Employee well-being is often examined through separate explanations centered on job demands and resources, interpersonal relationships, leadership, or recovery. This separation makes it difficult to explain why apparently supportive human resource practices can coexist with overload, why relationally rich workplaces can remain exhausting, or why recovery initiatives may fail when leaders communicate competing priorities. This article develops an integrative theoretical framework that treats employee well-being as an organizational design outcome rather than as an isolated individual state or a secondary consequence of performance-oriented systems. The analysis connects four domains: work demands and resource depletion, relational resources and social restoration, leadership signals through which employees interpret organizational priorities, and recovery-supportive culture. The proposed framework argues that these domains operate configurationally: the same formal practice may be protective, neutral, or depleting depending on the surrounding relational, leadership, and recovery conditions. It further distinguishes evidence-supported component relationships from newly proposed cross-domain interactions, protective and high-risk configurations, and multilevel design propositions. The framework extends strategic HRM by shifting attention from the presence of practices to their experienced functionality and alignment across work, relational, leadership, and temporal conditions. It also implies that individual well-being initiatives should not substitute automatically for changes in work architecture. The framework remains conceptual rather than causally validated. Its principal boundaries concern construct heterogeneity, level-of-analysis mismatch, contextual variation, employee agency, temporal dynamics, and the need for longitudinal, multilevel, and intervention-based tests.
