happiness at workplace research paper

• Subscribe to journal Subscribe
• Get new issue alerts Get alerts

Secondary Logo

Journal logo.

Colleague's E-mail is Invalid

Your message has been successfully sent to your colleague.

Save my selection

The science behind happiness at work

Caraballo-Arias, Yohama a ; Feola, Daniela b ; Milani, Simona b

a Department of Medical and Surgical Sciences, Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna

b Division of Occupational Medicine, IRCCS Azienda Ospedaliero-Universitaria di Bologna, Bologna, Italy

Correspondence to Simona Milani, IRCCS University Hospital of Bologna S Orsola-Malpighi Polyclinic: IRCCS Azienda Ospedaliero- Universitaria di Bologna Policlinico di Sant’Orsola, via Albertoni n. 15, Bologna, Italy. Tel: +39 051 214 2757; e-mail: [email protected]

Purpose of review 

The aim of this review is to provide an update on recent advances of happiness at work.

Recent findings 

A search on PubMed about ‘happiness’ on 18 August 2023, shows 12 699 entries and 117 systematic reviews. When writing ‘happiness at work’ and filtering data for the last 20 months (1 January 2022, up to 23 August 2023), we identified 209 articles (2 reviews). We excluded 160 studies (e.g. those conducted on the general population), and after reading the full text, we excluded 18 studies, remaining 31. The authors have identified 34 factors influencing happiness at work, several instruments and 12 interventions strategies that have been found to improve happiness at work.

Summary 

Happiness at work is a crucial factor for organizational success and can contribute to reducing turnover and improving organizational loyalty. Different cultures and countries perceive happiness differently, and we must understand its complexity from a psychological, economical, social, and organizational perspective. Work-related well being has been associated with overall and subjective well being and life satisfaction. It is essential for organizations to commit to creating a positive work environment where employees feel valued and motivated while impacting job satisfaction, engagement, and meaningful work and productivity.

INTRODUCTION

Happiness is a complex and multifaceted concept that transcends cultural boundaries; it is a universal aspiration that has captivated the minds of philosophers, poets, everyday individual throughout history and, more recently, scientists. Yet its understanding remains elusive.

Recently, the scientific community has embarked on a quest to unravel the mysteries of happiness, seeking to uncover the underlying factors that contribute to well being at work. The idea of Happiness at Work is derived from psychology and economic studies. It is often considered as a synonym of ‘well being‘ and defined as a state characterized by a high level of life satisfaction, a prominent level of positive emotions, and less negative emotions [1▪▪] . Happiness at work is considered an umbrella concept, as it covers both individual and organizational aspects of working life [2] .

Everyone's job is a small world for him/her. In today's fast-paced and demanding work environments, the pursuit of happiness has become an increasingly important focus for both employees and organizations. However, happiness at work is inseparable from other life dimensions such as stability in matrimonial relationships and finances, involvement in leisure and religious activities, and being mentally healthy [3] . By examining the interplay between psychology, social factors, and work environment, we aim to provide what has been explored in terms of factors and tools to measure happiness, as well as the recent interventions at the workplace that have been performed in the last 20 months.  

Relevant articles were found through computerized literature searches of the PubMed/MEDLINE Database using the term ‘happiness at work’. All the articles published from 1 January 2022, through 23 August 2023, in English were included. The articles that did not focus on the relationship between happiness and work or did not provide information regarding the study population's work life, such as epidemiological studies, conducted on the general population, were excluded. The eligibility of each article was assessed independently by three researchers, and disagreements were resolved by consensus and literature consultation.

Articles were grouped according to the following criteria:

• (1) Factors that contribute to happiness at work.
• (2) Instruments to measure happiness at work.
• (3) Interventions for improving happiness at work.

We divided the information collected in three tables. Table 1 includes studies that evaluated the labour factors that contribute to happiness; Table 2 includes instruments used to assess happiness at work and Table 3 the interventions made and their effectiveness on happiness at work. Each table includes author and year of publication, country where the research was conducted, aim of the study, method used, population characteristics (e.g. subjects, age, sex) and the main results. Most of the articles could be included in any of the tables; however, in order to avoid overlaping information, we decided to include each article in the table that reflects the proper criteria and relevance of the category.

The literature research retrieved 209 articles published during the specified time window. After applying the fore mentioned exclusion criteria, 49 articles were read in full. Full-text examination led to the exclusion of an additional 18 studies. The final number of included studies was, therefore, 31.

To better understand the results, we categorized the overall studies as follows: 19 studies that described happiness factors, 6 articles that used specific instruments to measure happiness, and 6 articles on improving happiness at work with any intervention strategy.

Factors that contribute to happiness at work

Nineteen studies have been made evaluating the factors that can have an influence on happiness at work ( Table 1 ).

In the study by Muñiz-Velázquez et al. [4] , the researchers aim to explore the level of happiness experienced by public relations practitioners in Spain. They found that job satisfaction and the perception of a positive work environment were important factors contributing to happiness at work.

Charles-Leija et al. [5] conducted a study to investigate the relationship between meaningful work, happiness at work, and turnover intention. The finding revealed that meaningful work was positively associated with happiness at work and negatively associated with turnover intentions.

Muthukumaran et al. [3] delve into the crucial aspect of job satisfaction and happiness among firefighters. The findings showed a strong correlation between these factors: most of the respondents reported above-average levels of satisfaction and happiness at work, showing a positive work environment. Co-worker support and organizational commitment emerged as significant contributors to overall job satisfaction and happiness.

Kortsch et al. [6] investigated the effects of flexibilization of work location and working hours on happiness at work and affective commitment in the German banking sector. The results showed that remote work had a positive impact on happiness at work: the employees who had the freedom to choose their work location and working hours experienced higher levels of job satisfaction and the employees’ affective commitment to the organization also increased with implementing remote work.

The study by González-Rico et al. [7] aimed to identify burnout and engagement profiles among university workers and their impact on well being at work. The results showed that high levels of burnout were associated with lower well being at work, while high levels of engagement were associated with higher well being.

Schwitz et al. [8▪▪] conducted a critical narrative review on the importance of happiness in medical education: the review highlighted the need to prioritize happiness in medical education to enhance the well being and satisfaction of medical students and healthcare professionals.

Gil-Flórez et al. [9] explored the mediating role of psychological well being between satisfaction/frustration of basic psychological needs and healthy organizational outcomes. They found that satisfying basic psychological needs improves well being (work commitment and happiness) and leads to healthier organizational outcomes.

Ray's study findings [10▪▪] showed a positive association between work-related well being and individual subjective well being.

Calitz et al. [11] explored the factors that affect the happiness of South African veterinarians: workplace relationship, work–life balance, and job satisfaction were significant factors influencing happiness.

Magnavita et al. [12] found that anaesthesia residents trainees working on night shifts have shorter sleep times, increased daytime sleepiness, a higher heart rate and generally reported to be less happy than occupational health residents trainees who do not work at night.

Chu et al. [13] found that a healthy balance between work and home life when working from home (WFH), so WFH can help make employees feel happier and maintain good levels of work productivity.

The study by Pi et al. [14] found that ergonomic-based piano teaching positively impacted teachers’ physical and mental health, leading to an improvement in their sense of happiness.

Zheng's findings [15] showed a positive relationship between work commitment, human–machine facilitation, and task performance with career happiness and job performance among political teachers in a positive emotional environment.

Pigati et al. [16] conducted a study on the resilience and subjective happiness of physiotherapists during the COVID-19 pandemic: resilience positively influenced the quality of life and subjective happiness.

Yang et al. [17] examined the associations between overtime work, job autonomy, and employees’ subjective well being in China: job autonomy seemed to play a significant role in promoting employees’ subjective well being, while excessive overtime work had a negative effect.

Feng et al. [18] conducted a mixed research method study on the effect of perceived stress, family companionship, and mental health on the subjective happiness of Chinese healthcare workers: the findings showed that perceived stress negatively affected subjective happiness, while family companionship and mental health positively influenced it.

Badri et al. [19▪▪] explored the reciprocal relationship between happiness and life satisfaction of working adults in Abu Dhabi, suggesting a bidirectional relationship between these factors, with each variable positively influencing the other.

Otsuka et al. [20] explored the association between happiness and burnout: higher levels of happiness were associated with lower levels of burnout.

In the study by Shi et al. [21] , the findings revealed that higher levels of occupational exposure to either physical, chemical, biological, psychosocial, or biomechanical agents were associated with lower levels of job satisfaction and overall happiness among Chinese physician and nurses.

Thirty-four factors have been identified to influence happiness, such as job satisfaction, perception of a positive work environment, meaningful work, co-worker support, companionship, supervisor support, organizational commitment, flexibilization of work location, engagement, satisfying basic psychological needs, individual subjective well being, positive relationship with patients, flexibilization of working hours, workplace relationship, shorter sleep time, ergonomics, life satisfaction, job performance, resilience, overtime work, job control, overall work life balance, optimism, work stress, leisure, human–machine facilitation, physical activity, to have personal protective equipment, to have voluntary choices to work extra time, family companionship, involvement in religious activities, social support network, work experience, Corporate Social and Responsibility (CSR) promotion climate. All these factors seem to have an impact on the workers’ happiness perception.

Tools for measuring happiness at work

In the study conducted by Fitriana et al. [1▪▪] , the authors validated the Happiness at Work Scale across different cultures. The researchers collected data from participants in Indonesia and the United States of America and compared the results to ensure the scale's cross-cultural validity. The findings of the study provided substantial evidence that the Happiness at Work Scale holds strong psychometric properties across diverse cultures.

The main goal of the study conducted by Feitor et al. [2] was to assess the psychometric properties of the Portuguese version of the Shortened Happiness at Work Scale specifically for nurses: the results provided strong evidence of the Portuguese version's reliability and validity, making it a valuable tool for assessing happiness at work among nurses in Portuguese-speaking contexts.

Toledo et al. [22] undertook a study to validate the IWH-BEAT (Integrative Well Being and Engagement Assessment Tool) questionnaire, collecting data from a diverse sample of participants to examine the psychometric properties and evaluate the validity of the questionnaire. The results of the study confirmed the questionnaire's reliability and validity, further establishing it as a robust tool for assessing well being and engagement in the workplace.

Manfredi [23] conducted a study comparing health and wellness indicators among trainees (psychiatric residents and anaesthesiologist) and found high levels of resilience, job satisfaction, coping strategies, and happiness in both specialties but a more compromised relationship with patients among anaesthesiologists.

Giess et al. [24] compared self-reported burnout among radiologist and nonradiologist peers at a large academic medical centre. Radiologists had significantly lower self-rating for work happiness, finding work meaningful, perceiving physicians as highly valued, and believing leadership treated them with respect and dignity.

Negri et al. [25] conducted a study on job satisfaction among physicians and nurses involved in the management of multiple sclerosis using the Eudaimonic and Hedonic Happiness Investigation. The findings suggested that both happiness and meaning at work contributed significantly to job satisfaction among healthcare professionals.

In the last 20 months, five instruments have been used to measure happiness at work: the happiness at work scale (the long and shortened version), and the IWH-BEAT (Integrative well being and engagement Assessment), Subjective Happiness Scale (SHS), the Stanford Physician Wellness Survey and the Eudaimonic and Hedonic Happiness Investigation and the Job Satisfaction Questionnaire ( Table 2 ). There were other instruments found on the review that were included on Table 1 , such as Worplace PERMA profiler questionnaire, Happy Career Scale, Pemberton Happiness Index (PHI) among others.

STUDIES ON INTERVENTIONS TO IMPROVE HAPPINESS AT WORK

Jeong et al. [26] explored the relationship between the climate of promotion of corporate social responsibility (CSR) at the team level, organizational identification, and job happiness. The results suggest that a team's CSR promotion climate positively influences job happiness, with organizational identification playing a mediating role and congruence of leading-follower values moderating the relationship.

Sulosaari et al. [27] conducted a review of nursing mindfulness interventions and found positive impacts on various aspects of psychological well being, including stress, burnout, and resilience.

Gerrard et al. [28] focused on welfare programs in emergency departments and identified several interventions, such as awareness, the practice of happiness and resilience, which proved to be useful. The study stressed the importance of adapting interventions to individual needs and considering potential barriers and facilitators.

Sexton et al. [29] found that the Web-based Implementation for the Science of Enhancing Resilience (WISER) intervention, a positive psychology program, had positive and lasting effects on multiple dimensions of well being for healthcare professionals.

The study by Gold et al. [30] emphasized that positive psychology interventions can lead to immediate improvements in positive affect and happiness. The intervention aimed to enhance the well being and resilience of healthcare workers by engaging them in a daily practice of reflecting on and documenting three positive events or experiences. Healthcare workers who took part in the intervention reported improvements in their overall well being, emotional well being, and job satisfaction compared with those in the control group. They also experienced a reduction in symptoms of burnout and had higher levels of positive affect; moreover, the intervention was effective in promoting better sleep quality and reducing sleep disturbances.

Spilg et al. [31] used the Stress Management and Resilience Training (SMART) program in physician clinical practice and assessed its impact on resilience, subjective happiness, stress, and anxiety.

Twelve intervention strategies have been found to improve happiness at work such as CSR climate, mindfulness, tactile massage, hypnosis, happiness practice (evidence-based strategy), meditation, video-based debriefing, web-based implementation for the science of enhancing resilience (WISER), positive psychology intervention, the stress management to practice awareness and resiliency and resilient training (SMART).

These interventions can be effective in creating a more positive and satisfying work environment for employees. However, the effectiveness of such interventions can vary depending on several factors, such as the intervention itself, the characteristics of the organization and the individual situation of employees ( Table 3 ).

The article ‘The science behind happiness at work’ provides an update on recent advances in the study of happiness at work. Significant number of articles on the topic, showing a growing interest in understanding the factors that contribute to happiness in the workplace.

The 34 factors that influence happiness at work highlight the complexity of this topic. It acknowledges that happiness at work is not solely determined by one factor but is influenced by a combination of psychological, economic, social, and organizational factors. This comprehensive approach is important in acquiring a holistic understanding of happiness at work.

The article emphasizes the importance of happiness at work for organizational success. Encouraging happiness at work can reduce turnover and boost loyalty. This supports previous research that found a connection between employee well being and organizational outcomes.

The article discusses the link between work-related well being and overall and subjective well being, and life satisfaction. This underscores the importance of work in the overall happiness and quality of life of individuals. It emphasizes the need for organizations to focus on employee well being and promote a positive work environment.

Although the article provides valuable insights into the current understanding of happiness at work, it is necessary to delve deeper into the specific factors that were identified in the 31 studies.

In conclusion, this article highlights the growing interest in happiness at work and the importance of understanding it from multiple perspectives. Further research on the specific factors influencing happiness at work (on different working scenarios) and the potential mechanisms or pathways through which these factors influence happiness at work. Understanding these factors in more detail could provide practical implications for organizations seeking to enhance happiness in the workplace.

Study limitations and strengths

The main limitation of our study is represented by the exact definition of ‘happiness’. Despite being an ever-present emotion in human life, happiness is in fact a volatile concept, which may vary wildly among diverse cultures, social groups and even individuals. Therefore, no standardized definitions exist for it [8▪▪] .

Tackling such a vast subject allows to improve our knowledge regarding its multifaceted nature, bringing us nearer and nearer to a univocal definition or, at least, to a more standardized approach. Our research has the merit of being a wide-spectrum analysis of a complex topic and it is not intended to be exhaustive, but to depict what has been done in the last 20 months, and describe some key factors associated with the complex construct of happiness at work.

Work happiness not only enhances individual well being but also contributes to the overall success and productivity of organizations, societies, and countries.

Understanding the 34 factors that contribute to happiness at work and several available tools to quantify the level of happiness with the possible 12 interventions strategies can be crucial for creating thriving organizations. By examining the interplay between individual characteristics, organizational culture, and work-related factors, we hope to provide not a comprehensive understanding of what truly fosters happiness in the workplace but an updated state-of-the art of the science behind happiness at work.

Acknowledgements

Financial support and sponsorship, conflicts of interest.

There are no conflicts of interest.

REFERENCES AND RECOMMENDED READING

Papers of particular interest, published within the annual period of review, have been highlighted as:

▪ of special interest

▪▪ of outstanding interest

• Cited Here |
• PubMed | CrossRef |
• Google Scholar
• View Full Text | PubMed | CrossRef |

happiness; happiness at work; well being; job satisfaction; occupational safety and health; well being at work

• + Favorites
• View in Gallery

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Authentic happiness at work: self- and peer-rated orientations to happiness, work satisfaction, and stress coping.

• 1 Depratment of Psychology, Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, Halle (Saale), Germany
• 2 Interkantonale Hochschule für Heilpädagogik (HfH), Zurich, Switzerland
• 3 Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

The authentic happiness theory covers three basic orientations to happiness; namely, the life of pleasure (via hedonism); engagement (via flow-related experiences); and meaning (via eudaimonia). There is broad evidence for a positive relationship between these three orientations and indicators of positive psychological functioning in a variety of life domains. However, their contribution to well-being at work is understudied. The main aim of this study was testing the relationship between self- and peer-rated orientations to happiness, work related well-being (work satisfaction, work stress), and coping strategies. Further possible mediating effects of the coping strategies on the relationship between orientations to happiness and well-being at work were also examined. The sample consisted of 372 German-speaking Swiss adults (60.3% female), aged between 18 and 65 years ( M = 38.9, SD = 10.8) with a minimum of 40% full-time employment. For 100 persons, peer-ratings of the orientations to happiness were available. Our results showed that the life of engagement and, to a lesser extent, the life of meaning are related to work satisfaction. The life of pleasure was associated with lower levels of reported work stress. Further, positive associations between self- and peer-rated orientations to happiness (particularly pleasure) and adaptive coping strategies with stress were also found. Mediation analyses showed that the effects of engagement in general and content-related work satisfaction were mediated mainly by control and negative coping, while the association between meaning and resigned work satisfaction was mediated by positive coping. Negative coping fully mediated the association between the pleasurable life and work stress. Overall, our results indicate that employees’ orientations to happiness are of importance for experiencing well-being at work.

Introduction

Well-being at work is not only crucial for the overall well-being of the individual but also leads to better work performance (e.g., Judge et al., 2001 ; Zelenski et al., 2008 ; Cooper et al., 2019 ), higher levels of employee creativity and engagement ( Bartels et al., 2019 ), and has been associated with lower rates of absenteeism at work (e.g., Wegge et al., 2007 ; Ybema et al., 2010 ). To effectively enhance work-related well-being and the ability to cope with work-related demands, approaches that help researchers to understand the mechanisms that add meaning to life and facilitate optimal functioning seem promising ( Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000 ; Gable and Haidt, 2005 ). Accordingly, recent years have seen a growing interest in studying positive psychology in association with organizational behavior (see, for example, Luthans and Youssef, 2007 ). In an effort to narrow a gap in the literature, we examine three basic orientations to happiness at work and their association with work satisfaction and work stress. In particular, we will collect self- and other ratings in the orientations and see whether they relate to specific stress-coping strategies and could thus be seen as protective factors buffering against stress.

Orientations to Happiness

Positive psychology is an “[…] umbrella term for the study of positive emotions, positive character traits, and enabling institutions” ( Seligman et al., 2005 , p. 410). There has been growing interest in the field of positive psychology over the past decade ( Donaldson et al., 2011 , 2015 ), and its main areas of interest are (a) positive subjective experiences such as happiness, (b) positive individual traits such as orientations to happiness, and (c) positive institutions such as schools and workplaces, etc. ( Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000 ). Positive institutions should encourage the use of positive traits, which, in turn, leads to positive experiences (see e.g., Harzer and Ruch, 2013 ; Pang and Ruch, 2019 ). Hence, the application of models derived from positive psychology and applied to the workplace facilitates the study of the potential contributors to positive experiences at work, for example, the role of hedonic, eudaimonic, and flow-related personal resources.

In his authentic happiness theory , Seligman (2002) postulates three routes to happiness: the pleasant life, the engaged life, and the meaningful life. The pleasure orientation (akin to the notion of hedonism ) suggests the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain as the main route to happiness. Already, Aristuppus argued that immediate sensory gratification is the main way to experience a fulfilled life ( Watson, 1895 ). The engaged life route builds upon works on “flow” experiences ( Csikszentmihalyi, 1990 ) for achieving a good life. During flow, people’s attention is focused on the task itself, and they are absorbed with the activity. Flow is different from sensual pleasure, and it is argued that it is rather non-emotional and non-conscious in the moment. The third route to happiness, the meaningful life, results from individuals’ using their signature strengths (i.e., morally positively valued traits; see Peterson and Seligman, 2004 ) to serve something larger than themselves (akin to the pursuit of eudaimonia ). Being true to one’s inner self ( demon ), that is, identifying and cultivating one’s strengths and virtues and living in accordance with them in the service of greater goods, leads to happiness ( Aristotle, 2000 ). Hence, two of the three orientations have long-standing roots in philosophy (hedonism and eudaimonia), while engaged life has its roots in psychology (flow experiences). Of course, hedonism and eudaimonia are also studied outside the framework of the authentic happiness model, namely, as facets of well-being, hedonic and eudaimonic well-being (e.g., Di Fabio and Kenny, 2018 ), and have led to the development of a new theoretical framework considering sustainable well-being in organizations ( Psychology of Sustainability ; Di Fabio, 2017 ).

Previous research on adults from 27 different nations has revealed that the orientations to happiness are related but remain distinct and positively correlated with life satisfaction and other indicators of positive psychological functioning ( Peterson et al., 2005 , 2007 ; Park et al., 2009 ). Numerically, engagement displayed the strongest and pleasure the weakest associations. Peterson et al. (2005) showed that those people with a “full life” (i.e., high expressions in all three orientations) are most satisfied with their lives, while those with low expressions in all three orientations (i.e., an “empty life”) are less satisfied; this notion has received support from a study on the perception of daily activities in terms of the three orientations and the importance of a balance across all three ( Grimm et al., 2014 ). There is also evidence from placebo-controlled intervention studies that deliberate activities targeting the three orientations (either separately or jointly) are associated with an increase in (a) the orientations themselves, (b) happiness, and (c) an amelioration of depression (e.g., Giannopoulos and Vella-Brodrick, 2011 ; Gander et al., 2016 , 2017 , 2018 ).

Orientations to Happiness and Well-Being at Work

The relationship between the orientations to happiness and work satisfaction as one dimension of well-being at work ( Rothmann, 2008 ) has been less frequently studied than their association with (the facets of) subjective well-being (e.g., Peterson et al., 2005 ; Park et al., 2009 ). Nevertheless, there is robust evidence for positive contributions from the three orientations to one’s working life. For example, Hofmann et al. (2018) recently identified that the associations between the orientations to happiness and life satisfaction differ across occupations. Using a representative sample of the Swiss workforce ( N = 1,140), they showed that people in more highly skilled occupations (defined as a function of the complexity and range of tasks and duties to be performed in an occupation) reported higher life satisfaction and a lower orientation to pleasure than those in less skilled occupations. In addition, the orientation to meaning was more closely related to life satisfaction in highly skilled than in less skilled occupations. The three orientations also relate to career adaptability ( Johnston et al., 2013 ). Proyer et al. (2012) tested 221 career officers in the Swiss military and found that the engaged and meaningful life positively and robustly correlated with work satisfaction. Engagement showed a strong association with the satisfaction with content-related aspects of work, whereas the life of meaning also correlated with general work satisfaction. Furthermore, the orientations were also predictive of the subjective and objective indicators of career success (the latter operationalized by military rank).

