Positive Psychology Meets HR (Part 1)
“Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for the love of it.” – Henry David Thoreau (n.d.)
Work is an important part of our lives. Consider the average American worker who starts a full time job out of college. During the prime years of life, from twenty-one or twenty two until retirement after the age of sixty, he or she will most likely work 40 hours a week or more. Consider that most people sleep seven to eight hours per week, and one can deduce that an individual might spend about 35% of his waking time at work. This is assuming an eight hour work day. With many Americans now working more than 50 hours per week, the time we spend at work is getting close to representing the majority of the time we spend awake. Whether it’s 35% or 50%, the time we spend at work is an important component of how we experience our lives. If we wish to improve our lives, experiencing more happiness, positive emotion, and increased well-being, it is important for us to understand the role of work as a part of life, not as something we balance with life.
Positive Psychology as a field is interested in gaining an understanding of the good life.(Seligman, Steen, Peterson, & Park, 2005) . A key reframing that has driven the development of the positive psychology field is the idea that mental health is more than the lack of mental illness. What then is healthy work? If we consider work and the life well-lived, there have been numerous recommendations as to how to approach or engage in work that will lead to increased happiness and life satisfaction. Seligman, in his book Authentic Happiness (2002) suggests that gaining happiness through work can be achieved by finding work that engages one’s character strengths. Jonathan Haidt provides similar advice, counseling readers of The Happiness Hypothesis that “people can get more from their work. The first step is to know your strengths. Take the strengths test and then choose work that allows you to use your strengths every day, thereby giving yourself at least scattered moments of flow.” (2006, p. 277, p. 277) Ed Diener and his son Robert Biswas-Diener advise readers of their book to “find a job that is the right fit for you. This means work is appropriately challenging, suited to your personality, meaningful, and interesting to you….look for a job where you can do what you do best on a daily basis” (Diener & Biswas-Diener, 2008, p. 88) .
Despite these recommendations from leaders within the field of positive psychology, there isn’t a study that directly relates use of strengths at work with increased levels of happiness. It makes sense that it would lead to increased happiness, as using strengths in different ways has been shown to lead to increased levels of happiness and decreased levels of depression (Seligman, et al., 2005) , however we do not know for sure how this would apply in the domain of work. We do know that not having work can lead to increased risk of depression. Richard Layard writes “work provides not only income but also an extra meaning to life. That is why unemployment is such a disaster: it reduces income but it also reduces happiness directly by destroying the self-respect and social relationships created by work…it hurts as much after one or two years of unemployment as it does at the beginning…And even when you are back at work, you still feel its effects as a psychological scar.” (Layard, 2005, p. 67) We also know that individuals can have different orientations towards work (Wrzesniewski, McCauley, Rozin, & Schwartz, 1997) . Individuals can see work as a job, performed for monetary benefit, as a career, where both money and advancement are important, or as a calling, where one might do the work even if the paychecks stopped. A surprising result was that how one is oriented towards work doesn’t necessarily depend on the type of work one does, with some administrative assistants and hospital orderlies reporting that they see their work as a calling while others held job or career orientations. The research did not look into whether orientation towards work may change if an individual were to switch jobs or careers. Therefore, we can’t state definitively whether orientation can be changed, although it is suggested that even if one were to stay at a job, doing a reframing exercise may lead to a calling orientation and increased engagement at work (Seligman, 2002) .
REFERENCES:
Haidt, J. (2006). The Happiness Hypothesis. New York: Basic Books.
Layard, R. (2005). Happiness. New York: Penguin books.
Seligman, M. E. P. (2002). Authentic Happiness. New York: Free Press.