Are Happier Workers More Productive?

In hiring for fit, how do we achieve positive outcomes for each party, the individual and the organization?  Are there shared pathways to these positive outcomes that simultaneously enrich the life of the individual and lead to a successful organization?

As organizations are fundamentally, as their name implies, made of people, the solution to mutual positive outcomes concerns the happy-productive worker theory.

The happy-productive worker theory argues that happier workers are more productive, therefore it is in the interest of the firm to treat workers in a way that will increase their happiness. Although this sounds like a straightforward statement, and one that many researchers came to think of as the holy grail of organizational sciences (Landy, 1985) the theory has received ambiguous support which has led to many organizational scientists remaining skeptical about the relation between happiness and job performance. Why are the findings so ambiguous? What does the body of literature teach us about this theory and its validity?

Wright and Crompanzano propose that the ambiguous findings regarding the happy-productive worker thesis were a result of how happiness was operationalized (2001). Happiness can be a vague term which means different things to different people.

Subsequently, they along with other colleagues, have done several studies that provide more clarity and support of the happy productive worker thesis. Wright, Cropanzano, Denney, and Moline examined three different happy-productive worker models. They examined job satisfaction, dispositional affect, and psychological well-being as predictors of job performance.  They found evidence that psychological well-being both correlated with job performance and predicted job performance (Wright, Cropanzano, Denney, & Moline, 2002).

Although they didn’t find that dispositional affect or job satisfaction predicted job performance, the authors did note that this could have been because of the modest sample size used in their research study. A further study in 2007 found evidence supporting the idea that psychological well-being moderates the relation between job satisfaction and job performance (Wright, et al., 2007) .

Zelenski, Murphy, and Jenkins provide further support for the link between performance and overall life happiness. Their study indicated that life satisfaction and productivity are correlated (Zelenski, Murphy, & Jenkins, 2008). In their study, the authors found that positive affect and life-satisfaction were the strongest predictors of productivity.

Between these studies, the evidence is strongly accumulating behind a happier worker being a more productive worker, and therefore the idea that we can achieve flourishing for an individual and his or her organization simultaneously, has strong scientific support.

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