Swart and Rothmann (2012) tested managers in the agricultural sector in South Africa ( N = 507) and found that all orientations to happiness, but especially engagement, had an impact on work satisfaction. Furthermore, the relationship between the orientations to happiness and work satisfaction were substantiated using longitudinal data. Martínez-Martí and Ruch (2017) discovered an association between orientations to happiness and work satisfaction 1 year after a first measurement period in a representative sample of employees in Switzerland. They stated that, although engagement was a better predictor than pleasure or meaning, the simultaneous endorsement of all of the three orientations is the best predictor for work satisfaction (i.e., the “full life;” Peterson et al., 2005 ). Using a large sample of 1,134 Japanese working adults, Suzuki et al. (2015) established an association between the life of meaning and grit (the perseverance and passion for long-term goals). Although the latter has been discussed critically with respect to its distinctiveness (e.g., Credé et al., 2017 ; Vazsonyi et al., 2019 ), this may be seen as a hint for an interplay between the orientations to happiness and their role in goals that relate to perseverance. Finally, the pursuit of work-related activities is robustly associated with the engaged life (and the meaningful life; Ruch et al., 2010 , 2014 ). Overall, a balance between the pleasurable, engaged, and meaningful life may help to achieve sustainable happiness. Given that adults typically spend a considerable portion of their time at work, testing the role of the three orientations to happiness for work-related outcomes and dealing with stress seem particularly important.

The Role of Work Stress

Positively dealing with work stress is an important contributor to well-being at work ( Rothmann, 2008 ). We follow a transactional perspective on stress (e.g., Lazarus and Folkman, 1984a , b ) and use De Bruin’s (2006) definition of work stress, namely, “[…] an uncomfortable state of psychological tensions that results from an appraisal that the perceived demands of the workplace exceeds the individual’s perceived resources to successfully meet the demands” (p. 68). Based on the assumption that orientations to happiness function as personal resources and contribute to lower levels of stress at work, Johnston et al. (2013) demonstrated that the orientations to happiness (especially engagement) positively correlated with career adaptability (i.e., individuals’ behaviors, competencies, and attitudes engaged “in fitting themselves into work that suits them;” Savickas, 2005 , p. 45). Furthermore, pleasure and engagement were negatively correlated with work stress. We aim to replicate and extend the latter finding by taking the potential limitations of subjective data into account.

Most of the earlier studies on the orientations to happiness were based on self-reports alone (for an exception see, for example, Ruch et al., 2010 ). One limitation of this approach is that these ratings may be prone to distortions due to the answer styles (e.g., social desirability or extreme answering behavior; for an overview, see Furnham, 1986 ). Thus, a method bias (e.g., Campbell and Fiske, 1959 ) may have an impact on the findings (e.g., an overestimation of the true effects due to similar answering behavior in the measures used). Another limitation may be that self-ratings do not provide the full picture of the associations, as it has been shown that ratings by acquaintances contribute additional information (e.g., Connelly and Ones, 2010 ). Thus, the inclusion of ratings by knowledgeable others will provide a second source of data to help in testing the stability of the associations beyond mere self-reports. Earlier research has shown that self- and peer ratings in the orientations to happiness converge well (around 0.50; Ruch et al., 2010 ); this is within the approximate range that has been reported for trait measures in personality research [i.e., between 0.46 (neuroticism) and 0.62 (extraversion); Connolly et al., 2007 ]. Overall, we expect that self- and peer-rated orientations to happiness, and especially engagement, would be correlated with work satisfaction.

Coping Strategies Mediating the Orientations to Happiness—Well-Being at Work Link

We derive our hypotheses from the transactional model of stress ( Lazarus and Folkman, 1984a , b ). Here, psychological stress is seen as a transaction between individual and environmental factors and is based on two basic forms of appraisal: primary and secondary appraisal. Primary appraisal refers to a person’s cognitive appraisal whether something of relevance to the individual’s well-being occurs, whereas secondary appraisal concerns coping options. These appraisals are determined by a number of personal variables such as motivational dispositions, goals, values, and generalized expectancies. In terms of the transactional model of stress ( Lazarus and Folkman, 1984a , b ), orientations to happiness may serve as personal resources of working people that help to explain the way people deal with work-related challenges and stressors. Orientations to happiness should facilitate the use of particular positive and negative coping strategies that, in turn, help to deal with challenges in terms of experiencing lower levels of stress in the workplace. In line with this theoretical framework, we aim to study the mediating effects of coping strategies for a better understanding of how the orientations may contribute to well-being at work.

Coping is defined as an individual’s habitual way of reacting to stressors by adopting certain strategies ( Erdmann and Janke, 2008 ). Positive and negative coping strategies can be distinguished: Positive coping strategies (e.g., positive self-affirmation, relaxation) reduce the experiencing of stress, while negative or maladaptive coping strategies consist of behaviors that alleviate the feeling of stress briefly, but not in the long run (e.g., escape, social withdrawal, rumination). In line with Fredrickson’s (2004) , broaden and build theory of positive emotions , we argue that the pursuit of the three orientations is linked to the elicitation of positive emotions. Referring to earlier work by, for example, Isen (e.g., Isen and Levin, 1972 ), Fredrickson argues that positive emotions serve as efficient antidotes for the lingering effects of (e.g., stress-induced) negative emotions. By broadening a person’s momentary thought–action repertoire, a positive emotion may buffer the effects of negative experiences. Positive emotions could, therefore, help broaden the scope of attention, cognition, and action and build physical, intellectual, and social resources. In line with these assumptions, research has shown that positive emotions are crucial facilitators of adaptive coping and adjustment to acute stress ( Folkman, 1997 ; Folkman and Moskowitz, 2000 ). Within the transactional stress model ( Lazarus and Folkman, 1984a , b ), Fredrickson’s (2004) broaden and build theory of positive emotions can help to explain an individual’s coping potential . Coping potential refers to the appraisal processes and means an individual’s evaluation of the expectation for generating certain cognitive or behavioral operations that will positively influence a personally relevant encounter. In short, it is argued that the three pursuits may facilitate the usage of specific, positive strategies that help in ameliorating perceived stress and combat-related negative outcomes. In this sense, the orientations could well be seen as a resource that facilitates the usage of certain stress-reducing strategies or prevents maladaptive strategies from occurring and, ultimately, leads to lower levels of perceived stress. Consequently, we expect a positive relationship between the orientations to happiness and positive coping strategies and a negative association between the orientations and negative coping strategies.

To the best of our knowledge, there has been no study that examines the relationship between orientations to happiness and coping with stress. It is argued that the pursuit of the three orientations will be linked to specific types of coping strategies (referring to Erdmann and Janke ’s, 2008 ). For example, those who pursue a hedonistic approach to happiness may distract themselves by conducting other activities that help them to relax. Those that pursue a life of engagement and experience flow have feelings of total concentration and absorption and an invigorating feeling of having things under control arises ( Csikszentmihalyi, 1990 ). We, therefore, expect that engagement is linked to the coping strategies of control and distraction. Distraction in terms of Erdmann and Janke’s (2008) is a positive strategy that enables people to direct their attention to activities that are useful to divert oneself from a stressful situation and/or to engage with activities that are incompatible with the stressful situation. A life of meaning will be associated with the search for higher values in life wherein problems and difficulties are understood in a larger context. Individuals who pursue this orientation may have a particular propensity for the usage of coping strategies that help them to cognitively restructure current stressful incidents.

Aims of the Study

The purpose of the present study is to test the associations of self-reported orientations to happiness with well-being at work (work satisfaction, work stress) and extend this by, additionally, analyzing the associations of peer ratings for the three orientations with facets of work-related well-being. We expect that the orientations to happiness, especially engagement, are positively associated with work-related well-being—in both the self- and peer ratings (H1). Second, we test the relation between self- and peer-rated orientations to happiness and coping strategies (H2). We expect that the self- and peer-rated orientations to happiness are positively related with positive coping and negatively with negative coping mechanisms. Third, we hypothesize that the relationship between orientations to happiness and well-being at work is mediated by the coping strategies (H3).

Materials and Methods

Participants, sample 1: self-ratings.

We collected data from N = 372 German-speaking working adults in Switzerland (60.2% female, 39.8% male) aged from 18 to 65 ( M = 38.9, SD = 10.8). The only inclusion criterion was that they had to be employed with a minimum of 40% full-time employment (FTE = 42 h/week in Switzerland). The participants reported an average percentage of working hours per week of 89.8% ( SD = 18.5; range, 40–100%). The majority of the participants held a university degree (72.6%), 25.3% completed secondary education, and 2.2% reported a level of education lower than elementary school.

Sample 2: Peer-Ratings

For 100 participants, peer ratings of the orientations to happiness were available from acquaintances (60.0% female, mean age = 40.0, SD = 11.0, range, 24–66 years). The majority of the acquaintances (66.0%) indicated that the rated person was their partner or spouse, while 16.0% indicated that the rated person was a friend. Most of them knew the rated person very well; on a scale from 1 = “hardly” to 7 = “excellent,” 51.0% indicated a “6,” and 38.0% a “7” level of acquaintance. The lowest rating was “4,” while the mean value was M = 6.2 ( SD = 0.8).

Data were collected in an online survey hosted by an institution of higher education in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. The study was announced on internet forums, social networks, and via leaflets. Participants were not paid but received individual feedback on the study variables. They were informed that feedback was only given for the self-ratings but not for the ratings by knowledgeable others. The peer raters were also informed that their evaluation would not be shared with the target person. The peer ratings for the Orientations to Happiness scale ( Peterson et al., 2005 ) were also collected online using an individualized link sent to the person. The study was conducted in line with institutional standards and recommendations. All procedures complied with the ethical guidelines of the local ethics committee at the institution of higher education where the study was conducted. Participation was voluntary, anonymity was ensured, and participants could end the survey at any time, without consequences. Consent was obtained by virtue of survey completion.

Collecting data in online studies has been criticized for several reasons (e.g., sample biases). However, research has shown that data collected online are comparable to those collected in conventional ways ( Gosling et al., 2004 ). We designed and conducted our study according to the code of “good practice” in internet-delivered assessments ( Coyne and Bartram, 2006 ). All data are available on the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/mf5cj/ .

Orientations to happiness were assessed using the German version ( Ruch et al., 2010 ) of the Orientations to Happiness Scale (OTH-self; Peterson et al., 2005 ). This consists of 18 items, and answers were given on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = very much unlike me, 5 = very much like me). The OTH scale is the standard measure for the assessment of the three orientations and frequently used in research across various contexts and cultures ( Giannopoulos and Vella-Brodrick, 2011 ; Buschor et al., 2013 ; Johnston et al., 2013 ). The internal consistencies in this sample were satisfactory for research purposes, namely, α = 0.73 (life of pleasure; six items, e.g., “Life is too short to postpone the pleasures it can provide”), α = 0.68 (life of engagement; six items, e.g., “I am always very absorbed in what I do”), and α = 0.79 (life of meaning; six items, e.g., “My life serves a higher purpose”).

Participants in Sample 2 completed a peer-report form of the Orientations to Happiness Scale (OTH-peer; Ruch et al., 2010 ), which uses the same 18 items as the OTH-self, but rephrased to enable ratings by a third person. Ruch et al. (2010) reported convergence between 0.48 and 0.51 between self- and peer ratings. The internal consistency coefficients for the OTH-peer were comparable to those of the self-reports (i.e., α = 0.75 for the pleasurable, six items, e.g., “For her/him, life is too short to postpone the pleasures it can provide;” α = 0.64 for the engaged, six items, e.g., “He/She is always very absorbed in what he/she does;” and α = 0.80 for the meaningful life, six items, e.g., “His/her life serves a higher purpose”).

Satisfaction With Work

Work satisfaction, as a subjective experience of objective work situations, was assessed using the German version ( van Dick et al., 2001 ) of the Job Diagnostic Survey (JDS; Hackman and Oldham, 1975 ). The total scale comprises 24 items. Three subscales of general work satisfaction (4 items, e.g., “In general, I am happy with my work”), content-related work satisfaction (15 items, e.g., “I perceive my work as very varied”), and resigned work satisfaction (4 items, e.g., “Even though my work is not ideal, it could be worse”) were built.

Participants had to respond on a 6-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree, 6 = strongly agree). The resigned work satisfaction subscale, however, was answered on a 7-point Likert scale (1 = practically never, 7 = practically always). The internal consistencies and items of the three types of work satisfaction were good (general work satisfaction: α = 0.88; content-related work satisfaction: α = 0.86; resigned work satisfaction: α = 0.81).

Work Stress

The General Work Stress Scale is a one-dimensional measure of the level of stress caused by work ( De Bruin and Taylor, 2005 ). We used a German translation that was also used in Johnston et al. (2013) . Individuals responded to nine items (e.g., “Do you become so stressed that you would resign?”) using a 5-point Likert type scale (1 = never, 5 = always). For this study, Cronbach’s alpha was 0.90.

Coping with stress was measured with the German-language questionnaire Stressverarbeitungsfragebogen (“stress coping questionnaire;” SVF-120; Erdmann and Janke, 2008 ). We used the standardized and adapted version assessing stressful situations at the workplace [using this instruction: “When I was affected, upset, or overbalanced by work (…)”]. The SVF-120 consists of 120 items, and answers are given on a 5-point Likert scale answer format (0 = not at all, 4 = very likely). Twenty different coping modes can be distinguished and subsumed into two broad categories, namely, positive and negative coping strategies (plus four equivocal coping modes, which are not of interest here). To choose an appropriate level of analysis, we followed the authors’ ( Erdmann and Janke, 2008 ) suggestions to distinguish between negative and positive strategies. The positive strategies can further be separated into three subcategories, whereas this does not apply for the negative strategies. The first positive coping subcategory, devaluation , covers a cognitive method of coping and entails the minimization, self-aggrandizement by comparison with others, and denial of guilt coping modes. The second, distraction , is characterized by seeking distraction from strain by focusing on situations and states that are incompatible with stress. It entails four coping modes: distraction, substitute gratification, search for self-affirmation, and relaxation. Control is the third positive coping subcategory and entails the active control of stressors and reactions. The related coping modes are situation control, reaction control, and positive self-instructions. Negative coping strategies are escape, social withdrawal, rumination, resignation, self-pity, and self-blame. The SVF-120 is frequently used in German-speaking countries (e.g., Rammsayer et al., 2006 ; Brandhorst et al., 2016 ).

Internal consistency coefficients and item samples were as follows: devaluation [α = 0.86; e.g., “(…) I take it easier than other people.;” to deemphasize], distraction [α = 0.90; e.g., “(…) I try to distract myself somehow.;” distraction], control [α = 0.87; e.g., “(…) I tell myself that I can handle it.;” positive self-instruction], and negative coping (α = 0.96; e.g., “[…] I avoid people.;” social withdrawal). A more detailed description of all subscales of the SVF-120 are available in the electronic supplement ( Supplementary Table S1 ) 1 .

Statistical Analyses

Following correlation analyses, we conducted hierarchical multiple regression analyses for each work satisfaction facet (general, content-related, and resigned; three separate analyses) and for work stress as criteria. We controlled for age and gender in Step 1 because these features are known to vary with facets of well-being (e.g., Peterson et al., 2005 ) and are considered to be “personal dispositions” in our theoretical stress model ( Lazarus and Folkman, 1984a , b ). Subsequently, we entered the three orientations to happiness as a predictor set in Step 2 to study their explained variance independently of age and gender. Additionally, we performed mediation analyses to test whether relations between orientations to happiness and types of work satisfaction and work stress are mediated by coping strategies. Figure 1 illustrates this mediation model. These analyses were performed using the PROCESS script (model 4) by Hayes (2013) , which allows us to estimate total ( c ), direct ( c ’), and indirect effects ( ab ) in multiple parallel mediator models; c ’ refers to orientations’ direct effects on work satisfaction, when coping strategies are controlled. The indirect effect ( ab ) of orientations on work satisfaction through coping is represented by the product of pathways a and b . The total effect c is defined as the sum ( c ’ + ab ) of the direct and indirect effects. To test the statistical significance of indirect effects, we implemented bootstrap confidence intervals. Bootstrapping is a resampling method generating an estimation of the sampling distribution of a statistic from the observed dataset. We used 10,000 bootstrap samples to compute bias-corrected bootstrap confidence intervals (95% CI). Point estimates of the indirect effects were considered to be significant when zero was not included in the 95% confidence intervals. Our sample size met the guidelines to reliably detect mediation effects by using bootstrapping (see Fritz and MacKinnon, 2007 ). Assuming small to medium effect sizes for both paths of mediation while determining a power of 0.80 ( Cohen, 1988 ), the sample size required is between 71 and 391. In line with Fritz and MacKinnon (2007) , we attempted to assess the maximum sample size.

Figure 1. Parallel mediational model. Total ( c ), direct ( c’ ) and indirect effects ( ab ) of the orientations to Happiness (Pleasure, Engagement, Meaning) on Well-being at work (work satisfaction, work stress) via the mediators Positive (Devaluation, Distraction, Control) and Negative Coping Strategies.

Preliminary Analyses

Means, standard deviations, and correlation analyses are shown in the electronic Supplementary Material ( Supplementary Table S1 ; see footnote 1). There were small ( r = −0.11–0.24) associations of the tested variables with age and/or gender. Therefore, we decided to control for these variables in the analyses conducted thereafter. The convergence between the self- and peer-rated orientations to happiness (self-other-agreement) were numerically lower for pleasure ( r = 0.34) and engagement ( r = 0.33) compared to meaning ( r = 0.48), but in the same direction and in the expected range (cf. Ruch et al., 2010 ).

Testing the Association Between Self- and Peer-Rated Orientations to Happiness, Work Satisfaction, Work Stress, and Stress Coping

Table 1 displays the correlations (controlled for age and gender) between self- and peer-reported orientations to happiness, types of work satisfaction, and work stress. All three self-rated orientations to happiness were positively associated with general work satisfaction and its content-related aspects. The overlap with the resigned aspects of work was considerably smaller (5% shared variance with the orientations to happiness, but 13 and 16% shared variance for general and content-related work satisfaction, respectively). The analysis of the peer-ratings showed that the ratings by knowledgeable others for engagement and meaning were also associated with content-related aspects of work satisfaction and that those were potentially the most robust relations. Overall, peer-rated pleasure seemed to be less predictive for types of work satisfaction.

Table 1. Correlations (controlled for age and gender) between self- and peer-reported orientations to happiness, types of work satisfaction, and work stress.

We found a negative relationship between the life of pleasure and experiencing work stress —numerically about the same size for peer-rated engagement. The experience of work stress further negatively correlated with the different types of work satisfaction ( r = −0.42 to −0.58; not shown in the table).

We conducted hierarchical stepwise regression analyses with work satisfaction (general, content-related, resigned) and work stress as criteria (four separate analyses) and the three orientations to happiness as joint predictors (Step 2; see Table 2 ). Additionally, we controlled for the impact of age and gender in Step 1. The findings suggest that the orientations to happiness predicted the types of work satisfaction differently. Post hoc power analyses supported our proposed models (method: special increase in R 2 , fixed model, α = 0.05; Faul et al., 2009 ). In the final models, engagement predicted general work satisfaction ( f 2 = 0.15; 1 −β = 0.99), engagement and meaning predicted content-related work satisfaction ( f 2 = 0.19; 1 − β = 1.00), and meaning predicted resigned work satisfaction ( f 2 = 0.05; 1 −β = 0.97). The orientations to happiness shared 13 and 16% variance with general and content-related work satisfaction, respectively. Their predictive power for the resigned type was considerably smaller (5% shared variance). Overall, our findings suggest that work satisfaction was higher in those participants that endorsed engagement and meaning. Considering work stress, the dominant predictor among the orientation to happiness was the pleasure orientation ( f 2 = 0.06; 1 −β = 0.99), whereas the contributions of engagement and meaning were rather small in size and not significant. Hence, the overall amount of explained variance by the orientations was rather small (6% shared variance). The data met the assumption of collinearity, and multicollinearity was not a concern (median tolerance across all variables = 0.79 and median VIF = 1.26; see Supplementary Table S2 for details; see footnote 1).

Table 2. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses predicting types of work satisfaction (general, content-related, resigned) and work stress from age, gender, and orientations to happiness (pleasure, engagement, meaning).

At the level of bivariate correlations (controlled for age and gender), the self-ratings of the life of pleasure increased with positive coping strategies and decreased with the total score of the negative strategies 2 (see Table 3 ). Moreover, the life of engagement positively correlated with the total score out of the positive coping strategies and the global scores for the single facets, especially regarding the distraction and control strategies, and negatively with the total score out of the negative strategies. The pattern was similar for the life of meaning, while the strongest associations were discovered for the strategies targeting control. The life of meaning existed relatively independently from the total score of negative strategies. The findings also reveal that there existed between 3 and 20% shared variance connecting the self-reported three orientations to happiness and the stress coping strategies.

Table 3. Correlations between self- and peer-reported orientations to happiness and positive and negative coping strategies (controlled for age and gender).

If the peer ratings were taken into account, findings were comparable for the pleasurable life. As expected, the size of the correlation coefficients was smaller, but, again, the life of pleasure was associated with the positive strategies—in particular with those targeting distraction. The peer ratings for engagement were widely unrelated to self-rated coping strategies, while the peer-rated meaning was primarily associated with distraction (in particular, relaxation and self-affirmation). There was between 0 and 15% shared variance between the peer-rated orientations to happiness and the self-rated stress coping strategies. There was no association of the negative coping strategies with peer-reported orientations to happiness, except from the negative relationships between self-pity and peer-rated pleasure.

The data from self- and peer reports supported the notion that the three orientations to happiness contribute to both work-related well-being (work satisfaction, work stress) and coping with stress in the workplace. The findings show that the positive coping strategies (devaluation, distraction, and control) and the negative coping strategies were robustly related to the orientations to happiness.

Testing a Mediation Model on the Contribution of Coping Strategies to the Association Between Orientations to Happiness and Well-Being at Work

We conducted separate mediation analyses for each type of work satisfaction and work stress using one of the three orientations to happiness as predictors (those revealed by the hierarchical regression analyses as the strongest predictor, namely, the engaged life for general and content-related work satisfaction, the meaningful life for resigned work satisfaction, and the pleasure life for work stress). We considered age and gender as covariates in all our analyses. Given that our mediators yielded robust bivariate correlations (e.g., r = 0.01–0.49), we computed mediation analyses with parallel mediators to simultaneously test the contribution of devaluation, distraction, control (positive coping), and negative coping in mediating the effects of orientations to happiness on work satisfaction and work stress.

Table 4 shows that the effect of the engaged life on general work satisfaction was partially mediated by devaluation and negative coping, whereas no mediation effect was found for distraction and control ( Figure 2 ). Unexpectedly, there was a negative effect of devaluation on work satisfaction. A comparison of indirect effects (devaluation minus negative coping) revealed a specific contrast effect of −0.15 ( SE = 0.04, 95% CI = −0.24 to −0.07). The inspection of the bootstrap confidence interval shows that it excluded zero; hence, the effects of negative coping were significantly stronger than the effects for devaluation. Furthermore, parts of the link between the engaged life and content-related work satisfaction were partly transmitted via devaluation, control, and negative coping, whereas no mediating effect was found for distraction ( Figure 3 ). Comparing indirect effects revealed specific significant contrasts for devaluation minus control (−0.11, SE = 0.04, 95% CI = −0.19 to −0.05) and devaluation minus negative coping (−10, SE = 0.03, 95% CI = −0.17 to −0.05), thereby indicating that devaluation yielded a smaller indirect effect than control and negative coping, while there was no significant difference among the latter (0.01, SE = 0.03, 95% CI = −0.05 to 0.08). The association between the meaningful life and resigned work satisfaction was partly mediated by positive coping strategies, that is, devaluation and control, whereas no indirect effect was identified for negative coping ( Figure 4 ). Among the positive coping strategies, the mediating effect of control was stronger than that of devaluation (−0.12, SE = 0.04, 95% CI = −0.20 to −0.05). Our findings show that the effects of engagement in general or content-related work satisfaction were mediated mainly by negative coping and control, while the association between meaning and resigned work satisfaction was mediated by positive coping.

