Happiness Leads To Productivity? No?!?

[M.D. Holloway]

Happiness Leads To Productivity? Not So, Says Psychologist
By Jessica Stillman December 10th, 2007 @ 12:49 pm


You can always count on the folks over at the Freakonomics blog to shake up the conventional thinking, and today they’ve done it again. Everyone knows that if employees are happy they’ll also be productive, right? Hence all the corporate efforts to improve morale. But new research suggests the truth of the matter is that the kind of people who are happy make better employees.

Freakonomics writes:
In a new paper called “Is the job satisfaction–job performance relationship spurious? A meta-analytic examination,” [Wright State University psychologist Nathan Bowling] re-assesses conclusions from five previous meta-analyses of the Big Five personality traits. He also conducts his own meta-analysis of the issue, focusing on studies that used data from thousands of employees and controlled for work-related self-esteem (how valuable employees think they are) and locus of control (how much they think they’ll be rewarded for a job well done).

His conclusion: My study shows that a cause and effect relationship does not exist between job satisfaction and performance. Instead, the two are related because both satisfaction and performance are the result of employee personality characteristics, such as self-esteem, emotional stability, extroversion and conscientiousness.

Well then, that’s a lot of money wasted on in-house yoga lessons and cheerful office design. Of course whether such perks (or even less extravagant ones) help retain talent is still an open question.

but then again, most of the folks that are always pissed off never seem to get anything done...

[equality72521]

How true. I'm surprised this took a study to figure out. Where has good old fashioned common sense gone? It doesn't take a scientist to know that unhappy will be unhappy no matter what their boss does. Some people will just plain piss and moan about life because that is there way of life.

[p911dad]

Hmmmm that is very interesting and I don't disagree with it. In regard to retention of employees, two weeks ago I was invited to a focus group on designing a leadership classroom curriculum. We had two consultants from LV that had the contract to lead the group, and one of them made an assertion that I took home with me: a very large percentage of employees that leave are leaving the boss, not the job. In other words, the way your bosses are interacting with, rewarding, encouraging and leading your employees has a huge effect on your bottom line(losing good employees is very expensive). So maybe digging down a little will reveal that you can dispense with the yoga and free starbucks, but keep the *********s out of the ranks of the leadership. Just don't blindly promote big producers to supervision without considering that production and supervision are two very different jobs, and being good at one doesn't guarantee good performance as a leader. And leadership does effect morale and employee retention, more than money or other tangible rewards over time.

[WolfeMacleod]

I usually get the most stuff done when I'm pissed off. Which usually has something to do with my assembly guy not having his act toigether and/or wanting time off. He likes a lot of time off. (like today...)..although he doesn't need it. So I give him time off, and then work like mad so he's got double or triple the amount of work he normally would.
Screw him. If he's going to take time off, he's going to earn it... Lazy SOB... Took most of a week off because he had a cold. 2 weeks ago..

[911Rob]

I'm always pissed off and I'm the most productive person I've ever met?

Grrrrr!