well-Being" which received a total citations of 166.Since both articles are considered a major reference for a lot of other researchers in the field, it provides space for finding a new gaps and contributions.
Regarding the most productive countries based on total citations, Netherlands, the USA, China, United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Finland, New Zealand, Singapore, and India are among the top 10 countries that contribute the greatest number of citations in this research field.This shows that the researchers from these countries are paying more attention and working on to further contribute to the research on wellbeing.Moreover, this result also proves that these countries are looking at the issue of wellbeing very seriously and finding

MOST FREQUENT JOURNALS
Total publications ways on how to maintain quality of life for their people.The Netherlands for example, has been recognised as the happy country by OECD Better Life Index.Based on the available and selected data, the Netherlands performs well in many dimensions of well-being relative to other countries.On the same note, both the Erasmus University and University Utretch in the Netherlands are the most productive affiliations and actively contributing and publishing research related to employee wellbeing.Hence, it shows that the authors from these institutions are among the productive authors that contributing to this field, and they should be approached for further research collaboration and exchanging research ideas.
In terms of productive journals that published the most numbers of articles in the field of employee wellbeing, Frontiers of Psychology is the most frequent journals followed by International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, International Journal of Human Resource Management and Personnel Review.Hence, these journals are the potential journals for researchers to publish their work in this field and gain more readers as well as engagement.
Finally, in recognising and offering the future directions for this study, it is suggested that research related to employee wellbeing is examine through the variety of research area and various stakeholders as its absence limits the bibliometric knowledge and insights.As compared to earlier studies that cover the bibliometric analysis of wellbeing that focus on entrepreneurship wellbeing (Sánchez-García et al., 2018), job insecurity of nurses (Prado-Gascó et al., 2021), financial wellbeing (Thomas & Gupta, 2021), work life balance (Rashmi & Kataria, 2021) and employee wellbeing using Scopus database and VOSviewer as its tool (Ali et al., 2021), this present study enhance it novelty through analysis of recent citation work and productivity of previous studies by using WOS database as well as Biblioshiny tool.

Conclusion
Through the citation productivity analysis via the R software, it shows that the research on employee wellbeing is in fact important as shown through the results from the citation productivity analysis.All the information in the articles being studied has been addressed extensively which includes that related to employee wellbeing, specifically publication years, article type, source, and document content.Besides that, this bibliometric analysis also has been examined thoroughly and produced key information on the annual publication trends, most productive authors, and citations per year in relation to the employee wellbeing research.
Furthermore, this study conducted bibliometric analysis on the citation work and productivity of authors, papers, journals affiliations and countries.This analysis can assist in theoretical contribution by identifying areas that need further exploration.It offers a retrospective into the journal's subject progression over various ownership and time periods in addition to offering insights into the publication and citation trends of the journal.This study also sheds light on the ways in which writers of employee wellbeing collaborate.It also offers a number of potential future trajectories for the journal.Moreover, this study provide the analytical visuals and making them downloadable as interactive maps.The research findings are intended to arouse the reader's curiosity, demonstrate how to engage with the findings, and hopefully motivate other academics to locate, consider, and investigate fresh and useful avenues for the field's advancement.Along with, this study also demonstrated the ubiquity and usefulness of bibliometric software and databases, which make it simple to collect and evaluate huge amounts of scientific data for business research, including in relatively recent but extremely rich fields like artificial intelligence and big data.This has led to a significant increase in the popularity of bibliometric methodology in recent years.
Although this study provides extensive information for practitioners, academics, and researchers, it is not without limitation.This study used only articles indexed in the social science citation index (SSCI) of the WOS database and excluding other available databases.Despite this limitation, this study put forward a dependable and exact summary of the analysis of the most imperative works of well-known authors in the field of wellbeing as based on the analysis of citation productivity.Additionally, for upcoming research work, other researchers can expand the study and includes databases from other indexes such as Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), SCOPUS, SCImago journal rank, Google Scholar, and many others to name a few.Notwithstanding, future works could extend this bibliometric analysis to cover the collaboration networks between authors, affiliations, and countries.The analysis can also expand to make comparison on keywords clustering over the year period.
To sum up, this bibliometric analysis is important as it provides information to assist new scholars in the field by offering ideas for future works in this field through the information on global citations, citations count of articles and the most productive journals in wellbeing studies.Hence, more and more studies in this field can help to sustain and improved the current citations and discover the unexplored area.

Figure 3 :
Figure 3: Illustration of total citations based on country on world map

Figure 4 :
Figure 4: Main information regarding top 20 productive affiliations

Figure 5 :
Figure 5: Main information regarding the most frequent published journals.

Table 1
Inclusion and Exclusion of data

Table 2
Main information regarding selected articles.

Table 3
Main information regarding top 20 productive authors De Voorde et al (2012) gained the highest total citations of 380 with 34.55 total citations per year.Likewise, Boxall, Peter;Macky, Keith (2014) with the paper entitled "High-Involvement Work Processes, Work Intensification And Employee Well-Being" and Chughtai, Aamir; Byrne, Marann; Flood, Barbara (2015) received total citations of 166 and 139 respectively.All these productive articles and others displayed in the Table 4 below managed to become major references in the studies of employee wellbeing.Nevertheless, article on "Flexible Work Designs And Employee Well-Being: Examining The Effects Of Resources And Demands" by Ter Hoeven et al (2015) received the lowest total citations of 79 with less than 10 total citations per year.

Table 5
Main information regarding top 20 productive countries