Table 4. Parallel mediation analyses predicting types of work satisfaction and work stress (DV) (10,000 bootstrap samples).

Figure 2. Direct, indirect, and total effects (in brackets) of Engagement on General Job Satisfaction via the mediators Positive (Devaluation, Distraction, Control) and Negative Coping Strategies (Controlled for age and gender). ∗ p < 0.05. ∗∗ p < 0.01. ∗∗∗ p < 0.001. a Significant point estimates ( p < 0.05).

Figure 3. Direct, indirect, and total effects (in brackets) of Engagement on content-related Job Satisfaction via the mediators Positive (Devaluation, Distraction, Control) and Negative Coping Strategies. It was controlled for age and gender. ∗∗ p < 0.01. ∗∗∗ p < 0.001. a Significant point estimates ( p < 0.05).

Figure 4. Direct, indirect, and total effects (in brackets) of Meaning on Resignative Job Satisfaction via the mediators Positive (Devaluation, Distraction, Control) and Negative Coping Strategies (Controlled for age and gender). ∗ p < 0.05. ∗∗ p < 0.01. ∗∗∗ p < 0.001. a Significant point estimates ( p < 0.05).

The association between the orientation to pleasure and reported work stress was wholly transmitted via negative coping, whereas the devaluation, distraction, and control positive coping strategies did not contribute significantly to the mediation ( Figure 5 ).

Figure 5. Direct, indirect, and total effects (in brackets) of Pleasure on Work Stress via the mediators Positive (Devaluation, Distraction, Control) and Negative Coping Strategies (Controlled for age and gender). ∗∗∗ p < 0.001. a Significant point estimates ( p < 0.05).

The main aim of the present study was to extend earlier findings on the relationship between orientations to happiness and work-related well-being in a sample of Swiss employees by including peer ratings of the three orientations to happiness. Overall, we found that the three orientations relate to higher levels of satisfaction with one’s working life, in particular, the engaged life (for facets, also the life of meaning). Additionally, the pleasurable life may be vital in experiencing lower stress levels at the workplace. However, the causality is unclear, and higher well-being at work may relate to higher orientations to happiness.

The life of engagement emerged as a potent predictor of general work satisfaction . Engagement and meaning predicted content-related work satisfaction and meaning predicted resigned work satisfaction . However, the association for the resigned type was considerably smaller than for the other types. Greater self-rated endorsement of a pleasurable life was associated with lower experiences of work stress , which may point to potential buffering effects. The analyses based on the peer ratings support the importance of engagement and meaning for content-related work satisfaction.

Our results are comparable to earlier research ( Proyer et al., 2012 ; Swart and Rothmann, 2012 ; Martínez-Martí and Ruch, 2017 ), which emphasized the importance of engagement for work satisfaction. This is also in line with Seligman (2002) , who proposed that individuals usually feel more engaged at work than at home (see Ruch et al., 2010 , 2014 ). The experience of flow, which is related to engagement, seems, therefore, to occur more frequently at work than during leisure time ( Csikszentmihalyi and LeFevre, 1989 ) and may hold the potential to elicit positive emotions and contribute to well-being. Of course, our data do not allow for the interpretation of causal effects. Future research may test whether workplace interventions directed at improving an engaged (and meaningful—and also a pleasurable) life hold the potential to increase positive experiences and decrease negative emotions at work and the elicitation of positive emotions. Finally, the inclusion of other outcomes (e.g., integrity, commitment, or innovative behavior at work) would be helpful in obtaining a better understanding of the role of the orientations at work. Earlier research has shown that all three orientations to happiness relate positively to different indicators of well-being (correlational, for example, Peterson et al., 2007 ; Ruch et al., 2010 ; experimental, for example, Giannopoulos and Vella-Brodrick, 2011 ; Gander et al., 2016 , 2017 ; Proyer et al., 2016 ), and our study supports the notion that they also have an impact on well-being at work. More research on work-related interventions is needed to determine how employees can capitalize from their orientations to happiness for a better experience at work.

Orientations to Happiness and Coping Strategies

We further considered positive coping strategies such as devaluation, distraction, and control and the single dimension for negative coping to gain more insight into the possible regulating mechanisms that help to implement the adaptive associations of the orientations to happiness to experience well-being in work life.

The life of pleasure was related to all three subscales of the positive coping strategies (devaluation, distraction, and control) and to lower expressions in the negative coping strategies. As expected, the peer ratings were in the same direction—yet lower in size. This supports the notion that pleasure plays an important role in coping with work stress. One might argue that people scoring high in life of pleasure find it easier to distract themselves from problems and stressful experiences and devalue them to cope with adversity. They have a good understanding of what activities elicit flow experiences, enabling them to do things that are incongruous to what causes the stressful experience. Simultaneously, they avoid or resign (flight) to a lower degree, both of which are negative coping strategies that do not help one to cope with the problem. This helps one to cope with the acute intensity of the problem and offers diversion but allows people to attend the problem later (after having distracted themselves to recuperate). A further assumption is that these people generally take life a little “easier” by trivializing difficulties and not taking them too seriously—thinking that they will be able to cope with what comes their way and also be more open to improvise given the circumstances. One consequence of this might be that they experience less stress at work. Whether this should be seen as a protective factor—only preventing stress from occurring—or whether too much endorsement of a pleasurable life also pertains to certain risks for other outcomes (e.g., integrity, involvement in work tasks, or productivity) may be valuable research questions for future research relying on longitudinal designs.

The life of engagement yielded associations with the positive coping strategies of devaluation and distraction and, specifically, control, and with the negative coping strategy. These results are in line with our expectations of flow as a state of total absorption (i.e., distraction from other things) with a strong feeling of having things under control. Overall, these findings warrant replication as the analysis of the peer ratings did not support the findings.

Self-ratings of the meaningful life were also associated with the positive coping strategies of distraction and, in particular, control. The peer ratings for meaning were primarily associated with distraction. A life of meaning is associated with the attitude that life serves a higher purpose. A connection between this attitude and control strategies seems reasonable. The strategy “situation control” is, for example, about analyzing situations and planning actions for control/problem solving. Hence, those high in a life of meaning may actively try to make something positive out of a given problem and learn from it for the benefit of a higher goal. Simultaneously, striving for meaning in life is unrelated to negative coping strategies such as ruminating about events, blaming oneself, and feeling sorry for oneself. Striving for a higher meaning in life can be understood as part of the intrinsic motive system ( Elliot and Church, 1997 ), which can be diminished by external punishment, whereas the meaning orientation seems to be unsusceptible to negative thoughts about the self or to ruminating.

In summary, we propose that the orientations to happiness, especially pleasure, may function as personal resources and contribute to more positive and less negative coping. As previously mentioned, we cannot make statements on causality. The reason that we found slightly different results for the peer ratings (e.g., no associations between peer-rated engagement and coping) could be due to the fact that personality traits and behaviors differ in their observability/evaluativeness (see Vazire, 2010 ). For example, one might argue that flow experiences are more difficult to recognize in others than pleasure or meaning. Furthermore, the ratings of the acquaintances likely do not refer explicitly to the individual’s behavior at work, since the majority of them were friends (or the partner/spouse) from their private life, not their work life. Moreover, it needs to be taken into account that peer ratings only exist for a subset of all participants providing self-ratings and that the peer ratings have, therefore, less stability in comparison with the larger sample of self-ratings (e.g., when taking research on the stability of correlation coefficients into account; Schönbrodt and Perugini, 2013 ).

The Relationship of Orientations to Happiness and Coping Strategies With Well-Being at Work

We proposed that the positive and negative coping strategies would mediate the associations between all the happiness orientations and well-being at work (facets of work satisfaction and work stress). Overall, reporting higher engagement at the workplace is related to experiencing higher levels of general work satisfaction , whereas this association is partly transmitted via the positive coping strategy devaluation of stressful experience and less negative coping, whereas negative coping was the predominant mediator. Considered in light of the transactional model of stress ( Lazarus and Folkman, 1984a , b ), being wholly absorbed in current tasks increases general work-related satisfaction because engagement enables people to not avoid or resign (flight) from difficulties that do not help one to cope with the problem. Comparably, the positive association of engagement in the workplace with reporting experiencing content-related work satisfaction is partly mediated by the positive strategies of devaluation and control, and less by negative coping strategies, whereas the mediating effects of control and negative coping were dominant over devaluation. Besides the aforementioned mediating mechanisms of negative coping, control seems to be important in mediating this effect. Arguably, because control helps to analyze situations and plan actions to control and solve problems related to work content, control accompanies increased content-related work satisfaction. The positive association between experiencing meaning at work and resigned work satisfaction is partly transmitted via the devaluation of stressors and active control of the stressors, whereas again, control was the predominant mediator. Our results suggest that striving for a life of meaning is associated with higher levels of actively trying to make something positive out of a given situation, which means more resigned work-related satisfaction.

Given only the partial mediation effects, there are still effects of engagement and meaning on work satisfaction that are independent of our considered coping mechanisms. Thus, it seems fruitful to continue studying potential mediators. One moderating variable of these effects may be playfulness [i.e., individual differences in the propensity to play and to (re)frame everyday situations in such a way as to experience entertainment, and/or intellectual stimulation, and/or personal interest; Proyer, 2017 ]. One might argue that a group of adults in the workplace may seek pleasure (at work) from playful interactions with others, intellectual types of challenges, or a general tendency toward lightheartedness and seeing problems from a meta-perspective enabling them to better cope with problems. Potential support for this notion comes from research showing that there is a robust relationship between playfulness and (primarily) a life of pleasure and an engaged life ( Proyer et al., 2012 ; Proyer, 2014 ) and that playfulness moderates the relationship between behaviors related to a playful work design and both work engagement and creativity ( Scharp et al., 2019 ).

Considering the association between the pleasure orientation and experienced work stress , we found that the negative coping strategy functions as a total and unique mediator even in the presence of the devaluation, distraction, and control positive coping strategies. Less application of negative coping strategies such as self-pity, self-blame, or rumination seems to serve as a mechanism through which people attain the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain at work. This interpretation is also consistent with our framework of the transactional model of stress ( Lazarus and Folkman, 1984a , b ). In the present situation, our negative coping strategies can be categorized as emotion-focused coping. Emotion-focused coping relates to the inner processes of individuals and helps to reduce negative emotional states such as the given work-related stress or to change the appraisal of the demanding work-related stress but does not relate to actively planning or engaging in activities to overcome the problem causing distress.

Self-Other-Agreement in the Orientations to Happiness

Data collected in this study allow for a replication of the self-other-agreement in the three orientations to happiness ( Ruch et al., 2010 ). As expected, self- and peer ratings converged well (between r = 0.33 and 0.47). However, they were numerically lower for pleasure and engagement than in Ruch et al. (2010) . There may be differences in the level of acquaintanceship, methodology (two raters in Ruch et al. (2010) , while we only had one), and sample sizes that may help explaining these findings. In any case, self-other-agreement in the orientations to happiness is in a comparable range to what has been reported in the literature for trait measures.

Taking our findings together, we argue for a stronger consideration of orientations to happiness in their relationship with work-related variables. The study extends prior knowledge in the field (e.g., Proyer et al., 2012 ; Swart and Rothmann, 2012 ; Johnston et al., 2013 ) and shows their potential for dealing with work-related stress.

Limitations

Our results are based on a cross-sectional design. We, therefore, cannot make any comments about causality or the directionality of the relationship between orientations to happiness, work satisfaction, work stress, and coping strategies. Based on our theoretical model (transactional stress model; Lazarus and Folkman, 1984a , b ), we argue that the experiencing of the orientations to happiness may facilitate certain coping strategies and behaviors and eventually more well-being at work, but it is also possible that the effect is vice versa—or based on interactions or the effects of other variables (e.g., employment status; Gander et al., 2019 ). A longitudinal research design should be applied in future research. Alternatively, the assumed causal link from the orientations to happiness on well-being via coping strategies can also be proofed using an experimental design such as the “experimental-causal-chain-design” ( Spencer et al., 2005 ) or the testing-a-process-hypothesis-by-an-interaction-strategy-Ansatz ( Jacoby and Sassenberg, 2011 ).

Given that we tried to overcome the common method bias by not relying on self-reports alone, we additionally included peer rating of the happiness orientations. However, with respect to the peer ratings of the orientations to happiness, the “letter of recommendation” effect could play a role: informants were nominated by targets, mostly friends and partners, and such informants may tend to like the target; thus they describe them overly positively ( Leising et al., 2010 ). Hence, a follow-up study with a different recruitment strategy or the inclusion of more knowledgeable persons, possibly from the work environment, providing the peer ratings should be considered—as well as having multiple peer raters. Furthermore, peer ratings were not available for the full sample, but only a subsample of those that have provided self-reports. Taking simulation studies of, for example, stability of estimates for correlation coefficients, into account (e.g., Schönbrodt and Perugini, 2013 ), the findings for the self-reports have more stability, and findings for the peer ratings need to be interpreted with more caution. Another strategy to overcome possible method biases would be using unmeasured method factor techniques as suggested by Podsakoff et al. (2012) or using structural equation models. However, given the cautionary note on the role of the peer ratings mentioned earlier, we suggest applying such analyses in a replication study with more balanced samples sizes across self- and peer ratings.

Our study demonstrated associations of orientations to happiness with facets of work-related well-being in a general sample of employees. Future research should build on this by validating our models in participants working in particular domains such as in less vs. highly skilled occupations. Previous research has already shown different associations between orientations to happiness and general life satisfaction across occupations ( Hofmann et al., 2018 ).

Finally, Seligman (2011) has revised his initial model, which now covers five facets (the inclusion of the achieving life/Accomplishment and positive relationships 3 ), and the pleasurable life is reconceptualized in the sense of a proneness to experience positive emotions. Only comparatively recently have measures been developed for the assessment of these additional components in German-speaking countries (English version: Butler and Kern, 2016 ; Japanese version: Watanabe et al., 2018 ; German version: Wammerl et al., 2019 ), and so we could not implement them in this study. Hence, a future replication and extension should be based on this conceptualization. Current research projects using the PERMA model demonstrate already promising results (e.g., Tansey et al., 2017 ; Wagner et al., 2020 ).

Implications

Since the orientations to happiness relate to adaptive coping with work stress and work satisfaction, consideration should be given to the possibility of enhancing the orientations to happiness in the workplace (e.g., via positive psychology interventions). Indeed, Meyers et al. (2013) conducted a review of positive psychology interventions applied in the working field. They identified 15 studies that examined the effects of interventions that were based on the cultivation of positive subjective experiences, the building of positive individual traits, or the building of civic virtue and positive institutions. In doing so, they concluded that positive psychology interventions consistently enhance employee well-being and performance and tend to diminish stress and burnout and, to a lesser extent, depression and anxiety. With regard to the orientations to happiness, the life of engagement, respectively the experience of flow and the life of meaning, seems to be crucial for work satisfaction and may, therefore, be a good starting point for the development of further interventions. They could be enhanced if employees identify their strengths and have the possibility to use them at work (see also Seligman, 2002 ). Typically, positive psychology interventions can easily be integrated into daily routines, can be self-administered (e.g., in online settings), and do not take up too much time or use too many materials (e.g., Sin and Lyubomirsky, 2009 ). Interventions that focus on the implementation of positive coping strategies in the work field should be additionally considered, for example, training based on strengthening individuals’ intrapreneurial self-capital (e.g., Di Fabio, 2014 ) that is regarded as a set of individual resources that enables people to proactively cope with the uncertainties of the 21st century’s world of work.

In summary, intervention studies based on the three orientations are promising, and while it has already been shown that these interventions contribute to subjective well-being ( Giannopoulos and Vella-Brodrick, 2011 ; Gander et al., 2016 , 2017 , 2018 ; Proyer et al., 2016 ), it seems reasonable to assume that they also hold potential for increasing work-related well-being ( Harzer and Ruch, 2012 , 2015 ).

Overall, our results indicate that the orientations to happiness are of importance for work-related well-being, such as general, content-related, and resigned work satisfaction and experienced work stress. In particular, the life of pleasure seems to be helpful for coping with work stress, while the life of engagement and, to a lesser extent, the life of meaning contribute to work satisfaction. This finding is in line with our theoretical transactional stress model and the positive psychology framework. The orientations to happiness function as positive traits that foster positive subjective experience such as well-being in the workplace mainly via using positive coping strategies.

Future research may examine the possibility of enhancing the orientations to happiness in the workplace and studying the impact of these activities on different indicators of well-being at work. From our point of view, the occupational context may benefit if we started to study and eventually facilitated more aspects related to the field of Positive Psychology—aspects that help researchers to understand what adds meaning to work life and promotes optimal functioning ( Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000 ).

Data Availability Statement

All data are available on the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/mf5cj/ .

Ethics Statement

The study was conducted in compliance with the local ethical guidelines at the University of Zurich (place of data collection) and participants provided online informed consent. Written informed consent for participation was not required for this study in accordance with the national legislation and the institutional requirements.

Author Contributions

AK and RP contributed to the conception and the design of the study. AK organized the data analyses. NT conducted the statistical analyses. AK, NT, and RP wrote sections of the manuscript. All the authors engaged in revisiting, reading, and approving the submitted version of the manuscript.

We received funding for the open access publication fees from the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Supplementary Material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01931/full#supplementary-material

TABLE S1 | Means, standard deviations, and correlations of orientations to happiness (OTH) and well-being at work with gender and age.

TABLE S2 | Collinearity analyses for our multiple regression models predicting types of work satisfaction (General, Content-related, Resigned) and work stress from age, gender, and orientations to happiness (Pleasure, Engagement, Meaning).

• ^ https://osf.io/mf5cj/
• ^ Due to the high number of simultaneous correlational tests, there is a risk of alpha-error accumulation. We, therefore, rejected the null hypotheses only when the p -value was lower than 0.01.
• ^ Seligman (2011) defines Accomplishment as “[…] success, accomplishment, winning, achievement, and mastery for their own sake” (p. 18) given that “[…] people often acted simply to exert mastery of the environment” (p. 20). Furthermore, he argues that “[…] other people are the best antidote to the downs of life and the single most reliable up” (p. 20) and stresses the importance of positive relationships with others (e.g., covering feelings of trust toward others and close relationships).

Aristotle (2000). The Nicomachean ethics. Trans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Google Scholar

Bartels, A. L., Peterson, S. J., and Reina, C. S. (2019). Understanding well-being at work: development and validation of the eudaimonic workplace well-being scale. PLoS One 14:e0215957. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0215957

PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Brandhorst, I., Hautzinger, M., and Schlarb, A. (2016). Improving psychosocial health, coping, and self-efficacy in parents of sleep-disturbed young children. J. Psychol. Psychother. 6:249. doi: 10.4172/2161-0487.1000249

CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Buschor, C., Proyer, R. T., and Ruch, W. (2013). Self-and peer-rated character strengths: how do they relate to satisfaction with life and orientations to happiness? J. Posit. Psychol. 8, 116–127. doi: 10.1080/17439760.2012.758305

Butler, J., and Kern, M. L. (2016). The PERMA-Profiler: a brief multidimensional measure of flourishing. Int. J. Wellbeing 6, 1–48. doi: 10.5502/ijw.v6i3.526

Campbell, D. T., and Fiske, D. W. (1959). Convergent and discriminant validation by the multitrait-multimethod matrix. Psychol. Bull. 56, 81–105. doi: 10.1037/h0046016

Cohen, J. (1988). Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences , 2nd Edn. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Connelly, B. S., and Ones, D. S. (2010). An other perspective on personality: meta-analytic integration of observers’ accuracy and predictive validity. Psychol. Bull. 136, 1092–1122. doi: 10.1037/a0021212

Connolly, J. J., Kavanagh, E. J., and Viswesvaran, C. (2007). The convergent validity between self and observer ratings of personality: a meta-analytic review. Int. J. Select. Assess. 15, 110–117. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2389.2007.00371.x

Cooper, B., Wang, J., Bartram, T., and Cooke, F. L. (2019). Well-being-oriented human resource management practices and employee performance in the Chinese banking sector: the role of social climate and resilience. Hum. Resour. Manag. 58, 85–97. doi: 10.1002/hrm.21934

Coyne, I., and Bartram, D. (2006). Design and development of the ITC guidelines on computer-based and internet-delivered testing. Int. J. Test. 6, 133–142. doi: 10.1207/s15327574ijt0602_3

Credé, M., Tynan, M. C., and Hams, P. D. (2017). Much ado about grit: a meta-analytic synthesis of the grit literature. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 113, 492–511. doi: 10.1037/pspp0000102

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Performance. New York, NY: Harper and Row.

Csikszentmihalyi, M., and LeFevre, J. (1989). Optimal experience in work and leisure. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 56, 815–8333. doi: 10.1037//0022-3514.56.5.815

De Bruin, G. P. (2006). The dimensionality of the general work stress scale: a hierarchical exploratory factor analysis. SA J. Indus. Psychol. 32, 68–75. doi: 10.4102/sajip.v32i4.250

De Bruin, G. P., and Taylor, N. (2005). Development of the sources of work stress inventory. South Afr. J. Psychol. 35, 748–765. doi: 10.1177/008124630503500408

Di Fabio, A. (2014). Intrapreneurial self-capital: a new construct for the 21st century. J. Employ. Counsel. 51, 98–111. doi: 10.1002/j.2161-1920.2014.00045.x

Di Fabio, A. (2017). The psychology of sustainability and sustainable development for well-being in organizations. Front. Psychol. 8:1534. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01534

Di Fabio, A., and Kenny, M. E. (2018). Intrapreneurial self-capital: a key resource for promoting well-being in a shifting work landscape. Sustainability 10:3035. doi: 10.3390/su10093035

Donaldson, S. I., Csikszentmihalyi, M., and Nakamura, J. (2011). Applied Positive Psychology: Improving Everyday Life, Health, Schools, Work, and Society. Abingdon: Routledge.

Donaldson, S. I., Dollwet, M., and Rao, M. A. (2015). Happiness, excellence, and optimal human functioning revisited: examining the peer-reviewed literature linked to positive psychology. J. Posit. Psychol. 10, 185–195. doi: 10.1080/17439760.2014.943801

Elliot, A. J., and Church, M. A. (1997). A hierarchical model of approach and avoidance achievement motivation. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 72, 218–232. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.72.1.218

Erdmann, G., and Janke, W. (2008). Stressverarbeitungsfragebogen (SVF). Handbuch: Stress, Stressverarbeitung und ihre Erfassung durch ein Mehrdimensionales Testsystem . [Stress Coping Questionnaire (SVF). Handbook: Stress, Stress Coping and its Acquisition in a Multidimensional Test System.]. Göttingen: Hogrefe.

