Positive Affect
Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden and build theory of positive emotions explains that positive emotions are valuable in that they help us broaden our scope of attention and cognition and help us build resources that we can draw on in the future (Fredrickson, 2003) . Increasing positive affect therefore may increase productivity and performance in a job due to an increase in resources which may be drawn on in performance of the work. It is not surprising, that an increase in positive affect increases life satisfaction (Cohn, Brown, Fredrickson, Mikels, & Conway, 2009) .
Let’s consider the other half of the equation. Do positive emotions increase productivity or performance at work? The evidence points to yes. One way to measure performance would be to consider long term success. There is evidence that frequent positive emotion leads to success (Lyubomirsky, King, & Diener, 2005) . In addition, positive affect relates to productivity in that people who typically experience more positive affect are more productive, and that people have their greatest productivity when they are experiencing positive moods (Zelenski, et al., 2008) . Finally, we know that we can use interventions to increase positive affect, building consequential resources as a result (Fredrickson, Cohn, Coffey, Pek, & Finkel, 2008) .
Therefore a good target for organizations and individuals is to look for ways to increase positive affect through and at work. This will benefit both the individual, in that it may lead to increased life satisfaction, as well as the employer in that it may lead to increased productivity and performance. Further, as positive emotion is a component of happiness and there is evidence that happiness spreads through social networks, in a natural network such as a workplace, one employee’s increase in positive emotion may actually make it easier to then increase the positive emotion of the next employee.
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