"The Role of Psychological Well-Being in Job Performance: A Fresh look at an Age-Old Quest"
Organizational Dynamics
33(4), pp. 338-351
Though many researchers have attempted to investigate the relationship between "happiness" and job performance, the results have not been impressive in supporting this link. The authors of this article argue that the reason for these findings primarily lies with the fact that employee "happiness" has traditionally been operationalized as "job satisfaction." "Happiness" is now starting to be conceptualized more broadly as psychological well-being (PWB) of employees. More precisely, the authors describe happiness/psychological well being as "a subjective and global judgment that one is experiencing a good deal of positive emotion and relatively little negative emotion." Using this definition, measures of psychological well being are consistently and positively related to a number of different job performance measures in the studies reviewed in this article.
The authors present three different possible approaches to building a workforce that is "happier"
- Select employees who are already "happy" (though the authors point out that this could make the other candidates even more depressed and unemployable!)
- Train employees to be happier through a number of cognitive restructuring stress-management techniques
- Through situational engineering, change the environment so that it is more conducive to psychological well-being
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