Faul, F., Erdfelder, E., Buchner, A., and Lang, A.-G. (2009). Statistical power analyses using G ∗ Power 3.1: tests for correlation and regression analyses. Behav. Res. Methods 41, 1149–1160. doi: 10.3758/BRM.41.4.1149

Folkman, S. (1997). Positive psychological states and coping with severe stress. Soc. Sci. Med. 45, 1207–1221. doi: 10.1016/s0277-9536(97)00040-3

Folkman, S., and Moskowitz, J. T. (2000). Stress, positive emotion, and coping. Curr. Direct. Psychol. Sci. 9, 115–118. doi: 10.1111/1467-8721.00073

Fredrickson, B. L. (2004). The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. B Biol. Sci. 359, 1367. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2004.1512

Fritz, M. S., and MacKinnon, D. P. (2007). Required sample size to detect the mediated effect. Psychol. Sci. 18, 233–239. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01882.x

Furnham, A. (1986). Response bias, social desirability and dissimulation. Pers. Indiv. Differ. 7, 385–400. doi: 10.1016/0191-8869(86)90014-0

Gable, S. L., and Haidt, J. (2005). What (and why) is positive psychology? Rev. Gen. Psychol. 9, 103–110. doi: 10.1037/1089-2680.9.2.103

Gander, F., Hofmann, J., and Ruch, W. (2019). From unemployment to employment and back: professional trajectories and well-being. Appl. Res. Qual. Life 1–13. doi: 10.1007/s11482-019-09797-y

Gander, F., Proyer, R. T., and Ruch, W. (2016). Positive psychology interventions addressing pleasure, engagement, meaning, positive relationships, and accomplishment increase well-being and ameliorate depressive symptoms: a randomized, placebo-controlled online study. Front. Psychol. 7:686. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00686

Gander, F., Proyer, R. T., and Ruch, W. (2017). The subjective assessment of accomplishment and positive relationships: initial validation and correlative and experimental evidence for their association with well-being. J. Happ. Stud. 18, 743–764. doi: 10.1007/s10902-016-9751-z

Gander, F., Proyer, R. T., and Ruch, W. (2018). A placebo-controlled online study on potential mediators of a pleasure-based positive psychology intervention: the role of emotional and cognitive components. J. Happ. Stud. 19, 2035–2048. doi: 10.1007/s10902-017-9909-3

Giannopoulos, V. L., and Vella-Brodrick, D. A. (2011). Effects of positive interventions and orientations to happiness on subjective well-being. J. Posit. Psychol. 6, 95–105. doi: 10.1080/17439760.2010.545428

Gosling, S. D., Vazire, S., Srivastava, S., and John, O. P. (2004). Should we trust web-based studies? A comparative analysis of six preconceptions about internet questionnaires. Am. Psychol. 59, 93–104. doi: 10.1037/0003-066x.59.2.93

Grimm, C., Kemp, S., and Jose, P. E. (2014). Orientations ot thappiness and the experience of everyday activities. J. Posit. Psychol. 10, 207–218. doi: 10.1080/17439760.2014.941382

Hackman, J. R., and Oldham, G. R. (1975). Development of the job diagnostic survey. J. Appl. Psychol. 60:159. doi: 10.1037/h0076546

Harzer, C., and Ruch, W. (2012). When the job is a calling: the role of applying one’s signature strengths at work. J. Posit. Psychol. 7, 362–371. doi: 10.1080/17439760.2012.702784

Harzer, C., and Ruch, W. (2013). The application of signature character strengths and positive experiences at work. J. Happ. Stud. 14, 965–983. doi: 10.1007/s10902-012-9364-0

Harzer, C., and Ruch, W. (2015). The relationships of character strengths with coping, work-related stress, and job satisfaction. Front. Psychol. 6:165. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00165

Hayes, A. F. (2013). Introduction to Mediation, Moderation, and Conditional Process Analysis: A Regression-Based Approach. New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Hofmann, J., Gander, F., and Ruch, W. (2018). Exploring differences in well-being across occupation type and skill. Transl. Issues Psychol. Sci. 4:290. doi: 10.1037/tps0000167

Isen, A. M., and Levin, P. F. (1972). Effect of feeling good on helping: cookies and kindness. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 21, 384–388. doi: 10.1037/h0032317

Jacoby, J., and Sassenberg, K. (2011). Interactions do not only tell us when, but can also tell us how: testing process hypotheses by interaction. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 41, 180–190. doi: 10.1002/ejsp.762

Johnston, C. S., Luciano, E. C., Maggiori, C., Ruch, W., and Rossier, J. (2013). Validation of the german version of the career adapt-abilities scale and its relation to orientations to happiness and work stress. J. Vocat. Behav. 83, 295–304. doi: 10.1016/j.jvb.2013.06.002

Judge, T. A., Thoresen, C. J., Bono, J. E., and Patton, G. K. (2001). The job satisfaction–job performance relationship: a qualitative and quantitative review. Psychol. Bull. 127, 376–407. doi: 10.1037//0033-2909.127.3.376

Lazarus, R. S., and Folkman, S. (1984a). “Coping and adaptation,” in The Handbook of Behavioral Medicine , Vol. 282325, ed. W. D. Gentry (New York, NY: Guilford Press), 282–325.

Lazarus, R. S., and Folkman, S. (1984b). Stress, Appraisal and Coping. New York, NY: Springer.

Leising, D., Erbs, J., and Fritz, U. (2010). The letter of recommendation effect in informant ratings of personality. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 98, 668–682. doi: 10.1037/a0018771

Luthans, F., and Youssef, C. M. (2007). Emerging positive organizational behavior. J. Manag. 33, 321–349. doi: 10.1177/0149206307300814

Martínez-Martí, M. L., and Ruch, W. (2017). The relationship between orientations to happiness and job satisfaction one year later in a representative sample of employees in switzerland. J. Happ. Stud. 18, 1–15. doi: 10.1007/s10902-016-9714-4

Meyers, M. C., van Woerkom, M., and Bakker, A. B. (2013). The added value of the positive: a literature review of positive psychology interventions in organizations. Eur. J. Work Organ. Psychol. 22, 618–632. doi: 10.1080/1359432x.2012.694689

Pang, D., and Ruch, W. (2019). Fusing character strengths and mindfulness interventions: benefits for job satisfaction and performance. J. Occup. Health Psychol. 24, 150–162. doi: 10.1037/ocp0000144

Park, N., Peterson, C., and Ruch, W. (2009). Orientations to happiness and life satisfaction in twenty-seven nations. J. Posit. Psychol. 4, 273–279. doi: 10.1080/17439760902933690

Peterson, C., Park, N., and Seligman, M. E. (2005). Orientations to happiness and life satisfaction: the full life versus the empty life. J. Happ. Stud. 6, 25–41. doi: 10.1007/s10902-004-1278-z

Peterson, C., Ruch, W., Beermann, U., Park, N., and Seligman, M. E. (2007). Strengths of character, orientations to happiness, and life satisfaction. J. Posit. Psychol. 2, 149–156. doi: 10.1080/17439760701228938

Peterson, C., and Seligman, M. E. (2004). Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification , Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Podsakoff, P. M., MacKenzie, S. B., and Podsakoff, N. P. (2012). Sources of method bias in social science research and recommendations on how to control it. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 63, 539–569. doi: 10.1146/annurev-psych-120710-100452

Proyer, R. T. (2014). Playfulness over the lifespan and its relation to happiness results from an online survey. Zeitschrift für Gerontologie und Geriatrie 47, 508–512. doi: 10.1007/s00391-013-0539-z

Proyer, R. T. (2017). A new structural model for the study of adult playfulness: assessment and exploration of an understudied individual differences variable. Pers. Indiv. Differ. 108, 113–122. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2016.12.011

Proyer, R. T., Annen, H., Eggimann, N., Schneider, A., and Ruch, W. (2012). Assessing the “good life” in a military context: how does life and work-satisfaction relate to orientations to happiness and career-success among Swiss professional officers? Soc. Indic. Res. 106, 577–590. doi: 10.1007/s11205-011-9823-8

Proyer, R. T., Gander, F., Wellenzohn, S., and Ruch, W. (2016). Addressing the role of personality, ability, and positive and negative affect in positive psychology interventions: findings from a randomized intervention based on the authentic happiness theory and extensions. J. Posit. Psychol. 11, 609–621. doi: 10.1080/17439760.2015.1137622

Rammsayer, T., Stahl, J., and Schmiga, K. (2006). Grundlegende persönlichkeitsmerkmale und individuelle stressverarbeitungsstrategien als determinanten der mobbing-betroffenheit. Zeitschrift für Personalpsychologie 5, 41–52. doi: 10.1026/1617-6391.5.2.41

Rothmann, S. (2008). Job satisfaction, occupational stress, burnout and work engagement as components of work-related wellbeing. SA J. Indus. Psychol. 34, 11–16. doi: 10.4102/sajip.v34i3.424

Ruch, W., Harzer, C., Proyer, R. T., Park, N., and Peterson, C. (2010). Ways to happiness in German-speaking countries. Eur. J. Psychol. Assess. 26, 227–234. doi: 10.1027/1015-5759/a000030

Ruch, W., Martínez-Martí, M. L., Heintz, S., and Brouwers, S. A. (2014). Short form of the orientations to happiness questionnaire for the German-speaking countries: development and analysis of the psychometric properties. Swiss J. Psychol. 73, 225–234. doi: 10.1024/1421-0185/a000xxx

Savickas, M. L. (2005). “The theory and practice of career construction,” in Career Development and Counseling: Putting Theory and Research to Work , eds S. D. Brown and R. W. Lent (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons Inc), 42–70.

Scharp, Y. S., Breevaart, K., Bakker, A. B., and van der Linden, D. (2019). Daily playful work design: a trait activation perspective. J. Res. Pers. 82:103850. doi: 10.1016/j.jrp.2019.103850

Schönbrodt, F. D., and Perugini, M. (2013). At what sample size do correlations stabilize? J. Res. Pers. 47, 609–612. doi: 10.1016/j.jrp.2013.05.009

Seligman, M. E. (2002). Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.

Seligman, M. E., and Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2000). Positive psychology: an introduction. Am. Psychol. 55, 5–14. doi: 10.1037//0003-066x.55.1.5

Seligman, M. E. P. (2011). Flourish. New York, NY: Simon &Schuster.

Seligman, M. E. P., Steen, T. A., Park, N., and Peterson, C. (2005). Positive psychology progress: empirical validation of interventions. Am. Psychol. 60, 410–421. doi: 10.1037/0003-066X.60.5.410

Sin, N. L., and Lyubomirsky, S. (2009). Enhancing well-being and alleviating depressive symptoms with positive psychology interventions: a practice-friendly meta-analysis. J. Clin. Psychol. 65, 467–487. doi: 10.1002/jclp.20593

Spencer, S. J., Zanna, M. P., and Fong, G. T. (2005). Establishing a causal chain: why experiments are often more effective than mediational analyses in examining psychological processes. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 89, 845–851. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.89.6.845

Suzuki, Y., Tamesue, D., Asahi, K., and Ishikawa, Y. (2015). Grit and work engagement: a cross-sectional study. PLoS One 10:e0137501. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0137501

Swart, J., and Rothmann, S. (2012). Authentic happiness of managers, and individual and organisational outcomes. South Afr. J. Psychol. 42, 492–508. doi: 10.1177/008124631204200404

Tansey, T. N., Smedema, S., Umucu, E., Iwanaga, K., Wu, J. R., Cardoso, E. D. S., et al. (2017). Assessing college life adjustment of students with disabilities: application of the PERMA framework. Rehabil. Counsel. Bull. 61, 131–142. doi: 10.1177/0034355217702136

van Dick, R., Schnitger, C., Schwartzmann-Buchelt, C., and Wagner, U. (2001). Der job diagnostic survey im bildungsbereich. Zeitschrift für Arbeits-und Organisationspsychol. 45, 74–92. doi: 10.1026//0932-4089.45.2.74

Vazire, S. (2010). Who knows what about a person? The self–other knowledge asymmetry (SOKA) model. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 98, 281–300. doi: 10.1037/a0017908

Vazsonyi, A. T., Ksinan, A. J., Jiskrova, G. K., Mikuška, J., Javakhishvili, M., and Cui, G. (2019). To grit or not to grit, that is the question! J. Res. Pers. 78, 215–226. doi: 10.1016/j.jrp.2018.12.006

Wagner, L., Gander, F., Proyer, R. T., and Ruch, W. (2020). Character strengths and PERMA: investigating the relationships of character strengths with a multidimensional framework of well-being. Appl. Res. Qual. Life 15, 307–328. doi: 10.1007/s11482-018-9695-z

Wammerl, M., Jaunig, J., Mairunteregger, T., and Streit, P. (2019). The German version of the PERMA-Profiler: evidence for construct and convergent validity of the PERMA theory of well-being in German speaking countries. J. Well-Being Assess. 3, 75–96. doi: 10.1007/s41543-019-00021-0

Watanabe, K., Kawakami, N., Shiotani, T., Adachi, H., Matsumoto, K., Imamura, K., et al. (2018). The Japanese Workplace PERMA-Profiler: a validation study among Japanese workers. J. Occup. Health 60, 383–393. doi: 10.1539/joh.2018-0050-OA

Watson, J. (1895). Hedonistic Theories From Aristippus to Spencer. New York, NY: Macmillan.

Wegge, J., Schmidt, K. H., Parkes, C., and Van Dick, R. (2007). Taking a sickie: job satisfaction and job involvement as interactive predictors of absenteeism in a public organization. J. Occup. Organ. Psychol. 80, 77–89. doi: 10.1348/096317906x99371

Ybema, J. F., Smulders, P. G., and Bongers, P. M. (2010). Antecedents and consequences of employee absenteeism: a longitudinal perspective on the role of job satisfaction and burnout. Eur. J. Work Organ. Psychol. 19, 102–124. doi: 10.1080/13594320902793691

Zelenski, J. M., Murphy, S. A., and Jenkins, D. A. (2008). The happy-productive worker thesis revisited. J. Happ. Stud. 9, 521–537. doi: 10.1007/s10902-008-9087-4

Keywords : coping, orientations to happiness, positive psychology, work satisfaction, work stress

Citation: Tandler N, Krauss A and Proyer RT (2020) Authentic Happiness at Work: Self- and Peer-Rated Orientations to Happiness, Work Satisfaction, and Stress Coping. Front. Psychol. 11:1931. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01931

Received: 08 January 2020; Accepted: 13 July 2020; Published: 07 August 2020.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2020 Tandler, Krauss and Proyer. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Nancy Tandler, [email protected]

† These authors have contributed equally to this work

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• Int J Environ Res Public Health

Happy-Productive Teams and Work Units: A Systematic Review of the ‘Happy-Productive Worker Thesis’

M. esther garcía-buades.

1 Department of Psychology, University of the Balearic Islands, 07122 Palma de Mallorca, Spain; [email protected] (M.I.M.-J.); [email protected] (S.O.-B.)

José M. Peiró

2 IDOCAL (Institut d’Investigació en Psicologia del RRHH, del Desenvolupament Organitzacional i de la Qualitat de Vida Laboral), University of Valencia, 46010 Valencia, Spain

3 IVIE (Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas), 46020 Valencia, Spain

María Isabel Montañez-Juan

Malgorzata w. kozusznik.

4 Work, Organizational and Personnel Psychology Research Group (WOPP), KU Leuven, 3000 Leuven, Belgium; [email protected]

Silvia Ortiz-Bonnín

Associated data.

The happy-productive worker thesis (HPWT) assumes that happy employees perform better. Given the relevance of teams and work-units in organizations, our aim is to analyze the state of the art on happy-productive work-units (HPWU) through a systematic review and integrate existing research on different collective well-being constructs and collective performance. Research on HPWU (30 studies, 2001–2018) has developed through different constructs of well-being (hedonic: team satisfaction, group affect; and eudaimonic: team engagement) and diverse operationalizations of performance (self-rated team performance, leader-rated team performance, customers’ satisfaction, and objective indicators), thus creating a disintegrated body of knowledge about HPWU. The theoretical frameworks to explain the HPWU relationship are attitude–behavior models, broaden-and-build theory, and the job-demands-resources model. Research models include a variety of antecedents, mediators, and moderating third variables. Most studies are cross-sectional, all propose a causal happy–productive relationship (not the reverse), and generally find positive significant relationships. Scarce but interesting time-lagged evidence supports a causal chain in which collective well-being leads to team performance (organizational citizenship behavior or team creativity), which then leads to objective work-unit performance. To conclude, we identify common issues and challenges across the studies on HPWU, and set out an agenda for future research.

1. Introduction

The happy-productive worker thesis (HPWT) has a long tradition in work and organizational psychology since the human relations movement (Hawthorne studies in the 1930s). This movement showed the importance of groups in affecting the behavior of individuals at work and strongly contributed to the generalized belief that a happy worker is more productive. Years later, an influential review expanded the widespread belief that the relationship between satisfaction and job performance was just an ‘illusory correlation’ (r = 0.17) [ 1 ]. However, re-calculations of those results [ 2 ] and more recent meta-analyses highlighted the job attitudes–job performance relationship as a relevant topic worth further research and applied interest (r = 0.30) [ 3 , 4 ]. More recently, research on the relationship between well-being and performance has expanded to other constructs such as affect [ 5 ] and engagement [ 6 , 7 ]. Some scholars view the happy–performance relationship as weak, spurious, or questionable [ 2 , 8 ], and many consider well-being and performance as unrelated variables [ 2 , 9 ]. On the other hand, different meta-analyses have demonstrated a positive significant relationship between individual well-being and task performance [ 4 , 7 ].

Most research on HPWT has taken place at the individual level. However, the changes and transformation in the world of work and organizations has led to a growing relevance of work teams and work-units in current organizations. More than half of all employees in the 28 member states of the European Union work in a team that has common tasks and can plan its work [ 10 ]. Despite the importance of teams in organizational life, studies on the HPWT at the team and work-unit level is still scant. Moreover, research on this issue has often relied on single constructs of collective well-being such as ‘group affect’ [ 11 ] or ‘work-unit satisfaction’ [ 12 ]. Over the last decades, several quantitative studies have investigated happy-productive teams. Yet, to date, there has been no systematic review bringing together and synthesizing existing research on this topic. To fill this research gap, our aim is to analyze the state of the art on happy–productive work-units (HPWU) through a systematic review and integrate existing research on different collective well-being constructs and collective performance. A systematic review would provide a comprehensive picture on the current knowledge on HPWU, a better understanding of the strengths, commonalities and differences across constructs, and provide implications for team management and future research.

To achieve our main objective, we undertake a systematic review of peer-reviewed research on HPWU from 2001 to 2018. Considering the limitations of HPWT research at the individual level [ 9 , 13 , 14 ], we explore research on eudaimonic constructs of well-being/happiness as well as hedonic constructs, and consider multiple aspects of collective performance and sources of evaluation. Furthermore, we review the literature on HPWU by placing the focus on answering three research questions: (1) Which are the main features of the conceptualization and measurement of collective well-being? (2) Which theoretical frameworks are used to explain the collective HPWU relationship and which third variables are included in HPWU research models? (3) What is the evidence for causal or reciprocal relationships between collective wellbeing and collective performance?

In this review, we first describe the conceptualization of the two key constructs in the HPWT (happiness and productivity). Second, we explain the methodological approach adopted for the systematic review. In the results section, we present a brief description of the studies identified, and then proceed to report the main findings structured around the research questions. Finally, we discuss the state of the art of research on HPWU, limitations, and challenges for future research.

1.1. Happiness and Well-Being at Work

Scholars have treated happiness as well-being and have studied it through different constructs that overlap with the broad concept of happiness (e.g., psychological well-being, subjective well-being, satisfaction with life). There are two main perspectives about happiness or well-being: hedonic and eudaimonic [ 15 ]. The “hedonic approach focuses on happiness and defines well-being in terms of pleasure attainment and pain avoidance; and the eudaimonic approach focuses on meaning and self-realization and defines well-being in terms of the degree to which a person is fully functioning” [ 16 ] (p. 141). Following Sonnentag [ 17 ], well-being refers to a person’s hedonic experience of feeling good and to the eudaimonic experience of fulfilment and purpose.

So far, research on the HPWT has focused mainly on hedonic constructs (i.e., job satisfaction, affect, and emotions). However, the last decades have seen a growth on research on individual-level eudaimonic constructs such as engagement or flow [ 6 ], thriving at work [ 18 , 19 , 20 ], flourishing at work [ 21 ], meaning at work [ 22 ], and purpose in life or personal growth [ 23 ]. In her review about happiness at work, Fisher [ 15 ] identified some research on collective job satisfaction, group task satisfaction, group affective tone, group mood, unit-level engagement. We present the hedonic and eudaimonic perspectives on individual and collective wellbeing at work identified by Fisher in Table 1 . In our review of HPWU, we aim to broaden the scope of research on collective well-being beyond a hedonic perspective by also exploring whether research on eudaimonic constructs has taken place at the team/work-unit level.

Hedonic and eudaimonic perspectives on individual and collective well-being at work

Recognizing the social dimension of work, well-being may be studied at the collective level as research on affective and emotional climates has shown [ 24 ]. Collective happiness or well-being refers to an emotional or affective climate that emerges in work-units and becomes a work context for employees affecting their work experience, behaviors, and performance [ 25 ]. Emotional or affective climates emerge in teams as a sharedness of affective reactions or emotional responses [ 25 ]. Teams develop shared climates through both top-down and bottom-up processes [ 26 ]. Top-down processes stem from team members sharing their work environment, team manager, most of their tasks, and from their exposure to similar job conditions. Shared affective climates also emerge from bottom up processes including social interactions and communication, emotional contagion, role modelling, and advice giving [ 26 ].

Measuring collective well-being presents important methodological issues. Most measures of collective well-being arise from evaluations provided by individuals (i.e., team members), which are statistically aggregated to the collective level. A majority of researchers interested in group or team processes have adopted either a direct consensus or a referent-shift consensus model to aggregate individual responses [ 27 , 28 ]. In the direct consensus model, team members evaluate their individual well-being with items using an ‘individual referent’ (e.g., “I am enthusiastic about my job”). Referent-shift models require individual team members to respond to survey items, which refer directly to the team (e.g., “My team is enthusiastic about the task”). Items worded with a ‘team referent’ shift the respondents’ attention to the team level. The second step in both direct consensus and referent-shift models is to average individual responses to obtain a group-level measure (e.g., group’s statistical mean) after assuming and testing for some minimal level of within-group interrater agreement (IRA) and interrater reliability (IRR) consensus [ 29 , 30 ].

1.2. Collective Performance

The approach taken to define and measure performance differs depending on the level at which performance is assessed (i.e., individual, team/work-unit, or organizational). At the team level, it is important to make a conceptual distinction between team performance and team effectiveness. Following Salas et al. [ 31 ]:

“Team performance accounts for the outcomes of the team’s actions regardless of how the team may have accomplished the task. Conversely, team effectiveness takes a more holistic perspective in considering not only whether the team performed (e.g., completed the team task) but also how the team interacted (i.e., team processes, teamwork) to achieve the team outcome. This is an important differentiation because many factors external to the team may contribute to the success (or failure) of the team, and therefore in some cases team performance measures may be deficient in understanding the team” (p. 557).

Although team effectiveness is the appropriate term, to keep in line with the expressions used in the HPWT literature we will also use the expressions ‘collective performance’ and ‘productive teams’ to refer to measures of both the team’s achievements and actions for the remainder of the article. Building on previous research, we contend that a comprehensive evaluation of a team’s effectiveness needs to include measures of different aspects of the team’s interaction (processes) and performance (outcomes) [ 31 ], as well as different facets of the work content (e.g., task, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), creativity) [ 9 ]; and multiple sources of evaluation (group members, supervisors, customers, and objective data) [ 32 ]. Figure 1 reflects these core aspects of work-unit effectiveness. Based on these aspects, we proceed to describe categories of collective performance commonly used in research [ 12 , 33 ]: team performance, customers’ evaluations, and work-unit objective/financial indicators.

Work-unit effectiveness: facets and sources of evaluation.

Team performance may refer to different aspects of the work content (e.g., task performance, contextual performance, and creativity performance) [ 9 ]; may refer to team members’ outcomes (i.e., do the team members achieve their objectives?) or processes (i.e., what do team members do when at work?); and may be provided by different agents, the team-members themselves (self-rated performance) or their supervisors. Typically, group/team members provide subjective ratings on their effectiveness based on their own perceptions (i.e., self-rated team performance). Team leaders (managers or supervisors) are also frequent evaluators of the team’s performance (i.e., leader-rated team performance). Managers’ evaluations of their work-unit’s performance are widespread and taken for valid as they are in the position to observe their team’s work and give a global evaluation of how much or how well the team works and accomplishes the set objectives. Managers typically provide a global measure about the work-unit. In our review, we call this measure of team’s effectiveness team performance and we will distinguish between self-rated team performance and leader-rated team performance, and whenever possible we will specify whether task performance, OCB, or creative performance are taken into account.

