Abstract Existing literature provides four theories to explain how employee well-being emerges and impacts: self-determination theory, conservation of resource theory, social exchange theory, and affective event theory. The present study first reviews the status quo and boundaries of each individual theory, and then proposes a goal-structure-change theory of employee well-being, which is rooted in the self-organization model of human psychology and introduces the goal-structure-change theory of human emotion to explain the emergence of employee well-being. Finally, the analysis of its theoretical advantages and contributions indicate that the goal achievement process theory of employee well-being integrates the existing theories, and demonstrates a stronger explanatory and predictive power toward employee well-being than any existing theory.
