When people are happy, engaged, and filled with positive emotions a strange thing happens: they have a broader sense of self that includes others.
Psychologists Christian Waugh and Barbara Fredrickson conducted an experiment where they “primed” subjects with positive emotions by showing them happy scenes from movies or pleasant images. The subjects were then asked to think of their best friend and then circle the picture on a chart that best describes their relationship. The pictures were Venn diagrams of a set of circles, one that read “Self” and one that read “Friend”. The set of pictures went from isolated circles in the top row to overlapping circles in the bottom row. Positively primed subjects chose the Venn diagram row at the bottom more often than the control subjects when describing their relationship.
In 1975, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi interviewed so called “experts” in their field. These represented artists, athletes, musicians, chess masters and surgeons.
Csikszentmihalyi wanted to study what he called the “optimal experience.” He wanted to investigate how people felt when they most enjoyed themselves and why. So he interviewed these experts because these were people who spent their time in the activity they preferred.
From their accounts of what it felt like to do what they loved and be engaged in it, he identified a path to happiness that entailed being highly engaged in an activity. He called this a state of flow.
In a May article in Gallup Management Journal, the authors discuss the impact of using one’s strengths on engagement and productivity. This is important research because intuitively we all agree with the statement that if you focus on your strengths in the workplace, you will be more engaged and will consequently be more productive.
But now there is the research to back up our intuitive knowledge. The article mentions some of the findings from Gallup’s research on the use of strengths in the workplace.
Engagement at work not only affects one’s physical health it also positively impacts one’s well-being.
Research has shown that for Americans the secret to happiness can be found of all places at work. A new study indicates that those who work longer hours in the United States are actually happier.
Research from a recent Gallup survey indicates that American employees who are emotionally disengaged from their job are about as unlikely as the unemployed to be in excellent health.
When an employee is dissatisfied with the job, over time he is likely to suffer from job burnout.
Psychologists have defined burnout as the erosion of engagement. This means that work that was once pleasant, important, and meaningful becomes unpleasant, unfulfilling, and meaningless.
Psychologist Christina Maslach from the University of California at Berkeley is one of the pioneering researchers on job burnout and created the Maslach Burout Inventory to measure burnout from work.
She has found that burnout can contribute to depression and that burnout can cause a number of problems including, physical and medical problems, other psychological problems, increased use of alcohol and drugs, low self-esteem, a sense of failure, dislike of people, conflicts in relationships, irritability, suspiciousness, paranoia, frustration, and apathy. A survey from the American Psychiatric Association, found that in terms of lost productivity, depression costs employers more than any other illness at $30 to $44 billion per year.
There are three psychological signs that predict burnout in the workplace: exhaustion, cynicism, and ineffectiveness.
The Department of Labor reported last Friday that the unemployment rate is down to 8.8% from 8.9% the prior month. While this is good news, the Workplace Prof Blog explains that there are still a lot of long-term unemployed.
To be unemployed is a very hard and demoralizing state to go through. But it is even harder due to the fact that when looking for work you face discrimination because you are unemployed.
If we look at a job as a relationship, we can see that there are two parties involved: the employee and the position. The employee puts in resources, psychological and emotional, and is compensated, not only monetarily, but also psychologically and emotionally.
Psychologists have referred to this relationship as a psychological contract. A psychological contract refers to the unwritten agreement concerning the underlying reciprocal relationship between the employee and employer (Levinson et al., 1962; Rousseau, 1989).
What every company wants is engaged employees. Why? Because engagement is the key to high performance.
Engaged employees directly impact the firm’s bottom line. Employee engagement is positively linked to profit. (Ketter, 2008). This means that increasing employee engagement will help increase company profit.
A 2007 survey from Leadership IQ of 20,000 new hires showed that 46% of new hires fail within 18 months of joining a company. The amount of successful hires was only a mere 19%.
Why did the new hires fail? Was this because the employees didn’t have the technical competencies to perform the job?