Customers’ evaluations constitute another relevant source to assess team’s effectiveness. It is externally rated, and it usually reflects a combined evaluation of both processes and outcomes (i.e., how fast a team responds to customers’ requests or to which extent the solution to a problem is satisfactory). Customers’ evaluations typically include facets such as service quality and customer satisfaction.

Another performance category includes work-unit objective/financial indicators. In this case, team productivity refers to a combination of efficiency and effectiveness and encompasses a number of results-oriented outcomes such as profit, return-on-investment, and sales [ 12 ]. These objective assessments of performance are usually recorded for groups rather than for individuals [ 14 ] and therefore refer to the work-unit as a whole.

The association between well-being and performance may vary with the type of performance considered [ 34 ]. The diversity in operationalizations of team performance provides a rich combination of criteria, thus increasing the interest in the evaluation of how collective well-being relates to different collective performance criteria. Overall, a more comprehensive consideration of collective well-being and collective performance allows for a richer picture of HPWU relationships. Therefore, in our systematic review, we aim to explore HPWU research considering both hedonic and eudaimonic constructs of well-being, and performance indicators based on multiple aspects of collective performance and multiple sources of evaluation.

2. Materials and Method: Study Search and Collection

To address our research questions, we conducted a systematic literature review searching the PsycINFO and PsycARTICLES databases for empirical studies in peer-reviewed journal articles that addressed the HPWT in groups/teams/work-units between 2001 and 2018 published in English or Spanish. This search took place in June 2019. For a comprehensive inclusion of all potential terms referring to happy teams and productive teams, we used the following keywords (and combinations thereof): happy (well-being, satisfaction, affect, emotions, mood, engagement, flourishing, flow, purpose, meaning, hedonic, eudaimonic, morale); productive (performance, productivity, efficiency, effectiveness, customer satisfaction, OCB, innovation, creativity); and team (work-unit, work group).

We included all studies about groups, teams, work-units, and branches because all represent the same meso-level of analysis as opposed to individual and organizational levels. We broadly define team or work-unit as a group of three or more employees who meet on a regular basis, are jointly responsible for one or more tasks, and are nested in a larger social system (e.g., organization) [ 35 ]. In this vein, we use the terms group and team interchangeably as is common in organizational psychology literature [ 32 ]. Although we recognize that some differences may exist, we focus on their communalities [ 33 ]. This exploratory systematic search yielded 356 abstracts. A first screening of all abstracts showed research to concentrate on three collective well-being constructs: satisfaction, group affect (emotions and mood), and engagement. We did not find studies analyzing eudaimonic constructs at the team level (e.g., meaning of work or flourishing). Consequently, we conducted three specific searches on satisfaction, group affect, and engagement, which we complemented with cross-references found in different meta-analyses and through a snowball system. The entire search phrases are presented in Supplementary Materials .

In each case, two independent evaluators analyzed all abstracts to check if they met two inclusion criteria: (1) the study reported collective level measurements of well-being and performance; (2) it presented empirical research undertaken with work samples (e.g. we excluded students and athletes). Agreement between evaluators reached 96%. After solving discrepancies, evaluators selected 87 abstracts.

In the next stage, we proceeded with full-text analysis. We searched and found 87 manuscripts. We discarded the studies that while studying team phenomena, analyzed the data at the individual or organizational level, or did not report correlations between well-being and performance. We also discarded nine studies on collective satisfaction and one on group affect, which did not propose a happy-productive or the reversed productive-happy research model. These 10 studies presented models akin to input-processes-outcomes models of team effectiveness and considered both collective well-being and collective performance as dependent variables.

The final sample of empirical studies with this systematic literature review yielded 30 studies relating happy work-units and performance strictly at the collective level of analysis. A PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses) flowchart ( Figure 2 ) summarizes the process of search, analysis, and selection of research papers.

Process of analysis and selection of research papers on happy–productive teams and work-units. Notes. SAT = satisfaction; AFF = group affect; ENG = engagement; *Exclusion criteria: sample (no work sample), quality of the study (meta-analyses, review), analyses (individual data analyses, no correlation data), measures (no satisfaction measures, no performance measures), and happy–productive relationship (happy and productive as dependent variables).

Data Analysis

First, we read the 30 manuscripts and extracted relevant information which we report in the Appendix A ( Table A1 for satisfaction, Table A2 for group affect, and Table A3 for team engagement) about their study goal, theoretical background, direction proposed between happiness and productivity (HP: happy–productive; PH: productive–happy), definition and operationalization of collective well-being and performance, study design (cross-sectional or time-lagged), reported correlations, and sample. Next, we proceeded to analyze the manuscripts in order to answer our main research questions and summarize the findings in the results sections.

3.1. Description of the Studies

3.1.1. collective satisfaction.

We identified seven empirical studies relating collective satisfaction and collective performance in work-units or teams. Samples were drawn from different sectors (sales, manufacturing, social care, local governments, health care, banks), and countries (USA, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Taiwan, China, and Australia) with representations from four continents. Samples sizes ranged from 28 to 171 work-units. Most studies used a cross-sectional design, with three using time-lagged performance indicators [ 33 , 36 , 37 ].

3.1.2. Group Affect

We identified 14 empirical studies relating group affect and collective performance in work-units or teams. Samples were drawn from sectors such as electronic industry, service organizations, sales, banks, orchestras, etc., and different countries (Germany, Spain, Brazil, Taiwan, South Korea) with representations from three continents. Samples sizes ranged from 22 to 417 work-units. Most studies used a cross-sectional design, with two using time-lagged performance indicators [ 38 , 39 ].

3.1.3. Team Engagement

We identified nine empirical studies relating team engagement and collective performance. Empirical research exploring the collective engagement-performance relationship varies considerably in terms of sample size (54 to 242 teams), types of company/sector (health services, hospitality, call centres, research teams, and teachers). All studies have taken place in European countries (Spain, Finland, UK, and The Netherlands) and one in Vietnam. All studies used a cross-sectional design.

3.2. Main Findings

3.2.1. research question 1. which are the main features of the conceptualization and operationalization of collective well-being.

In this section, we review the main features of the conceptualization and operationalization of collective well-being. We review the definitions, instruments, informants and referents used within the literature identified in the systematic review.

Definition of Collective Satisfaction. An important theoretical contribution in defining satisfaction at the unit-level as a different phenomenon to individual job satisfaction is the work by Whitman et al. [ 12 ] (p. 46). They defined “unit-level job satisfaction” as “a work unit’s shared internal state that is expressed by affectively and cognitively evaluating shared job experiences with some degree of favour or disfavour”. They stressed the relevance of sharedness as a critical precondition to forming collective job satisfaction. The antecedents to this sharedness are both situational (e.g., similar work environments and conditions) and dispositional (i.e., processes of attraction–selection–attrition). These antecedents lead to a common interpretation, understanding, and attitudinal evaluation of the job experience [ 12 ].

Within the reviewed literature, four studies omit a definition of collective satisfaction and three studies adopt the ”group task satisfaction” definition, which refers to “the group’s shared attitude toward its tasks and work environment” [ 12 ] (p. 1). Mason & Griffin [ 35 ] differentiate ”group task satisfaction” from ”individual job satisfaction” in that group-level attitudes will focus on the task for which the whole group is responsible and common aspects of the work environment rather than developing a shared attitude toward any one individual’s job.

Operationalization of Collective Satisfaction. Operationalizations of collective satisfaction appear in diverse formats across studies: global vs. facets satisfaction, individual vs. team referents, and different instruments.

Global vs. Facets Satisfaction. Six studies reported global measures of job satisfaction, in which a few items capture an overall feeling about satisfaction with the team or work-unit (e.g., ”we are satisfied with each other’s contribution to our team”). Global satisfaction refers to a general attitude towards the team, and is distinct from satisfaction with facets or various features of the job. One study reported measures of satisfaction with facets such as tasks, rewards, supervision [ 35 ]. Both global and facets satisfaction scales are valid measures and preference for either one of them depends on the diagnostic vs. general purpose of the evaluation [ 40 , 41 ].

Informants and Referents. Team or work-unit members were the informants of job satisfaction in all studies and their responses were aggregated at the unit level. Six studies reported the use of individual referents (i.e., I am satisfied with…), and Mason & Griffin [ 35 ] used both individual and team referents (i.e., My team is satisfied with…) to measure aggregated “individual task satisfaction” and “group task performance” respectively. Regarding the debate about using individual or group referenced measures, Mason & Griffin [ 35 ] advocate the use of group referenced measures in preference to the individual referenced measures. In their empirical study, the group referenced ”group task satisfaction” measure explained variance in sportsmanship behavior and group absenteeism norms beyond aggregated “group members’ individual job satisfaction ratings”. Whitman et al. [ 12 ] in their meta-analysis compared the use of organization vs. job referent, finding unit-level organizational satisfaction more strongly related to unit-level performance (rho = 0.39) than unit-level job satisfaction (rho = 0.33). These results, although restricted to a limited amount of studies, suggest that the referent used does affect the satisfaction–performance relationship and the authors advocate the use of collective referents.

Collective Satisfaction Measures. We found two validated instruments of satisfaction used at the collective level to grasp the extent to which members are satisfied with their teamwork. The “group task satisfaction scale” [ 35 ] consists of 10 items to tap into three dimensions: satisfaction with the task itself (e.g., work stimulating, fulfilling), satisfaction with the group’s internal work environment (e.g., the way they work together, conflict among team members), and satisfaction with the group’s external work environment (e.g., senior managers, support, resources, policies, rewards). This scale uses a group referent, i.e., “our team finds its work stimulating”. Furthermore, one study reported using the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire [ 42 ] (20 items) to measure “aggregate individual job satisfactions” [ 35 ], and each one of the remaining studies used a different scale to the rest (two used 2-item scales, two used 3-item scales, one a 4-item scale, and one a 10-item scale).

Summary Collective Satisfaction. Group or team satisfaction has been defined as “a shared positive attitude towards a work-related object (i.e., the job, the team’s task, and the team’s environment)”. However, many studies have used individual referents and relied on a measure of “aggregated individual job satisfactions”. As an attitude, definitions incorporate both cognitive and affective evaluations of shared job experiences, but the evaluations of work-unit satisfaction are predominantly cognitive and stable [ 43 ] and “the affective property of job attitudes lay relatively inert” [ 43 ] (p. 362).

Overall, the lack of homogeneity in the use of instruments, number and content of items, and scale origin is remarkable. The widespread heterogeneity in operationalizations of team satisfaction is likely to affect the comparability of studies and results. We believe using validated team satisfaction scales (e.g., “group task satisfaction”), and combining global and team-facets satisfaction measures would strongly contribute to a more appropriate operationalization and understanding of team satisfaction and of its connection with team performance.

Definition of Group Affect. Group affect refers to the homogeneous affective states within the group [ 44 ] (p. 781). More specifically, it relates to the mood states team members experience or feel while on the job or in team meetings [ 45 ]. Research on group affect involves the study of affect, moods, and emotions at a collective level [ 5 ]. Most authors provide definitions of group positive affect with two components: “shared or homogeneous or consistent” and “affective states, feelings, affective reactions, emotions or moods”. They use the terms within each component as almost synonymous in their definitions of group affect, notwithstanding recognition of some differences among concepts (for instance, between emotions and moods) [ 46 ]. All these terms refer to how people feel, whether positive or negative (i.e., valence), and more or less activated (i.e., activation) [ 46 ].

Group affect, as a collectively shared pattern of affective states among group members, is a meaningful construct at the team level of analysis and an important factor that shapes group processes and outcomes [ 5 ]. Following Barsade & Gibson [ 47 ], group affect can be characterized through two approaches. A top-down approach in which group affect as a whole acts upon the emotions of the individuals within it, and a bottom-up approach in which group affect emerges as the result of the aggregate of individual group members’ affective states and traits. The group affect literature reviewed emphasizes the bottom-up approach and emotional contagion as the main mechanism explaining the emergence of group affect as a group level phenomenon. This view is complemented with the top-down influence of transformational leadership, which appears as a relevant antecedent of group affect within this literature.

Operationalization of Group Affect. Seven studies used validated measures of positive group affect, namely six studies used PANAS (Positive and Negative Affective Scale) [ 48 ], and one used the Affective Well-being Scale [ 49 ]. The rest used a variety of scales ranging from 3–10 moods or emotions. PANAS has been criticized for its focus on high activation moods, and some researchers advocate complementing it with low activation moods [ 46 ].

The periods and statements accompanying the items are also diverse. One study measured group mood felt “at the very particular moment”, four studies have referred to “the past week”, one “in the last weeks”, one “in the past two weeks”, one “in the past six months”, two “in the past year”, two “in general”, and two do not specify time frames. There is a debate about the advantages and disadvantages of different time frames to measure group affect. Although “current mood states may be more accurately and reliably reported than recalled moods” [ 46 ] (p. 345), other authors suggest that group mood or emotion is a group’s temporally stable, basic temperament, with an overall positive or negative cast [ 50 ].

Additionally, operationalizations refer to how the team members have felt at work/job/at the store (five studies), at team meetings (three studies), or do not refer a particular situation (six studies). Regarding informants, team-members reported their positive affect in 13 studies, and only Rego et al. [ 38 ] had the store manager as an informant of team-members’ positive affect. They argue that “the store supervisor is, to a certain degree, an observer of the stores’ affective tone and behaves toward the store according to this perception/observation” (p. 69).

Summary Group Affect. Group positive affect refers to how the team members have felt for a certain period of time (i.e., past week, or during a team meeting). Similar to collective satisfaction, group affect focuses on the affective component of working in a team or work-unit. As opposed to team satisfaction (with affective-cognitive components), there only appears an affective component, and there is no reference to specific aspects of the job/work, just affect (e.g., such as pleasure) while working or at work or at team meetings.

Definition of Team Work Engagement. The concept of personal engagement was introduced by Kahn [ 51 ] as “the behaviors by which people … employ and express themselves physically, cognitively, and emotionally during role performances” (p. 694). Macey & Schneider [ 52 ] built on Kahn’s view to develop a theoretical framework that describes how some distal antecedents (i.e., job characteristics or leadership) influence engagement levels, which in turn affect performance outcomes. Furthermore, Schneider et al. [ 53 ] defined engagement as having two major components: the feelings of engagement or the heightened state of energy and enthusiasm associated with work and the organization, and engagement behaviors such as persistence of tasks, being proactive and taking on responsibilities when the need arises, all in the service of accomplishing organizational goals. This conceptualization of engagement has been applied to the organizational level [ 53 , 54 ] but to our knowledge not to the team level.

A second conceptualization with a business engagement perspective refers to engagement as “the individual’s involvement and satisfaction with as well as enthusiasm for work” (The Gallup Organization). This definition has been criticized for evaluating satisfaction together with, or instead of, engagement [ 52 ]; and the associated instrument (Gallup Q12, or Gallup Workplace Audit) for lacking face or construct validity [ 6 , 12 ]. Still, a meta-analysis with Q12 found a true score correlation of r = 0.42 between collective “satisfaction-engagement” and composite business-unit performance outcomes (e.g., customer satisfaction, productivity, profit, employee turnover, and accidents) in American for-profit companies [ 55 ]. A third stream of engagement research developed in Europe has become dominant [ 6 ] to a great extent due to the development of the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES) [ 56 ]. Within this perspective, engagement has been examined as a team-level construct [ 57 ].

Team engagement refers to “a positive, fulfilling, work-related and shared psychological state characterized by team work vigor, dedication and absorption which emerges from the interaction and shared experiences of the members of a work team” [ 58 ] (p. 107). Thus, engaged team members have high levels of energy and work hard (vigor), are enthusiastic about their work (dedicated), and are often fully immersed (absorbed) in their job so that time flies [ 59 ]. Emergence of team work engagement is attributed to the interaction and shared experiences of team members through two types of processes: implicit (i.e., emotional contagion) and explicit (i.e., team members sharing workplace experiences) [ 60 ]. A second definition of team engagement refers to it as “a shared, positive and fulfilling, motivational emergent state of work-related well-being” [ 61 ] (p. 35). Although Costa et al. [ 61 ] referred to engagement as a motivational state in their definition, they also contend that “Team work engagement seems to be a promising construct for future research on the affective and motivational emergent states of work teams” (p. 43).

Sonnentag [ 17 ] attempts to clarify conceptual boundaries and reflects on whether work engagement is a motivation or a well-being construct; she concludes that “work engagement and thriving as positive well-being concepts seem to be closely related to motivational and behavioral processes. Conceptually, however, they emphasize the experience of energy, dedication, absorption, and growth—as opposed to actual behaviors” (p. 264).

Operationalization of Team Work Engagement . We identified two measures of team work engagement: UWES and Team Work Engagement construct. In all cases, team members were the informants about the team’s work engagement and their responses were aggregated at the team level. Seven studies measured team engagement through different versions of the UWES scale: one used the 18-item version, one used the 17-item version, four used the 9-item version, and two used the 3-item version. Five studies used a team referent (i.e., “My team…”), three used an individual referent (i.e., “I am enthusiastic about my job”), and one study used both individual and team referents [ 62 ]. A second instrument, the team work engagement construct [ 61 ], has been validated to measure team work engagement and differentiate it from individual work engagement. It consists of nine items, measuring it as a team property with a team referent (i.e., “we are proud of the work we do”). Results show the nine items to converge in a single-factor structure. Two studies from our literature search used this instrument (4 and 9 items).

Summary Team Work Engagement. Although different conceptualizations of engagement exist, when it comes to research of collective work engagement at the team level within our literature review, all authors have defined it following the Utrecht perspective: “a positive, fulfilling, work-related and shared psychological state characterized by team work vigor, dedication and absorption which emerges from the interaction and shared experiences of the members of a work team” [ 63 ]. Some authors have distinguished work engagement from job satisfaction in aspects such as level of activation (engagement high activation vs. satisfaction low activation), and work engagement from motivation [ 17 ]. Team work engagement is more related to an eudaimonic perspective of well-being, i.e., closer to feeling authentic and meaningful in one’s life [ 17 ], than a hedonic perspective emphasizing pleasure and absence of pain. Feeling engaged may be accompanied by positive and/or negative emotions. Thus, the main emotion in engagement is not pleasure like in hedonic constructs, but interest in order to pursue gratification [ 64 ]. Thus, engagement would explain team efforts in unpleasant conditions such as when team members ignore physical or mental exhaustion and continue working to achieve their objective.

Unfortunately, operationalizations of collective engagement following the North American perspective based on the work by Kahn, and Macey and Schneider [ 52 ] have been applied to the organizational level [ 54 , 65 ] and to our knowledge not to the team level. All studies within our systematic review have followed the European perspective on work engagement and used the two validated measures of the construct at the team level: UWES and Team Work Engagement scale. These scales offer the benefits of consisting of a manageable amount of items, using team referents, offering adequate psychometric properties, and allowing for comparability among studies.

3.2.2. Research Question 2: Which Theoretical Frameworks Are Used to Explain the Collective Happy-Productive Work-Unit Thesis? Which Third Variables Affect the Relationship between Well-Being and Performance in the Empirical Research Models (Mediators, Moderators, Antecedents)?

In this section, we describe the main theoretical frameworks underpinning the relationship between collective well-being and collective performance (see Table 2 ). We structure the findings around each of the collective well-being constructs. The relationship between collective well-being and performance is usually embedded in wider research models including third variables. Depending on the theoretical models and specific hypotheses, third variables may have a role as antecedents of the main variables, mediators between well-being and performance, or moderators that explain when or how the main HP relationship is stronger or weaker. Thus, we also describe third variables found in the research models.

Theoretical frameworks linking collective well-being and collective performance.

The Collective Satisfaction Literature: Theoretical Frameworks. The seven studies identified in the systematic review considered collective satisfaction as an antecedent of collective performance. The main theoretical framework supporting the research models is the HPWT applied to the team level. In the early 1990s, Ostroff [ 66 ] applied the happy–productive thesis to the collective (organizational) level. She argued that satisfaction and the happiness of personnel would heighten organizational effectiveness through employees’ behaviors and responses at work. Building on the arguments from the sociotechnical and human relations schools, she proposed that positive attitudes trigger productivity-related behaviors, which in turn lead to organizational effectiveness. These productivity-related behaviors relevant to organizational effectiveness encompass attachment behaviors (i.e., attending to and staying in the organization), performance behaviors (i.e., job-related tasks) and citizenship behaviors (cooperation and collaborative efforts) [ 67 ]. A central mechanism is collaborative effort, in her words “satisfied employees will be more likely to engage in collaborative effort and accept organizational goals that can increase productivity, whereas dissatisfied employees … may fail to work collaboratively (p. 964)”.

At the unit-level, Koys [ 33 ] proposed that “shared values or attitudes” are the key to the relationship between unit-level employee job satisfaction and organizational effectiveness. These shared attitudes lead to appropriate behaviors, which lead to organizational effectiveness. He also referred to collaboration as a key process between shared attitudes and productivity: “If a unit’s employees share positive attitudes, they should have norms of cooperation and collaboration, which in turn enhance unit productivity (p. 102)”. These first studies suggest the general idea that a shared attitude leads to collaborative behaviors among team members and subsequent improved work-unit performance. Following a similar reasoning, Whitman [ 12 ] proposed that OCB (e.g., a measure of team contextual performance) mediated the effects of work-unit satisfaction on performance (a composite of three criteria—productivity, withdrawal, and customer satisfaction). Testing this mediation through meta-analytical correlations, they found a small but significant mediator effect of OCB between satisfaction and performance.

One study within the reviewed literature [ 36 ] found empirical support for a partial mediation of OCB between high performance work systems and departmental performance (e.g., overall departmental performance score based upon the percentage of success on each of the performance metrics tracked by the Welsh government) in a sample of 119 local government departments.

A related and complementary argument why happy work-units would be productive work-units refers to social exchange theory [ 68 ]. Thus, three studies propose that when (work-unit) employees are satisfied with their job or work-unit [ 33 , 69 ] or with high performance work systems provided by their companies [ 36 ], they would reciprocate with positive behaviors such as OCB to benefit the unit or organization. An additional theoretical background is applied to explaining the relationship between collective satisfaction and a specific type of performance (i.e., customer satisfaction). Three studies [ 33 , 37 , 70 ] refer to the service climate framework or the linkage research model [ 71 , 72 ] and the service-profit-chain model [ 73 ]. The service climate framework posits that a unit’s service climate (positive and strong-shared perception of service as a focus) leads to service behaviors, such as in-role behavior and customer-focused OCB as a mediator, which subsequently leads to positive customer experiences (quality, satisfaction, and loyalty). The service-profit-chain model posits that employees’ capability, satisfaction, and loyalty, would lead to satisfied and loyal customers, who tend to purchase more and increase organizational revenue and profits [ 33 ]. Two studies report positive and significant correlations between collective satisfaction and customer satisfaction [ 33 , 70 ].

Regarding empirical support, 15 out 22 correlations reported in cross-sectional studies proposing a happy–productive relationship are statistically significant and positive (range 0.17 to 0.63); seven with team task performance (range 0.27 to 0.63), three with team contextual performance (range 0.36 to 0.61), two with customer satisfaction (range 0.49 to 0.57) and four with objective financial criteria (range 0.19 to 0.43). Non-significant results are obtained between collective satisfaction and one measure of supervisor-rated performance [ 35 ], one with customer satisfaction [ 33 ], and three measures of financial profit [ 33 , 37 ].

Collective Satisfaction: Third Variables Included in HP Research Models . Antecedents affecting work-unit satisfaction (and collective performance) are related to transformational leadership and leader empowering behaviors, team task characteristics, high-performance work systems, and work-unit climate. In one study, leaders’ positive moods led to both transformational leadership and positive group affective tone, which then led to team processes such as team satisfaction, and in turn enhanced team sales performance [ 45 ]. A second study in a restaurant chain found that leader empowering behaviors increased work-units’ employees psychological empowerment, which in turn enhanced work-unit employee satisfaction, which consequently improved customer satisfaction [ 70 ]. Team task characteristics (task autonomy and feedback) were relevant antecedents of team member satisfaction, which together with task meaningfulness enhanced team performance [ 69 ]. In another study, high-performance work systems (HPWS) was an antecedent of departmental job satisfaction, which subsequently improved department performance [ 36 ]. Finally, Van De Voorde et al. [ 37 ] found that two work-unit climates (service orientation and goals orientation) increased work satisfaction.

Furthermore, Whitman et al. [ 12 ] analyzed in their meta-analysis the moderating role of several variables that need to be taken into account to understand when and under which conditions collective satisfaction and collective performance are related. Results showed that the satisfaction-performance relationship was moderated by the strength of unit consensus (rho = 0.32 for high consensus vs. rho = 0.22 for low consensus), industry type (stronger in the education vs. business sector); stronger for government units vs. for-profit sector. They concluded that “the strength of the relationship - though always positive-depended a great deal on how criteria were conceptualized, aligned, and constructed” (p. 72). In a meta-analysis on situational strength as a moderator of the relationship between job satisfaction and job performance [ 3 ], satisfied employees were more likely to be productive employees in those situations in which employees have a fair amount of discretion in deciding how to perform their work. We did not find similar studies at the work-unit level, but a similar moderator effect of discretionary behavior may exist for groups and work-units.

In summary, the theoretical arguments within the collective satisfaction literature refer to the HPWT, the general attitude-behavior link, social exchange theory, and linkage research model or service-profit chain. Both theory and empirical evidence suggests that contextual performance (e.g., OCB) is a mediator between collective satisfaction and objective performance, i.e., attitudes lead to collaborative behaviors. The HPWU relationship seems stronger for higher degrees of sharedness of collective satisfaction [ 12 ]. Work-unit satisfaction may be increased by antecedents such as leadership behaviors, team task design, HPWS, and work-unit climate.

Group Affect Literature: Theoretical Frameworks. All fourteen studies on group affect consider group affect as the antecedent of performance. The dominant theoretical framework in the group affect–performance literature is the “broaden-and-build” theory [ 74 ], which has been applied both at the individual and team level. This model has been complemented with the mood-as-input theory [ 75 ], recently applied to the team level. The rationale behind the broaden-and-build theory is that in a isomorphic way as it happens at the individual level, “positive group emotions may broaden the group’s range of attention, cognition, and action and build social resources such as friendship among the members” [ 76 ] (p. 74). In addition, positive emotions build long-term physical resources (e.g., better health), intellectual resources (e.g., knowledge), social resources (e.g., help and cooperation), and psychological resources (e.g., resilience) among individuals and team-members.

Rhee [ 76 ] explored the role of group-member interactions as the underlying mechanism of the relationship between group emotions and group outcomes. She proposed three main interaction processes as mediators between positive group emotions and group outcomes: building on each other’s ideas, morale-building communication, and affirmation. Building on each other’s ideas among the group members (e.g., being attentive to others’ ideas and expanding the original idea to improve idea quality) is the manifestation of cognitive broadening and social spontaneity at the group level. On the other hand, morale-building (e.g., encouraging the group’s achievements and successful outcomes) and affirmation of each other’s ideas (e.g., accepting and supporting others’ opinions) manifest social spontaneity and building social resources. Rhee contends that these positive interaction processes have an effect on outcomes such as creativity, team-member learning, satisfaction with the group, and the quality of group decision making.

The literature reviewed on group affect has proposed and tested cognitive, motivational, attitudinal, and behavioral team processes as mediators between group affective tone and team performance. For example, transformational leadership and positive affective tone enhanced team performance (perceived and objective) through team goal commitment (i.e., motivated team members pursue team goals), team satisfaction (i.e., satisfied members in terms of their team tasks and environments), and team helping behavior (i.e., team members exhibit more helping behaviors) in a sample of 85 sales teams in Taiwan [ 45 ]. In another study, positive emotions were positively related to team resilience (i.e., the process to face off, persevere and respond positively in the face of adversity), and team resilience was positively related to team in-role (i.e., task) and extra-role performance as reported by the supervisor in a sample of 216 teams [ 77 ].

Seong & Choi [ 78 ] reported a significant role of group positive affect in predicting group performance through group-level fit (i.e., the presence of shared goals among members and the collective pursuit of congruent goals) and group conflict in a sample of 96 Korean teams in the defence industry. Another study found support for the mediating role of team reflexivity (i.e., the extent to which team members collectively reflect on and communicate about the team’s objectives, strategies, and processes) and team promotion focus (i.e., team level motivational state that regulates and coordinates the team’s efforts toward approaching positive outcomes) between group positive affect and team creativity [ 79 ]. Moreover, Kim & Shin [ 80 ] found that cooperative group norms and group positive affect were significant predictors of team creativity, and that this relationship was fully mediated by collective efficacy (i.e., a sense of collective competence shared among team members with respect to responding to specific situational demands and allocating, coordinating, and integrating their resources). Peñalver et al. [ 81 ] found full-mediation effect of group social resources (i.e., teamwork, coordination, supportive team climate) between group positive affect and in- and extra-role performance.

As mentioned earlier, a second relevant theoretical framework to explain the relationship between group affect and collective performance refers to the mood-as-input theory [ 75 ]. This model states that people use their current mood as an information, and the interpreted meaning and consequences of their mood on their behavior depend on the organizational context in which the mood was formed [ 82 , 83 ]. The model also focuses on the relationship and potential interaction between negative and positive affect to predict creativity. Negative affective tone informs work-unit members that the situation is problematic and leads them to feel the need of carrying actions to remedy the situation [ 38 ]. Group negative affect adopts a moderator role (see next section).

Regarding empirical support, 16 out 24 correlations reported in group affect cross-sectional studies proposing a happy–productive relationship are statistically significant and positive (range 0.13 to 0.58); two with member-rated task performance (0.35, and 0.56), four with leader-rated task performance (range 0.13 to 0.58), one with member-rated contextual performance (0.40), two with leader-rated contextual performance (0.14, and 0.20), one with member-rated creativity (0.34), four with leader-rated creativity (range 0.40 to 0.47), and two with objective financial criteria (range 0.19 to 0.43).

Group Affect: Third Variables Included in HP Research Models . Antecedents of group affect found in the literature are related to organizational support climate and leadership. For instance, team climate of support from the organization (i.e., the extent to which team members believe the team is supported by the organization and their managers) was shown to be positively related to positive team mood, which in turn was relating to team performance in a sample of bank branches [ 39 ]. Regarding leadership, different studies propose that the leader is a relevant initiator of a particular tone of group affect, which disseminates among members through a contagion process. Leader positive moods led to transformational leadership [ 45 ] and positive group affective tone [ 45 , 78 ]. Finally, transformational leadership positively predicts positive group affective tone through team learning goal orientation (i.e., team members’ shared tendencies to develop competence by acquiring new skills and learning from experience) [ 84 ].

Moderators. A meta-analysis showed that positive group affect has consistent positive effects on task performance regardless of contextual factors such as group affect source (exogenous or endogenous to the group) and group life span [ 11 ]. However, other contextual factors such as group identification, team trust, or the presence of negative affect have proved their influence on the positive group affect–performance relationship. For example, positive group affective tone had a stronger positive influence on willingness to engage in OCB and on perceived team performance when group identification (i.e., the extent to which people define themselves in terms of their group membership) was high [ 46 ]. In a second study, positive group affective tone was beneficial for team creativity when team trust was low, and detrimental for team creativity when team trust was high [ 85 ]. As seen earlier, negative group affect is an additional boundary condition with the potential to enhance the effect of positive affect on team creativity [ 38 , 82 ]. For example, Tu [ 83 ] found that negative affect might be positively related to employee creativity, when contextual factors are supportive (i.e., organizational support is high and organizational control is low) in a sample of 106 new product development (NPD) teams working for high-technology Taiwanese firms. In another study in a Brazilian retail chain, negative affective tone made the relationship between positive affective tone and creativity stronger [ 38 ]. The authors contend that negative affective tone may help employees to broaden their modes of creative thinking to identify and solve problems/difficulties. Similarly, Tsai et al. [ 85 ] found that positive group affect enhanced creativity when team trust was low and negative group affect was high.

In summary, the theoretical frameworks underpinning the HPWU literature on group affect are the broaden-and-build theory and the mood-as-input theory. Following these theories, positive group affect broadens and activates the teams’ (cognitive, motivational, attitudinal, and behavioral) processes and interactions over a specific period of time leading to improved team performance. Moreover, this literature is starting to take into account the potential interaction of positive and negative group affect and the influence of contextual conditions (e.g., trust, group identification, organizational support, or control) on the HPWU relationship.

Team Work Engagement Literature: Theoretical Frameworks. Team work engagement is considered a predictor of collective performance in the nine studies we found in the systematic review. The job demands-resources model of work engagement (JDR-WE model) is the main theoretical framework used to explain why higher levels of engagement lead to increased performance [ 86 ]. The JDR-WE model is a model of employee motivation [ 87 ]. Its main proposition is that job resources (e.g., social support, autonomy) and personal resources (e.g., self-efficacy, optimism) have a positive impact on engagement, particularly when job demands (e.g., workload, emotional demands) are high. Specifically, challenging job demands (vs. hindering job demands) have the potential to promote employees’ growth and achievement together with their motivation toward the task. In turn, work engagement has a positive impact on job performance.

The mechanisms operating between team engagement and performance replicate the arguments given at the individual level on how vigor, dedication, and absorption may lead to increased performance. For example, Mäkikangas [ 88 ] stated that: “As work engagement is a motivational state characterized by an employee’s will and drive to perform well at work [ 89 ], it is reasonable to use it as a predecessor of team job performance” (p.773). A more detailed explanation was offered by Costa [ 87 ] who proposed that engaged teams are energetic when working, display active and productive behaviors, are willing to help each other and build on each other’s ideas, and consider their task meaningful and relevant. García-Buades et al. [ 90 ] contend that shared team engagement additionally contributes to teams’ performance due to emergent phenomena such as the team members’ alignment towards common goals, increased synergies among members, and better cooperation and interaction processes. The studies identified in the systematic search provide similar arguments about the mechanisms explaining the collective engagement–performance link. However, little research has been conducted on these mechanisms.

Furthermore, it is worth mentioning some multilevel efforts in the team work engagement–collective performance literature, which contribute to clarify the relationship between team-level constructs and individual level constructs. For instance, individual and team work engagement were associated with high levels of perceived team performance in 102 Finnish teams from the educational sector [ 88 ]. Another study found that team work engagement was significantly related to team performance, but it also predicted individual performance through individual work engagement (vigor) [ 62 ].

Regarding mediators, only one study proposed and found support for service climate and employee performance to mediate an indirect relationship between team engagement and customer loyalty in 114 service units in the hospitality industry [ 91 ].

The nine cross-sectional studies proposing a happy–productive relationship based on team work engagement reported 8 out of 11 correlations to be statistically significant and positive (range 0.24 to 0.54); four with member-rated task performance (range 0.30 to 0.54), three with leader-rated task performance (range 0.24 to 0.30), one with member-rated contextual performance (0.38). Although two correlations between team work engagement and customer satisfaction were not significant, results with path analysis found an indirect relationship with customer satisfaction [ 91 ] and results with multilevel analyses found a significant effect of team engagement on service performance when climate for innovation was high [ 90 ].

Team Work Engagement: Third Variables included in HP Research Models

Regarding antecedents, a meta-analysis by Christian et al. [ 7 ] found that job resources are the most relevant predictor of work engagement. Within the studies identified in the systematic search, team resources arise as relevant antecedents of team work engagement. For example, team resources (supportive team climate, coordination, and teamwork) predicted team work engagement, which in turn predicted performance [ 58 ]. Other team resources affecting team work engagement are performance feedback, social support from co-workers, support from supervisor, and information available [ 87 ]. In the same study, a direct negative effect of task conflict was found on team work engagement [ 87 ]. In another study, transformational leadership increased team work engagement, which in turn enhanced team performance [ 57 ].

Another antecedent of team work engagement is team job crafting or collaborative crafting (i.e., the process by which groups of employees determine together how they can alter their work to meet their shared work goals). Team job crafting predicted team work engagement which then predicted leader-rated performance [ 92 ], and team-rated performance [ 62 ]. In a similar vein, McClelland et al. [ 93 ] found support for a model in which collaborative crafting led to three team processes (team efficacy, team control, and team interdependence), which then led to team work engagement and subsequent improved performance in a sample of 242 call centre teams.

Moderators. Some moderators have been shown to strengthen the influence of team work engagement on performance such as task conflict [ 87 ], and climate for innovation [ 90 ]. In a study with research teams, Costa et al. [ 87 ] found that task conflict may enhance the benefits of engaged teams on objective performance, because engaged teams are more open to discussing new ideas positively and can integrate their members’ contributions better. In another study, multilevel analyses showed significant positive direct relationships between team engagement and service quality indicators in hotel and restaurant units, and a consistent moderating role of climate for innovation—recognition of employees’ ideas and suggestions to improve work methods and the service delivered—so that the relationship between team engagement and service performance became stronger as climate for innovation increased [ 90 ].

In summary, the main theoretical framework at the base of the HPWU literature on team work engagement is the job–demands–resources model of work engagement. Thus, team resources increase engagement, particularly when challenging demands are high, creating a positive affective-motivational shared state, which leads to improved team performance. This literature emphasizes a varied array of team resources, which increase team work engagement, and in turn enhance team performance. Moreover, it benefits from some examples of multilevel research, which takes into account the effects of team-level well-being and behavioral processes together with individual well-being and performance.

3.2.3. Research Question 3: What Is the Evidence for Causal or Reciprocal Relationships between Collective Well-Being and Collective Performance?

Despite the frequently reported positive significant correlations, the causal relationship between well-being and performance is far from clear. Does well-being increase performance? Or does good performance increase well-being? In the most recent meta-analysis about satisfaction, citizenship behaviors, and performance in work units, Whitman et al. [ 12 ] reported the lack of enough longitudinal studies to meta-analytically test causal relationships between collective satisfaction and performance at the unit-level. Therefore, in this section, we first summarize the findings on two meta-analyses on causal HP relationships at the individual and organizational level [ 94 , 95 ]. Then, we describe the findings about causal or reciprocal relationships between collective well-being and collective performance at the work-unit level.

Two important meta-analyses published at the individual and organizational level provide interesting findings on causal relationships between well-being and performance. At the individual level, Riketta (2008) conducted a meta-analysis of 16 panel studies finding support for job attitudes to increase performance (in-role, extra-role, and objective performance) after controlling for baseline performance, whereas effects of performance on subsequent job attitudes were nonsignificant. Effects of job attitudes on performance were stronger for shorter time lags (less than 6 months compared to longer time lags) suggesting that time lag was a moderator of the cross-lagged relationship. Riketta [ 94 ] suggests that attitudes effects may be short lived and recommends exploring shorter spans (e.g., a few days). Furthermore, Riketta [ 94 ] found a counterintuitive negative effect of performance on job satisfaction for moderate time lags, which he attributed to people who perform strongly but do not perceive to be adequately rewarded for their performance. Based on these results, he suggests studying the potential moderating role of reward systems and justice perceptions on the job satisfaction–performance relationship (p. 479).

At the organizational level, a meta-analysis by Schneider et al. [ 95 ] using data from 35 companies over 8 years showed organizational financial and market performance to be predictors of overall job satisfaction and satisfaction with security more strongly than the reverse. They also reported a more reciprocal relationship of organizational financial and market performance with satisfaction with pay, which they suggest may be mediated by OCB. The authors contend that “the relationship between employee attitudes and organizational performance is complex, and it is too simplistic to assume that satisfaction attitudes lead to organizational financial or market performance—some do and some do not, and some employee attitudes apparently are the result of financial and market performance" (p. 849). They also suggest that non-financial organizational outcomes may show a stronger relationship with satisfaction than financial performance.

Five studies investigated time-lagged or longitudinal HP relationships at the work-unit level, three on collective satisfaction [ 33 , 36 , 37 ], and two on group positive affect [ 38 , 39 ] (see Table 3 for a summary). In an empirical study, Koys [ 33 ] addressed the issue of whether work-unit satisfaction and behaviors (OCB and turnover) influenced business outcomes (profitability and customer satisfaction) in a sample of 28 restaurant units from a chain, and explored the reverse relationship as well. In stressing the relevance of behaviors, he argued that “employee attitudes cannot influence organizational effectiveness on their own; employees must also behave appropriately” (p. 103). Results supported the HP model, in that human resources outcomes (work-unit satisfaction and behaviors) influence work-unit effectiveness, rather than the other way around. More specifically, cross-lagged regression analyses showed that unit-level employee satisfaction, OCB, and turnover measured at year 1, predicted two unit-level profitability measures at year 2 (R 2 = 0.14, and 0.17), with only OCB having a significant beta weight. The same independent variables predicted customer satisfaction at year 2 (R 2 = 0.31), with only unit-level employee satisfaction having a significant beta weight. Thus, OCB had an impact on profitability, and employee satisfaction had an impact on customer satisfaction. This research supports the idea that unit-level employee satisfaction leads to OCB, which in turn leads to profitability; and additionally, employee satisfaction leads to customer satisfaction.

Summary of time-lagged correlations between happy–productive teams and productive–happy teams.

Note. * p < 0.05. ns not significant.

Messersmith et al. [ 36 ] studied the link between high-performance work systems (HPWS) and time-lagged performance in a sample of 119 public service departments in Wales. Their results support a research model in which department-level HPWS enhanced what they called the black box (employee attitudes–job satisfaction, organizational commitment, psychological empowerment, and behaviors (OCB)), which was further related to objective departmental performance. The authors highlight the important role that aggregate discretionary behaviors (OCB) may play in the success of departmental units. HPWS initiate a chain in which employees are more likely to engage in the prosocial behaviors that help organizational units to meet goals and objectives. In combination, these helping behaviors allow organizational units to be more efficient and flexible, as “employees are more likely to step beyond the bounds of their narrowly defined job descriptions to assist each other as well as to help maximize their overall departmental functions. In addition, this reciprocity is likely to have continual positive effects in the department as OCBs become enmeshed as a part of the established norms and values in the culture of the unit” (p. 1114).

A third study explored the longitudinal relationships between work-unit climate and labor productivity in a sample of 171 bank branches in the Netherlands [ 37 ]. Based on previous findings at the individual level, the main hypothesis was that two climate types (goals and service orientation) would positively influence (objective) productivity through increased work-unit satisfaction. The rationale is that shared positive attitudes would be a prerequisite for engaging in collaborative effort and accepting organizational goals. They also explored the reversed causation model in which productivity would increase the branch resources to invest in their employees, resulting in higher positive climate scores and work attitudes. Contrary to their expectations, they found no evidence for work satisfaction as an intermediary mechanism at the business level, and additionally they found no effects between work satisfaction and productivity. Thus, they concluded that the happy–productive thesis valid at the individual level, does not obtain empirical support at the branch-level. They attributed these results to the sample (business sector instead of multiple or educational), to the lower associations usually found for longitudinal rather than cross-sectional associations (average time lag was 2 years), and to the use of aggregated work satisfaction. They suggest that “at branch level, more active concepts like OCB or work engagement may be more strongly related to unit performance compared to traditional attitudinal concepts like work satisfaction” (p. 306).

Two time-lagged studies explored the relationship between group affect and collective performance. In a study with Spanish bank branches, a team climate of support from the organization was positively related to positive team mood, which in turn was positively related to team members’ ratings of team performance but not to leader-rated team performance [ 39 ]. Another study explored how store positive affective tone predicted store performance (i.e., sales achievement) in a sample of 94 Brazilian retail stores [ 38 ]. Although the correlation and direct path between positive affect and store performance were non-significant, results showed that positive affective tone predicted the stores’ performance through the mediating role of creativity, even after controlling the effects of preceding stores’ performance. Thus, “happier” stores were more creative and more effective (i.e., increased sales).

Two of these studies additionally explored a reverse causality direction [ 33 , 37 ] from performance (Time 1) to happiness (Time 2). Koys [ 33 ] found a stronger correlation between collective work-unit satisfaction (Time 1) and customer satisfaction (Time 2) (r = 0.61), than the reverse (r = 0.36). He also found stronger correlations between collective work-unit satisfaction and two profit measures (r = 0.35; r = 0.27), than the reverse (ns). On the other hand, he also reported a stronger correlation for manager-rated OCB (Time 1) and collective satisfaction (Time 2) (r = 0.32), than the reverse (ns). Van de Voorde [ 37 ] reported cross-lagged correlations between objective indicators of performance (financial branch yearly productivity index) and collective satisfaction in two directions, both were nonsignificant.

In summary, four out of five studies exploring causal relationships between collective well-being and collective performance at the unit level provide empirical support to a happy–productive direction. Three of them obtain support for a causal chain between unit-level well-being (work-unit satisfaction or group positive affect), unit-level behaviors (OCB or team creativity), and objective unit-level performance (profitability, departmental performance, and sales respectively) [ 33 , 36 , 38 ]. These three studies propose a causal chain in at least three steps “well-being–team performance–objective performance”. Interestingly, the fourth study proposed a direct link between well-being and objective performance, without considering a “team behavior” as a mediator, and found no empirical support for the collective satisfaction–performance link. Overall, the very limited existing evidence suggests that collective well-being would enhance relevant discretionary team behaviors (OCB and creativity), which in turn increase objective productivity.

4. Discussion

The aim of this systematic review was to offer an integrated overview on the literature on happy-productive work-units (HPWU). More specifically, we reviewed quantitative peer-reviewed studies published between 2001 and 2018 on the relationship between collective happiness and collective performance for teams and work-units. With our systematic review, we found 30 empirical studies on HPWU, which adopted three main collective well-being constructs and four categories of collective performance. Research has focused on hedonic well-being (satisfaction, 7 studies; group Affect, 14 studies), and more recently on eudaimonic well-being (teamwork engagement, 9 studies). We could not identify research on other eudaimonic constructs applied to teams (e.g., collective flourishing, purpose or meaning of work), which could, we believe, further explain extra-ordinary team efforts and success (e.g., such as the world-watched rescue of 12 soccer players from a flooded cave in Thailand in July 2018). On the other hand, collective performance relies mainly on team performance (task performance, OCB, creativity; supervisor-rated and member-rated), and less so on customer satisfaction or financial/objective ratings. The literature on HPWU is scarce, diverse, and disintegrated. There is diversity both in the operationalization of collective well-being and performance and in the theoretical frameworks used.

Our main contribution is the analysis of the strengths, commonalities, and differences across these three well-being literatures to get a comprehensive picture of what is known on happy–productive teams. To do so, we reviewed and summarized how collective well-being and performance is measured, the theories that attempt to explain how happy teams become productive teams or productive teams become happy, and whether both collective phenomena reciprocate. In this section, we summarize and discuss the results following the research questions set out for the review, reflect on the limitations of our study, and suggest avenues for future research.

4.1. Discussion

4.1.1. research question 1—which are the main features of the conceptualization and operationalization of collective well-being.

The HPWU literature builds on diverse conceptualizations and operationalizations of well-being and performance. A question that remains open is about the relationship among the three constructs of collective well-being and their relative contribution to collective performance. Far from addressing this issue, the reviewed literature about collective well-being mostly ignores it. An exception is the work by Mason & Griffin [ 35 ], who differentiated and explored the effects of group task satisfaction and group affective tone on group outcomes. They found “group task satisfaction” to explain unique variance in civic helping and sportsmanship behavior, but not in leader-rated team performance, once the effects of aggregated “individual job satisfaction” and group affective tone had been taken into account. Second, the literature on positive group affect considers team satisfaction as a mediator between group affect and performance, therefore placing group affect as an antecedent of satisfaction. Positive group affect has been considered as an antecedent of both satisfaction [ 45 ] and engagement [ 6 , 7 ]. Third, literature on engagement proposes satisfaction as either an antecedent or a consequent of engagement [ 6 ]. Although engagement and satisfaction have shown considerable overlap, enough discriminant validity between them justifies their differentiation [ 7 ]. Overall, only good quality, longitudinal research studying simultaneously group affect, group satisfaction, and team engagement will be able to elucidate the relationship among different types of well-being, whether they overlap or complement each other, and their relative contribution to performance.

Regarding collective performance, the overreliance on subjective effectiveness measures is an additional weakness of existing research. Although team-member and leader-rated team performance are valid and useful measures of performance, studying more distal (e.g., customer satisfaction) or objective team performance criteria would add extra value to future research. Task and contextual team performance are the main focus of collective performance by the three well-being literatures. A particular strength of the collective satisfaction literature is evaluating performance not only through team performance (task performance and OCB) but also through distal team effectiveness outcomes (i.e., customer satisfaction and/or financial performance). Besides, only group affect researchers study team performance by means of team creativity. Using a combination of multiple valid operationalizations of collective well-being and collective performance would contribute to a more comprehensive picture of the HPWU relationship and allow for sound comparisons among HP constructs.

Regarding operationalizations of collective well-being, despite some valuable contributions in defining and measuring work-unit satisfaction [ 12 , 35 ], they had limited influence both on subsequent research and extending the use of valid group-satisfaction measures. However, significant results obtained across diverse operationalizations support the consistency of the relationship between collective satisfaction and performance. Alternatively, operationalizations of group affect and team engagement are more homogeneous and uniform than measurement of satisfaction, thus allowing for comparability among studies and results.

In general, recommendations for appropriate measurement of team-level well-being includes use of valid instruments, use of team referents (vs. individual referents), and use of multiple informants (e.g., leaders, peers). Furthermore, collective well-being ratings generally rely on the aggregated unit’s average score. This method emphasizes sharedness of well-being, a core quality of collective well-being, however there are calls to investigate the effects of the strength of well-being among team-members and over time. Additionally, an issue of substantial interest is to examine the amount of variability and dispersion of work-unit well-being within a team and its influence on collective performance [ 12 , 96 ].

Overall, the variety in definitions and operationalizations of collective constructs make it difficult to reach consistent conclusions about HP relationships but it provides a more comprehensive and holistic view on these relationships.

4.1.2. Research Question 2—Which Theoretical Frameworks Are Used to Explain the Collective Happy–Productive Work Unit Thesis?

The theoretical frameworks on the HPWU relationship and mechanisms linking collective well-being and collective performance are specific for each body of literature. Regardless of the consideration of well-being as hedonic or eudaimonic, it is implicitly or explicitly assumed that well-being shared among team-members is a relevant antecedent of collective performance. In this section, we reflect on the strengths of different theoretical efforts to explain how collective well-being influences collective performance and the mechanisms through which shared well-being translates into better team performance.

The literature on team satisfaction builds on the general research on attitudes and behavior. The predominant theoretical framework expands the happy–productive thesis to the team level, complemented with additional theoretical models like social exchange theory, linkage research, or the service–profit chain. The rationale behind the HPWU thesis is that when collective satisfaction emerges as a shared phenomenon, it activates collaboration and OCBs among team members (i.e., a measure of team performance/processes), which subsequently leads to improved (objective) performance. Thus, team satisfaction facilitates collaborative effort towards, and acceptance of, organizational objectives. The literature in satisfaction proposes and finds empirical support for “OCB” as a key mediator between collective well-being and objective/financial performance, following a causal chain “collective satisfaction–team performance (OCB)–financial performance” [ 12 , 33 , 97 ].

The literature on group affect showed a strong focus on uncovering the mediating mechanisms between well-being and performance. Building on the broaden-and-build theory [ 74 ], the rationale is that shared positive group affect activates relevant cognitive (e.g., goal setting and reviewing), motivational (e.g., goal commitment), attitudinal (e.g., team satisfaction), and behavioral (e.g., providing help and support) group processes, which subsequently improve performance. Existing cross-sectional research finds empirical support for these mediating mechanisms. Based on the mood-as-input model [ 75 ], another relevant contribution of the group affect literature is the study of the combined effect or interaction between positive group affect and negative group affect on team’s performance (e.g., mainly team creativity). Negative group affect has been shown to enhance the positive effects of positive group affect on team performance in particular situations in which the team needs to solve problems or face difficulty [ 38 ].

Research on team work engagement benefits from a sound theoretical framework (i.e., the job demands–resources model of work engagement, JDR), a precise concept, and well-established instruments. Research linking team work engagement and collective performance argues that a balance between team resources and challenging demands promotes energized team members, who consider their task meaningful and show active, productive, and helpful behaviors. Research interest in the engagement literature emphasizes the identification of team resources as antecedents of well-being (transformational leadership, resiliency, collective efficacy).

The reviewed studies offer empirical evidence of the relevance of multiple antecedents of well-being, and moderators of the HP collective relationship. Regarding antecedents, the role of leadership seems especially relevant, in particular transformational and charismatic leadership behaviors have shown a significant effect on a work unit’s collective well-being and behavior [ 12 , 45 , 57 ]. Other antecedents include organizational practices (HPWS or climate), work attributes (team task characteristics), and team resources of multiple kinds. Several moderators stand out as particularly important in the literature reviewed on HPWU such as sharedness (or strength of well-being), sector, team size, team tenure, and third variables such as group identification, team trust, negative affect, and shared job crafting. Further research is needed to clarify and compare the roles of antecedents, mediators and moderators of the HPWU relationship in order to guide interventions and investments [ 14 ].

4.1.3. Research Question 3—What Is the Evidence for Causal or Reciprocal Relationships between Collective Well-Being and Collective Performance?

The predominant view in previous research and across the 30 HPWU studies identified in our review is that collective well-being is an antecedent of collective performance. The happy–productive relationship obtains generalized empirical support as a positive and significant relationship both in previous meta-analyses and in our findings. Previous meta-analyses have provided moderate corrected correlations between work-unit satisfaction and performance (r = 0.34) [ 12 ], group affect and group task performance (r = 0.33) [ 11 ] and business-unit engagement and performance (r = 0.42) [ 55 ]. In our systematic review, we found 76.2% of the correlations reported were positive and significant across different constructs of collective well-being and performance. Existing evidence so far shows a moderate relationship, does not allow concluding causal direction, and is affected by mediating and moderating third variables. However, these results heavily rely on correlational and cross-sectional studies, and thus the causal direction between different types of well-being and different types of performance remains an open question.

Two meta-analyses on longitudinal relationships between well-being and performance are available at the individual [ 94 ] and organizational [ 95 ] levels of analyses, with none available at the work-unit level due to the dearth of longitudinal studies [ 12 ]. Overall, their results show weaker or non-significant correlations between collective well-being and time-lagged measurements of performance compared to cross-sectional measurements. Shorter time-lags (less than 6 months) yielded stronger relationships between job satisfaction and performance at an individual level meta-analysis [ 94 ]. Careful selection of time-lags between measurements of collective satisfaction and performance may shed light as to whether the effects of collective well-being vary short-term vs. long-term. Another time-related question is whether some collective well-being constructs have longer impact on performance than others. For instance, it has been suggested that engagement is associated with the development of resources and the pursuit of long-term goals [ 98 ].

Furthermore, stronger correlations in the direction of well-being to performance than the reverse were found at the individual level [ 94 ], and mixed evidence on the direction HP or PH at the organizational level depending on the specific measure of satisfaction used [ 95 ]. Only five studies analyzed time-lagged HP relationships, and only two reported correlations in the reverse direction (PH). The limited but very interesting findings of these five studies showed that collective well-being would lead to relevant discretionary team behaviors (OCB and creativity), which in turn increased objective productivity. Overall, the question remains open as to whether well-being leads to performance or the reverse is true until more research with time-lagged or longitudinal designs is conducted. Future research should undertake panel studies at the work-unit level with improved methodological quality to be able to shed light on issues of causality or reciprocity between collective well-being and collective performance.

4.2. Implications for Practice

The findings from this systematic review suggest several implications for practice on how to increase collective well-being, and how to enhance transformation of collective well-being into collective performance. Based on the empirical evidence reviewed, strategies to improve collective well-being should focus on relevant antecedents such as implementing HPWS, encouraging transformational and charismatic leadership, allowing for collaborative job crafting, improving team work design, promoting organizational support climate, and providing team resources. Building on the mediating mechanisms identified, it is also recommended to train team leaders and members on team work processes (e.g., team reflexivity, team helping behavior, OCB) and on how to maintain positive interactions (e.g., building on others’ ideas, morale-building communication). Finally, attending to (instead of ignoring) important moderators such as negative affect or task conflict help teams to focus efforts on relevant team problems and avoid defective team decision-making.

4.3. Recommendations for Future Research

4.3.1. antagonistic patterns of hpwu.

The relationship between well-being and performance is more complex than the HPWT proposes and needs to be re-defined [ 9 ]. Beyond happy-productive workers or teams (synergistic pattern), alternative and antagonistic patterns of happy–unproductive or unhappy–productive teams should be considered. For instance, Peiró et al. [ 9 ] found that over 50% of the respondents were classified in antagonistic patterns in a sample of Spanish workers. Furthermore, they found that the same employee belonged to different patterns of well-being and performance in different operationalizations of well-being (hedonic vs. eudaimonic) and performance (self-rated vs. supervisor rated), e.g., the same employee could be hedonically happy, eudaimonically unhappy, and receive high or low performance ratings depending on the source of evaluation. At the team level, HPWU research emphasizes the positive influence of well-being on valuable performance outcomes such as task performance [ 11 , 12 ], team creativity [ 38 , 79 , 83 ], and customer satisfaction [ 33 , 70 ]. However, evidence exists also on the negative consequences of being a happy team (defective decision-making, group-think, social loafing). Thus, applying an expanded HPWT model with synergistic and antagonistic patterns to the study of teams and work-units would be a fruitful avenue for future research. Researchers might, for example, investigate the conditions under which a team transitions from one happy–productive pattern to another pattern over time; explore team composition to understand how individual members’ HP patterns contribute to a team’s general HP pattern; study which top-down (e.g., leadership) or bottom-up factors (e.g., team processes) enhance team’s happiness and productivity. To address these questions, we believe both qualitative and quantitative research is strongly needed to uncover the dynamic relationship between collective well-being and performance.

Relationship between hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. A relevant question for future research is the relationship between hedonic well-being and eudaimonic well-being. In other words, can team members be hedonically satisfied and not feel engaged? Can team members feel engaged while experimenting negative affect or dissatisfaction? The likely answer is “yes” they can, but additional questions arise. How long can a team stay in a situation in which eudaimonic well-being is present but hedonic well-being is absent? How do they move or which dispositional or situational factors help the team stay in one state or change from one well-being form to another? This issue is related to team dynamics and transitions over time.

4.3.2. Gain Spirals

There is too limited longitudinal evidence to draw conclusions about the causal ordering of team happiness and productivity. Most likely collective well-being and collective performance maintain a reciprocal and dynamic relationship as teams and team-members move through affective states and performance episodes. Previous research has found empirical support for gain spirals between resources and work engagement [ 99 ], and between work engagement and performance indicators like financial returns [ 100 ]. A gain spiral is a cycle of positive, mutual reinforcement relationship among constructs and an increase in their levels over time. We believe this theme could be expanded to the study of the HPWU relationship to investigate whether reciprocal relationships between collective well-being and performance may lead to positive cycles and upward spirals, or to negative cycles and downward spirals. Moreover, researchers might identify key third variables with an impact on these spirals such as collective efficacy or conflict management.

4.3.3. Situational and Personal Features

There may be other factors, beyond the work environment, that could affect work performance and well-being. For example, employee impaired health can be critical for organizations, because workers with worse health often lose more work hours, ask for more sick leave, and are resultantly less productive than healthy workers [ 101 ]. Recent studies on the HPWT suggest to identify situational and personal features that are associated with adscription to different happy-productive clusters [ 9 , 14 ]. Current research has considered situational features related to job characteristics such as task demands [ 69 ] or supervisor behavior [ 45 , 102 ]. Future research should consider other situational features (e.g., time pressure, availability of feedback) as well as personal and social factors related to team members. For instance, factors such as individual health status and chronic diseases [ 103 ], age [ 104 ], gender [ 9 ], educational qualification [ 105 ], occupational category [ 9 ], and cultural background [ 106 ] have shown to have an influence on well-being and/or performance. Further research on the effect of these third variables on patterns of well-being and performance would enrich the knowledge about happy-productive teams.

4.3.4. Multi-Level Methodology

The use of a multilevel methodology would be highly recommended to explore cross-level relationships among organizational, unit-level, and individual constructs. For instance, Tims et al. [ 62 ] found support for team work engagement to influence individual work engagement and individual performance. Mäkikangas et al. [ 88 ] found support for shared job crafting as a cross-level moderator so that in teams with high levels of shared job crafting engaged individuals perceived better team performance. In a longitudinal study on the role of workforce engagement to predict organizational financial and customer satisfaction, Schneider et al. [ 54 ] found that organizational practices (e.g., senior leadership communication of company’s goals) were surprisingly the strongest correlate of workforce engagement compared to supervisory support and work attributes. Further research could explore how organizational level variables influence and promote work-unit well-being and performance (e.g., HPWS).

4.3.5. Methodological Issues

Some recommendations on methodological issues can be drawn from previous research [ 94 , 95 ]. Recommendations would include using consistent, valid, and multiple measures of well-being and performance; careful selection of administration procedures and time lags between measurements; control for sectors, countries, and industry effects; and consider aggregation issues beyond the unit’s average. Furthermore, another point of interest would be to widen the size and diversity of samples. Whitman [ 12 ] suggests to increase the number of teams over 400 units, but it is also important to research teams and workgroups in different conditions such as virtual or disperse teams, teams with short vs. long term belonging members, teams with frequent membership changes or with multiple supervisors. Investigating how well-being develops among these teams (e.g., virtual teams, or with frequent membership changes) and how this relates to team performance would be an interesting avenue for future research.

4.4. Limitations

There are important limitations to consider within the literature identified through the systematic review. First, there is a dearth of research on eudaimonic constructs beyond team engagement, and theoretically relevant perspectives such as Kahn’s conceptualization are not developed at the team/work-unit level. Second, collective performance relies on single measurements, one-faceted, and mainly on subjective evaluations of team performance rather than objective measurements. Third, most studies rely on cross-sectional designs to test proposed causal models.

At review level, there are some limiting factors worth mentioning. The focus of our review was on happy–productive teams and work-units. Therefore, we adopted a positive perspective and excluded concepts that indicate ill-being or lack of well-being such as dissatisfaction, burnout or negative affect just to name a few. Obviously, teams and work-units go through bad times and the management of dissatisfaction, conflict, and frustration may be more important than the management of well-being. Previous research has studied how dissatisfaction or negative affect influences group performance, and found promising results on how negative well-being can lead to improved performance under certain conditions [ 11 ]. However, studying unhappy teams was out of the scope of our review. We also excluded team outcomes not directly related to productivity such as absenteeism or turnover. As Schneider et al. [ 95 ] pointed out, it may be that satisfaction shows stronger relations with other outcomes rather than financial productivity. We have focused on refereed studies to ensure a certain level of quality in the empirical evidence reviewed. This may have left out interesting unpublished research and to a certain extent bias our review with shortcomings associated with published research (i.e., over-representation of significant results and lack of replication studies). In this line, publication of studies with non-significant results and replication studies would make it possible to accumulate enough and better evidence to progress knowledge and understanding on HPWU. Besides, the scarce number of studies that focus on the relationship between well-being and performance at the collective level of analysis coupled with the heterogeneity among these studies impede carrying out a meta-analysis that would have helped to further integrate the results. Once we dispose of enough accumulated studies on this relationship, we suggest future research to perform a meta-analytic study on this topic in order to add valuable information, in particular about causality.

5. Conclusion

Despite all its limitations, literature on collective well-being has contributed to understanding the relevant role of affective processes happening in teams and work groups, which have largely been ignored compared to cognitive processes. Theoretical frameworks underpinning the collective well-being–performance relationship are mainly the happy-productive worker thesis and general attitude-behavior link for collective satisfaction; the broaden-and-build theory and input-as-mood theory for group affect; and the job-demands-resources model and broaden-and-build theory for team engagement. The positive effects of collective well-being (or affective climates) on team performance, team creativity, customer satisfaction, and financial performance have been empirically tested and found throughout the studies included in this systematic review. Across a diversity of samples, organizational sectors, countries, conceptualizations, and operationalizations of well-being and performance, collective well-being is positively correlated to collective performance at the meso-level of analysis (team, group, work-unit). In particular, the satisfaction and group affect literatures have shed light on mediating team processes that explain the link between collective well-being and performance. Additionally, literature found on the three collective well-being constructs offers very interesting inputs on antecedents (e.g., transformational leadership, resources, task characteristics), and moderators of the HPWT (e.g., strength of well-being, group identity, negative group affect, organizational support) at the unit-level.

Supplementary Materials

The following are available online at https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/1/69/s1 .

Description of the studies on Collective Satisfaction – Collective Performance.

a HP = Happy-Productive; PH = Productive-Happy; b JS = Job Satisfaction; c G = Global; F = Facets; d P = Performance; e C = Cross-sectional design; CL = Cross-lagged design; f R = correlation coefficient; ns = not significant; * = p < 0.05; ** = p < 0.01; *** = p < 0.001.

Description of the studies on Group Affect – Collective Performance.

a HP = Happy-Productive; PH = Productive-Happy; b GA = Group Affect; PANAS = Positive Affect and Negative Affect Schedule; c P = Performance; d C = Cross-sectional design; TL = Time-lagged design; e R = correlation coefficient; ns = not significant; * = p < 0.05; ** = p < 0.01; *** = p < 0.001.

Description of the studies on Team engagement – Collective Performance.

a HP = Happy-Productive; PH = Productive-Happy; b EG = Engagement; UWES = Ultrecht Work Engagement Scale; c P = Performance; d C = Cross-sectional design; CL = Cross-lagged design; e R = correlation coefficient; ns = not significant; * = p < 0.05; ** = p < 0.01; *** = p < 0.001; Sources 3, 8, & 10 r = mean correlation of vigour, dedication, and absorption.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, J.M.P., M.E.G.-B., and M.W.K.; Methodology, M.E.G.-B., J.M.P., and M.W.K.; Data gathering and databases, M.E.G.-B., M.I.M.-J., S.O.-B., and M.W.K.; Data analysis, M.E.G.-B., M.I.M.-J., and S.O.-B.; Writing—original draft preparation, M.E.G.-B., and J.M.P.; Writing—review and editing, M.E.G.-B., J.M.P., M.I.M.-J., S.O.-B., and M.W.K.; Funding acquisition, J.M.P. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

The present study was funded by the MINECO/FEDER Research agencies: project PSI2015-64862-R(MINECO/FEDER).

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Mindfulness at Workplace and Employee Happiness

• Conference paper
• First Online: 02 November 2023
• Cite this conference paper

• Deeksha Tewari 6 ,
• Manish Kumar 7 &
• Santoshi SenGupta 8  

Part of the book series: Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics ((SPBE))

Included in the following conference series:

• INDAM: Indian Academy of Management at SBM-NMIMS Mumbai

360 Accesses

Ever since the turn of this century, organizations are solely trying to extract maximum productivity from the employees, irrespective of their mental and physical well-being (Gavin and Mason in Organ Dyn 33:379–392, 2004 ). With the increasing globalization, technological advancement, and changing environment, employees are facing pressures resulting in anxiety, stress, and unbalanced work-life which negatively impact their performance.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Subscribe and save.

• Get 10 units per month
• Download Article/Chapter or eBook
• 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
• Cancel anytime
• Available as PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Durable hardcover edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Exploring How Mindfulness Links to Work Outcomes: Positive Affectivity and Work-Life Enrichment

Mindfulness can make you happy-and-productive: a mindfulness controlled trial and its effects on happiness, work engagement and performance, mindfulness, work climate, and psychological need satisfaction in employee well-being.

Ashmos DP, Duchon D (2000) Spirituality at work: a conceptualization and measure. J Manag Inq 9(2):134–145

Article   Google Scholar  

Bajaj B, Gupta R, Sengupta S (2019) Emotional stability and self-esteem as mediators between mindfulness and happiness. J Happiness Stud 20(7):2211–2226. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-018-0046-4

Benzo RP, Anderson PM, Bronars C, Clark M (2018) Mindfulness for healthcare providers: the role of non-reactivity in reducing stress. Explore 14:453–456

Brown KW, Ryan RM (2003) The benefits of being present: mindfulness and its role in psychological wellbeing. J Pers Soc Psychol 84:822–848

Cameron KS, Dutton JE, Quinn RE (eds) (2003) Positive organizational scholarship. Berrett-Kohler, San Francisco, CA

Google Scholar  

Erdogan B, Bauer TN, Truxillo DM, Mansfield LR (2012) Whistle while you work: a review of the life satisfaction literature. J Manag 38(4):1038–1083

Filbeck G, Preece D (2003) Fortune’s best 100 companies to work for in America: do they work for shareholders? J Bus Finance Account 30(5–6):771–797

Frederickson HG, LaPorte TR (2002) Airport security, high reliability and the problem of rationality. Public Adm Rev 62(s1):33–43

Fredrickson BL (1998) What good are positive emotions? Rev Gen Psychol 2:300–319. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.2.3.300

Fredrickson BL (2001) The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. Am Psychol 56:218–226. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.56.3.218

Fulmer IS, Gerhart B, Scott KS (2003) Are the 100 best better? An empirical investigation of the relationship between being a “great place to work” and firm performance. Pers Psychol 56(4):965–993

Gavin JH, Mason RO (2004) The virtuous organization: the value of happiness in the workplace. Organ Dyn 33:379–392

Halinski RS, Feldt LS (1970) The selection of variables in multiple regression analysis. J Educ Meas 7(3):151–157. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-3984.1970.tb00709.x

Hobfoll SE (2001) The influence of culture, community, and the nested-self in the stress process: advancing conservation of resources theory. Appl Psychol 50:337–370. https://doi.org/10.1111/1464-0597.00062

Luthans F (2002) The need for and meaning of positive organizational behavior. J Organ Behav 23:695–706

Lyubomirsky S, Lepper HS (1999) A measure of subjective happiness: preliminary reliability and construct validation. Soc Indic Res 46(2):137–155

Malinowski P, Lim HJ (2015) Mindfulness at work: positive affect, hope, and optimism mediate the relationship between dispositional mindfulness, work engagement, and well-being. Mindfulness 6(6):1250–1262

Moore KA (2017) Mindfulness at work. In: Research handbook on work and well-being, pp 453–467. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781785363269.00031

Petchsawang P, Duchon D (2012) Workplace spirituality, meditation, and work performance. J Manag Spiritual Relig 2012:37–41

Petchsawang P, McLean GN (2017) Workplace spirituality, mindfulness meditation, and work engagement. J Manag Spiritual Relig 14(3):216–244. https://doi.org/10.1080/14766086.2017.1291360

Roche M, Haar JM, Luthans F (2014) The role of mindfulness and psychological capital on the well-being of leaders. J Occup Health Psychol 19(4):476–489

Seligman MEP, Csikszentmihalyi M (2000) Positive psychology: an introduction. Am Psychol 55:5–14

Shonin E, Van Gordon W, Griffiths MD (2013) Mindfulness-based interventions: towards mindful clinical integration. Front Psychol 4:194. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00194

Staw BM, Sutton RI, Pelled LH (1994) Employee positive emotion and favorable outcomes at the workplace. Organ Sci 5(1):51–71. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.5.1

Wright TA, Staw BM (1999) Affect and favorable work outcomes: two longitudinal tests of the happy-productive worker thesis. J Organ Behav 20(1):1–23. https://doi.org/10.1002/(sici)1099-1379(199901)20:1%3c1::aid-job885%3e3.0.co;2-w

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Graphic Era Deemed to Be University, Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India

Deeksha Tewari

Graphic Era Hill University, Haldwani, Uttarakhand, India

Manish Kumar

Graphic Era Hill University, Bhimtal, Uttarakhand, India

Santoshi SenGupta

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Santoshi SenGupta .

Editor information

Editors and affiliations.

School of Business Management, Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, Mumbai, India

Prashant Mishra

Ashu Sharma

Sayantan Khanra

College of Business, Modesto A. Maidique Campus, Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA

Sumit K. Kundu

Organizational Behavior & HRM, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, Bengaluru, India

Sushanta Kumar Mishra

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

About this paper

Cite this paper.

Tewari, D., Kumar, M., SenGupta, S. (2023). Mindfulness at Workplace and Employee Happiness. In: Mishra, P., Sharma, A., Khanra, S., Kundu, S.K., Mishra, S.K. (eds) Digital Economy Post COVID-19 Era. INDAM 2023. Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0197-5_60

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0197-5_60

Published : 02 November 2023

Publisher Name : Springer, Singapore

Print ISBN : 978-981-99-0196-8

Online ISBN : 978-981-99-0197-5

eBook Packages : Business and Management Business and Management (R0)

Share this paper

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

• Tools and Resources
• Customer Services
• Econometrics, Experimental and Quantitative Methods
• Economic Development
• Economic History
• Economic Theory and Mathematical Models
• Environmental, Agricultural, and Natural Resources Economics
• Financial Economics
• Health, Education, and Welfare Economics
• History of Economic Thought
• Industrial Organization
• International Economics
• Labor and Demographic Economics
• Law and Economics
• Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
• Micro, Behavioral, and Neuro-Economics
• Public Economics and Policy
• Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics
• Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Article contents

Happiness and productivity in the workplace.

• Mahnaz Nazneen Mahnaz Nazneen Economics, University of Warwick
•  and  Daniel Sgroi Daniel Sgroi Economics, University of Warwick
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190625979.013.852
• Published online: 13 December 2023

Happiness has become an important concept in economics as a target for government policy at the national level. This is mirrored in an increasing understanding of the microeconomic effects of increased happiness. While correlational studies have for many years documented a relationship between individual-level happiness and productivity, more recent work provides causal evidence that a positive shock to happiness can boost productivity significantly. These studies include three strands of research. The first provides a number of longitudinal surveys that have generated evidence linking happiness to productivity but run the risk of confounding happiness with other related variables that may be driving the relationship. The second includes laboratory experiments that simulate a workplace under tightly controlled conditions, and this strand has established a clear relationship between positive happiness shocks and rises in productivity. The third involves examining experimental field data, which sacrifices the control of laboratory experiments but offers greater realism. However, there is still work to be done generalizing these findings to more complex work environments, especially those that involve cooperative and team-based tasks where increases in happiness may have other consequences.

• positive affect
• productivity
• workplace performance
• mood induction
• experiments
• survey-based studies

You do not currently have access to this article

Please login to access the full content.

Access to the full content requires a subscription

Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Economics and Finance. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 11 September 2024

• Cookie Policy
• Privacy Policy
• Legal Notice
• Accessibility
• [185.80.149.115]
• 185.80.149.115

Character limit 500 /500

Mediating role of workplace happiness in enhancing work engagement

Rajagiri Management Journal

ISSN : 0972-9968

Article publication date: 25 January 2023

Issue publication date: 10 August 2023

This research seeks to explain the mediating function of workplace happiness in enhancing employee engagement through the drivers of employee engagement among the IT sector employees of India.

Design/methodology/approach

Quantitative data were acquired from 104 respondents from the Indian IT industry via an online survey utilizing Google Forms, employing a stratified random sample method. The study hypotheses were tested using PLS-SEM.

Results indicated that workplace happiness positively mediates employee engagement and drivers of employee engagement.

Research limitations/implications

The current study followed a cross-sectional analysis where establishing causality is difficult; however, there is a scope to do longitudinal study on the same phenomenon. Research data are produced through online surveys. Possible sources of bias may be selective memory, attribution and/or exaggeration. This study covers specific variables of workplace happiness and drivers of employee engagement other variables remain unaddressed, such as COVID-19-related impacts. The nature of the industry and sample size were limited.

Practical implications

This study shows that workplace happiness has a mediating effect on both drivers of employee engagement and employee engagement; as a result, organizations should consider the function of workplace happiness as a mediating factor when implementing drivers of employee engagement and employee engagement.

Social implications

On the social level, this research will help organizations to understand the drivers for employee engagement and linkages between workplace happiness and employee engagement. It hopes to create more happy workplaces and have good social impact.

Originality/value

This is the first study to look into the function of workplace happiness as a mediator between the drivers of work engagement and work engagement.

• Workplace happiness
• Employee engagement
• Drivers of employee engagement
• Employee wellbeing

Shelke, A.U. and Shaikh, N. (2023), "Mediating role of workplace happiness in enhancing work engagement", Rajagiri Management Journal , Vol. 17 No. 3, pp. 238-253. https://doi.org/10.1108/RAMJ-07-2022-0110

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2022, Ashwini Uttamrao Shelke and Naim Shaikh

Published in Rajagiri Management Journal . Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode

1. Introduction

Happiness has been argued as to be a highly cherished aim in human communities, and people desire to be happy ( Diener, 2000 ). Happiness is a basic human emotion, and most people are content to some degree most of the time ( Diener and Diener, 1996 ). Happiness has piqued philosophers' interest since the dawn of written history ( McMahon, 2006 ), but it has only recently become a subject of psychological research.

Despite the recently increasing attention, the topic of employee well-being has been largely disregarded in management literature ( Erdogan et al. , 2012 ). Empirical studies on workplace happiness are still at dearth as several studies are commonly related to only job satisfaction, and most studies do not clearly show how workplace happiness influences employee engagement levels and majority of these studies are from the western literature. Despite the fact that people spend much of their time at work ( Johnson and Onwuegbuzie, 2004 ), past research reveals that the value of workplace happiness in the modern organizations has been overlooked, with most practices focusing on the firm's productivity. This concentration overlooked one of man's most important characteristics: “Happiness”. As a result, we feel that a key research gap is the lack of attention paid to employee happiness.

This study aims to investigate the factors that influence workplace happiness and employee engagement, as well as the relationship between workplace happiness, drivers of employee engagement and employee engagement while considering workplace happiness as a mediating factor. Based on the findings of this research, a survey will be conducted on a larger sample in order to validate a theoretical model and generalize the findings. The findings of the study show that when an organization applies workplace happiness strategies, it will see a significant increase in employee engagement.

2. Literature review

While happiness has long been recognized as an important component of a person's life, few individuals have addressed workplace happiness as a factor in employee engagement, according to Albrecht (2010) . This assertion underlies the study's significance, since it reveals how employee happiness has long been disregarded in the workplace.

Gulyani and Sharma (2018) , in their research study, analyzed the relationship concerning “total rewards perceptions and work happiness” and the effects of total reward components on employee happiness. The study's findings demonstrated that how employees feel about their overall incentives has a big impact on how engaged and happy they are at work. The study's key finding, in the researcher's opinion, is that financial incentives had a little effect on workers' job satisfaction. An organization can learn a valuable lesson about the importance of rewards in promoting employee engagement. Increased job engagement served as the sole mediator in the correlation between perceived aggregate compensation and “work happiness”, which was closely related to workplace happiness. The study offers crucial recommendations for creating a rewards scheme that boosts worker efficiency and productivity in the developing firms' unstructured work environments.

Singh et al. (2018) investigated the relationships between organizational virtue and job performance metrics, in their study article. Their cross-sectional investigations demonstrated a favorable correlation between organizational virtuousness and task performance, labor intensity, engagement and organizational citizenship behaviors. The purpose of the study was to look into the specific roles that forgiveness, kindness and collective gratitude play in fostering positive employee outcomes. The study's findings demonstrated that work engagement is predicted by employees' perceptions of organizational virtue both directly and indirectly through happiness. Stakeholders and managers can foster organizational virtue in businesses to raise employee satisfaction and encourage a more active workforce.

Researchers Syaa and Hidayatb (2018) looked at how work engagement is impacted by perceived organizational virtue. The researchers' hypothesis, which is based on the social identity theory, is that organizational identification mediates the link between perceived organizational virtue and work engagement. The findings indicate that work engagement, organizational identity and organizational identification were strongly influenced by perceived organizational virtue. Through the study, researchers established that organizational identity fully mediated the association between perceived organizational virtue and work engagement. These results are consistent with the social identity theory, which holds that organizational identity mediates the link between perceived organizational virtue and job satisfaction. Through organizational identification, a good culture may be created that can be used to increase employee engagement.

In light of COVID-19, Mehta (2021) investigated how working from home affects employee happiness and engagement. According to the findings, exogenous factors like more diversity was predicted by WFH (work from home) freedom, WFH comfort and WFH social and psychological safety than endogenous constructs like WFH work engagement. The study's findings, which support past studies, show that work engagement is significantly impacted by autonomy. The study's findings show that people who work remotely, in this example from home, feel a sense of autonomy in their work, and that perception of work engagement is significantly impacted by independence. In order to understand how people feel about themselves, their families and themselves when working from home during COVID-19, the study also examined how people's perceptions of psychosocial safety are shaped. According to the study, WFH work involvement during COVID-19 significantly affects employee satisfaction. The path coefficient between WFH work engagement and psychological safety points to a strong correlation between the two.

Chanana (2020) the goal of the essay is to assess how various companies involved their workforces throughout the coronavirus pandemic. The document provides a summary of various employee engagement strategies. The authors came to the conclusion that these forms of employee engagement techniques boost employee morale and help them feel motivated and loyal to the company during the pandemic situation brought on by the coronavirus.

There appears to be widespread consensus that happy employees are more productive employees. Diener et al. (2008) .

In their book “Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements”, Rath et al. (2010) claim that for most people professional wellbeing is the most significant of the five elements, which include career, social, financial, physical and community wellbeing.

According to Csikszentmihalyi and Seligman (2000) , positive psychology promotes robust psychological health over stress, mental illness and suffering.

According to Halvorsen (2005) , a good or happy employee can deliver amazing achievements, whereas marginal employees tend to hinder the creative and advancement process by dragging out their responsibilities.

Employee engagement, fatigue and happiness in the Indian IT Sector by Indhira and Shani (2014) evaluated the primary factors promoting or inhibiting employee engagement, fatigue, and happiness in ITES personnel. According to the author, the concept of full engagement may offer a practically helpful strategy for enhancing organizational success by integrating employee engagement and psychological well-being. According to studies, both variables have a positive impact on organizational outcomes, and it is theoretically possible that their combined impact is bigger than the effects of the individual variables. This perspective is supported by some preliminary research findings, which demonstrate that the inclusion of psychological well-being, which includes happiness and exhaustion, strengthens the associations between engagement and favorable results. The idea that psychological health is crucial for creating long-term levels of employee engagement also seems to line up with theoretical predictions and prior research findings.

Workplace happiness and employee engagement are seen to be cyclical, with a rise in one leading to an increase in the other. This means that businesses should make sure their employees are satisfied, as this will enhance employee engagement.

Salimath and Kavitha (2015) in their research study, reflected upon the two concepts of employee engagement and organizational effectiveness, which are thought to have an impact on organizational performance. The study's aim was to identify the variables that had the greatest influence on the employees who participated in the survey on employee engagement. Finding out the degree of involvement that employees were experiencing was another goal of the study. A study found a significant link between organizational effectiveness and engagement.

Singh (2016) in her research article examined the numerous factors that influence employee engagement. The study examined numerous employee engagement studies. After reviewing a number of research studies, the author highlights the key factors which can influence employee engagement.

According to the arguments made by Lewis et al . (2012) , an employee must acquire a particular degree of happiness before becoming engaged. These reasons are consistent with the study's findings, confirming that happiness is connected to engagement.

Rampersad (2006) stated that by assisting employees in their development, the organizations have a better possibility of improving the employee's welfare, which leads to employee engagement.

According to Gavin and Mason (2004) , workplace happiness has important implication on employee productivity; a happy employee is more productive than an unhappy one. Employee happiness, they stated, is a crucial aspect of the employee that must be maintained in order to have engaged employees.

According to Hassan and Ahmed (2011) , happy employees are more engaged, whereas unhappy employees are less inclined to commit to their jobs.

Employee assistance almost always leads to greater employee performance, but more importantly, increased employee engagement, according to Ali (2018) .

While studies on work-related well-being and life satisfaction may be found in publications on diverse issues many of these studies fail to analyze the nature and context of employment ( Erdogan et al. , 2012 ).

Happiness in the workplace, according to Hsieh (2010) , has the capacity to provide high business results while also improving the wellbeing of its people. Lyubomirsky et al. (2005) .

According to the existing research, workplace happiness is a necessity for engaged employees, and employee engagement comes before workplace happiness. As a result, it is vital for organizational leaders to assess their employees' worth and design strategies to attract them to stay. Employee happiness should come first before engaging them, according to the appropriate drivers of employee engagement.

3. Theoretical framework

3.1 workplace happiness.

We have been studying a variety of factors that appear to come under the umbrella concept of happiness for a long time. Workplace happiness, job satisfaction organizational citizenship, work engagement, positive and negative emotion, thriving and vitality are just a few of the notions that belong under the wellbeing construct ( Fisher, 2010 ). Without a doubt, the most important and widely used of these characteristics is job satisfaction.

The importance of workplace happiness cannot be overstated Page and Vella-Brodrick (2009) and Grant et al . (2007) . Many concepts in organizational behavior seem to straddle various levels of happiness. Furthermore, while some characteristics of overall workplace well-being are routinely measured and well-measured, other crucial aspects of overall workplace well-being have been completely disregarded. This shows that we have a lot of room to expand our perspectives on and assessments of workplace well-being.

Happiness and wellbeing have been characterized in different ways by philosophers ( Kesebir and Diener, 2008 ). These concepts are defined in a variety of ways, both conceptually and practically, and different authors have used the same phrases in different ways. Some operationalizations and conceptualizations are well-known, while others are newer and less well-known. The primary distinction is between hedonic and eudaimonic perspectives on wellbeing.

Subjective workplace wellbeing is a concept akin to Diener's that includes satisfaction evaluations of one's life as well as moods at work. Eudaimonic wellness is especially significant in the workplace since it encompasses growth, meaningful work and absorption ( Diener and Emmons, 1984 ).

According to Kahneman et al. , we feel happy when we have more positive emotions than negative emotions, as well as the effect of previous pleasant sentiments on current state and satisfaction ( 2005 ).

3.2 Employee engagement

According to Macey and Schneider, the term “work engagement” has gained in popularity recently, yet philosophers coin it differently (2008a , b) . Kahn coined the terms “personal engagement” and “psychological presence” in the workplace ( 1990 , 1992 ). The amount of real physical, mental and psychological self that individuals commit to their work, is referred to as “personal engagement” by Kahn.

According to Schaufeli et al. (2002) , work engagement is a good, fulfilling, work-related state of mind typified by vigor, dedication and immersion. Utrecht Work Engagement Scale, 2002 (UWES) is the most commonly used self-reporting questionnaire to measure it. The UWES employs three scales to assess job involvement: vigor, dedication and absorption. Vigor is described by high levels of energy and mental toughness while working. Being completely engrossed in one's work and experiencing a sense of purpose can be defined as dedication. Absorption is defined as being completely absorbed and content with one's activities, with time passing fast and separation becoming impossible. “At work, I am brimming with enthusiasm”, “I find the work that I perform full of meaning and purpose”, and “When I am working, I forget everything else around me” are few items from the scale.

As per, Claypool (2017) business success is predicted to be fueled by employee engagement, which has been heralded as the next big thing. This enables committed employees to ensure their efficiency at work. Happiness has been cited as one of the factors that boost employee engagement. Employee engagement and happiness are positively associated, according to the data collected.

3.3 Drivers of work engagement

Social support from coworkers, supervisors, communication and reward has all been proven to be beneficial drivers of employee engagement in previous studies. These are the factors that influence employee engagement and can help to reduce job stress ( Schaufeli and Bakker, 2004 , Bakker and Demerouti, 2008 ).

Employees' internal and extrinsic motivations are thought to be influenced by engagement drivers. They contribute to intrinsic motivation by fostering employees' growth. In the first example, job resources address basic human needs like autonomy, connectedness and competence ( Deci and Ryan, 1985 ; Ryan and Frederick, 1997 ). The intrinsic motivating potential of drivers of work engagement is recognized by job characteristics theory ( Hackman, 1980 ).

Extrinsic motivational factors may also play a part in work engagement drivers ( Meijman and Mulder, 1998 ). It is more likely that the task accomplished and the work goal will be achieved in such an environment.

A link between drivers of engagement and work engagement has been discovered in several research studies, reinforcing these beliefs on the motivational usefulness of drivers of engagement. Hakanen et al . (2006) discovered that task authority, knowledge, supervisory support, innovative environment were all positively linked to work engagement in a sample of roughly 2000 Finnish teachers. Llorens et al . (2006) obtained conceptually comparable results in a Spanish environment. In a group of female managers and professionals at a major Turkish bank, Koyuncu et al . (2006) explored the causes and consequences of job engagement.

3.3.1 Theoretical model

Figure 1 theoretical model diagram represents constructs of the study and their relationship. It contains independent variables (IV), dependent variables (DV), mediator variables (MED) or indirect effects, as shown in the diagram below. In this model, organizational drivers act as a predictor or independent variable, workplace happiness acts as a mediator and employee engagement acts as an outcome or dependent variable.

4. Objectives and hypotheses

4.1 objectives.

To identify the factors influencing the workplace happiness and employee engagement.

To study the relationship of workplace happiness and employee engagement.

To examine workplace happiness as a mediator between drivers of employee engagement and employee engagement.

4.2 Hypotheses

There is an insignificant relationship between workplace happiness and employee engagement.

Workplace happiness does not enact as a mediator between drivers of employee engagement and employee engagement.

5. Research methodology and design

5.1 sample design.

Sample size: 104 (Ref.  Krejcie and Morgan, 1970 ) with 95% confidence interval

Sample element: HR managers, team managers and subordinates.

Sampling technique: stratified random sampling

5.2 Research methodology

To test the link between exogenous (independent) and endogenous (dependent) variables, we used the Smart PLS V 3.2.7 software program.

5.3 Data collection

5.3.1 instrument used in the study.

A thorough investigation of the literature review reveals the numerous scales that have been used to conduct research on the variables mentioned. However UWES ( Schaufeli and Bakker, 2003 ) is the most commonly used self-reporting questionnaire to measure work engagement. It includes items to assess the three types of engagement dimensions: vigor, devotion and absorption. According to the validity and reliability scores assigned to these studies, the internal consistency of all the constructs was demonstrated to be satisfactory.

The draft instrument was sent to five researchers for face and content validity testing and three academicians from human resource management domain and two practicing executives working as HR managers in IT organizations in India). This was a fully voluntary endeavor, and the experts received no compensation for their opinion. Experts were briefed about the study's aims and the reasoning for choosing specific variables. Following the expert's advice, appropriate revisions to the draft instrument were made, and it was distributed to the targeted samples after being converted into an online questionnaire.

5.4 Data analysis

5.4.1 demographics of the sample respondents (n = 104).

The sample size for pilot study was selected keeping in mind that, it would help in presenting target population. Data were collected from 104 respondents from an Indian IT industry. Out of the total respondents, 61.04% are male and 38.96 are female respondents, out of which 89.08% fall in the age group of 21–35. 55.83% respondents reported that they are never married and 70.47% of total sample size hold bachelor's degree; 100% respondents are working as full time employees. A total of 34.49% said they are working on team leader level and 62.78% respondents are associated with an organization for 1–3 years at the reported time.

Table 1 above presents construct wise reliability and validity of the data. It can be seen that alpha is a reliability coefficient. It is a standard statistic for determining a psychometric test's internal consistency or reliability. Cronbach's alpha for most of the constructions is greater than 0.8, which is good, according to the above table. The test result confirmed that the instrument is consistent and that the data are accurate.

Figure 2 presents construct wise correlation matrix . As per the analysis of the above correlation table, dimensions are correlated and statistically significant at least 5% level.

5.4.2 Partial least square structural equation (PLS-SEM) model

PLS-SEM is one of the foremost statistical techniques that gives researchers the ability to observe variables and their relationships ( Hair et al. , 2017 ). The reason for using PLS-SEM technique is that it converges factor analysis and multiple regression and allows the researcher to benefit from using small sample sizes and generally gaining higher levels of statistical power even in case of complex models. Table 2 below presents assessment of outer loadings. Outer loadings of all indicators exceed the cross-loadings, thereby fulfilling the criteria for establishing discriminant validity.

Above tables, Table 3 and 4 presented the discriminant validity of the data set; it shows that this study's discriminant validity is established by meeting the stipulated criterion.

Tables 5 and 6 depicts R square and F square values, indicated the effect is statistically significant.

Above Figure 3 presents path co-efficient of the study variables.

The study used 2,000 bootstrap subsamples and derived t -values. The route coefficients of the direct effects for variable relationships are shown in Table 7 below.

Table 8 presents indirect effect of variable relationship.

5.4.3 Hypothesis outcome

There is a significant relationship between workplace happiness and employee engagement.

Workplace happiness enacts as a mediator between drivers of employee engagement and employee engagement.

5.4.4 Findings

Study identified the key factors which can influence workplace happiness and employee engagement. Intrinsic motivation, work engagement, supportive organizational experiences and unsupportive organizational experiences can have significant influence on workplace happiness. Vigor, dedication and absorption can significantly impact employee engagement.

Study result shows that there is a positive relationship between drivers of employee engagement and workplace happiness.

Drivers of Employee Engagement lead to employee engagement.

Workplace happiness enacts as mediator between drivers of employee engagement and employee engagement.

Practical implication: This study shows that workplace happiness has a mediating effect on both drivers of employee engagement and employee engagement; as a result, organizations should consider the function of workplace happiness as a mediating factor when implementing drivers of employee engagement and employee engagement.

5.4.5 Research limitations

Current study followed cross section analysis where establishing causality is difficult; however, there is a scope to do longitudinal study on the same phenomenon.

Research data are produced through the online surveys. Possible sources of bias may be selective memory, attribution and/or exaggeration.

This study covers specific variables of workplace happiness and drivers of employee engagement other variables remains unaddressed, such as COVID-19 related impacts:

The nature of industry and sample size was limited.

5.4.6 Recommendations for future research

Future research should focus on other HR factors to have a better understanding of this construct.

Despite recently increasing attention, empirical studies on well-being at work are still lacking ( Erdogan et al. , 2012 ).

Therefore there is a scope to develop a single instrument to assess all of these components.

Social wellbeing at work has wide scope of research.

With rare exceptions, happiness is not a term that has been extensively used in academic research.

Finally, longitudinal research is proposed across organizations to examine workplace happiness interventions for promoting employee engagement.

6. Conclusions

According to the findings, there is a considerable link in workplace happiness and employee engagement, and it works as a mediator between employee engagement drivers and employee engagement. It can also significantly contribute to the literature on workplace happiness and employee engagement by establishing the relationship of drivers of employee engagement and workplace happiness and employee engagement, demonstrating that while employee engagement is important to the organization, whether or not an employee becomes engaged is determined by workplace happiness.

The establishment of a positive relationship between these three factors suggests that an organization will reap significant benefits when it implements drivers of employee engagement alongside workplace happiness practices to boost employee engagement, resulting in more engaged employees and faster growth.

Theoretical model diagram

Correlation matrix: construct wise

Assessment of structural path significance in bootstrapping

Construct wise reliability and validity