6
The Research We’ve Ignored About Happiness at Work
By André Spicer and Carl Cederström
Recently, we found ourselves in motivational seminars at our respective places of employment. Both events preached the gospel of happiness. In one, a speaker explained that happiness could make you healthier, kinder, more productive, and even more likely to get promoted.
The other seminar involved mandatory dancing of the wilder kind. It was supposed to fill our bodies with joy. It also prompted one of us to sneak out and take refuge in the nearest bathroom.
Ever since a group of scientists switched the lights on and off at the Hawthorne factory in the mid-1920s, scholars and executives alike have been obsessed with increasing their employees’ productivity. In particular, happiness as a way to boost productivity seems to have gained traction in corporate circles as of late.1 Firms spend money on happiness coaches, team-building exercises, gameplays, funsultants, and chief happiness officers (yes, you’ll find one of those at Google). These activities and titles may appear jovial or even bizarre, but companies are taking them extremely seriously. Should they?
When you look closely at the research—which we did after the dancing incident—it’s not clear that encouraging happiness at work is always a good idea. Sure, there is evidence to suggest that happy employees are less likely to leave, more likely to satisfy customers, are safer, and more likely to engage in citizenship behavior.2 However, we also discovered alternate findings, which indicates that some of the taken-for-granted wisdoms about what happiness can achieve in the workplace are mere myths.
To start, we don’t really know what happiness is or how to measure it. Measuring happiness is about as easy as taking the temperature of the soul or determining the exact color of love. As historian Darrin M. McMahon shows in his illuminating book Happiness: A History, ever since the sixth century BC, when Croesus is said to have quipped “No one who lives is happy,” this slippery concept has served as a proxy for all sorts of other concepts, from pleasure and joy to plenitude and contentment. Being happy in the moment, Samuel Johnson said, could be achieved only when drunk.3 For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, happiness was to lie in a boat, drifting aimlessly, feeling like a God (not exactly the picture of productivity). There are other definitions of happiness, too, but they are neither less nor more plausible than those of Johnson or Rousseau.
And just because we have more-advanced technology today doesn’t mean we’re any closer to pinning down a definition, as Will Davies reminds us in his book The Happiness Industry. He concludes that even as we have developed more-advanced techniques for measuring emotions and predicting behaviors, we have also adopted increasingly simplified notions of what it means to be human, let alone what it means to pursue happiness. A brain scan that lights up may seem like it’s telling us something concrete about an elusive emotion, for example, when it actually isn’t.
Happiness doesn’t necessarily lead to increased productivity. A stream of research shows some contradictory results about the relationship between happiness—which is often defined as “job satisfaction”—and productivity.4 One study on British supermarkets even suggests there might be a negative correlation between job satisfaction and corporate productivity: The more miserable the employees were, the better the profits.5 Sure, other studies have pointed in the opposite direction, saying that there is a link between feeling content with work and being productive. But even these studies, when considered as a whole, demonstrate a relatively weak correlation.
Happiness can also be exhausting. The pursuit of happiness may not be wholly effective, but it doesn’t really hurt, right? Wrong. Ever since the eighteenth century, people have been pointing out that the demand to be happy brings with it a heavy burden, a responsibility that can never be perfectly fulfilled. Focusing on happiness can actually make us feel less happy.
A psychological experiment recently demonstrated this.6 The researchers asked their subjects to watch a film that would usually make them happy: a figure skater winning a medal. But before watching the film, half of the group was asked to read a statement aloud about the importance of happiness in life. The other half did not read the statement. The researchers were surprised to find that those who had read the statement were actually less happy after watching the film. Essentially, when happiness becomes a duty, it can make people feel worse if they fail to accomplish it.
This is particularly problematic at the present era, in which happiness is preached as a moral obligation.7 As the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner put it, “Unhappiness is not only unhappiness; it is, worse yet, a failure to be happy.”8
Happiness won’t necessarily get you through the workday. If you’ve worked in a frontline customer service job, like a call center or a fast food restaurant, you know that being upbeat is not optional—it’s compulsory. And as tiring as that may be, it makes some sense when you’re in front of customers.
But today, many non-customer-facing employees are also asked to be upbeat. This could have some unforeseen consequences. One study found that people who were in a good mood were worse at picking out acts of deception than those who were in a bad mood.9 Another piece of research found that people who were angry during a negotiation achieved better outcomes than people who were happy.10 This suggests that being happy may not be good for all aspects of our work or for jobs that rely heavily on certain abilities. In fact, in some cases, happiness can actually make our performance worse.
Happiness could damage your relationship with your boss. If we believe that work is where we will find happiness, we might, in some cases, start to mistake our boss for a surrogate spouse or parent. In her study of a media company, researcher Susanne Ekmann found that those who expected work to make them happy would often become emotionally needy.11 They wanted their managers to provide them with a steady stream of recognition and emotional reassurance. And when they didn’t receive the expected emotional response (which was often), these employees felt neglected and started overreacting. Even minor setbacks were interpreted as being rejected by their bosses. So in many ways, expecting a boss to bring happiness makes us emotionally vulnerable.
Happiness could also hurt your relationships with friends and family. In her book Cold Intimacies, sociology professor Eva Illouz points out a strange side effect of people trying to live more emotionally at work: They started to treat their private lives like work tasks. The people she spoke with saw their personal lives as something that needed to be carefully administered using a range of tools and techniques they had learned from corporate life. As a result, their home lives became increasingly cold and calculating. It’s no wonder then that many of the people she spoke with preferred to spend time at work rather than at home.
Happiness could make losing your job that much more devastating. When we expect the workplace to provide happiness and meaning in our lives, we become dangerously dependent on it. When studying professionals, sociology professor Richard Sennett noticed that people who saw their employer as an important source of personal meaning were those who became most devastated if they were fired.12 When these people lost their jobs, they weren’t just losing an income—they were losing the promise of happiness. This suggests that, when we see our work as a great source of happiness, we make ourselves emotionally vulnerable during periods of change. In an era of constant corporate restructuring, this can be dangerous.
Happiness could also make you selfish. Being happy makes you a better person, right? Not so, according to an interesting piece of research.13 Participants were given lottery tickets and then given a choice about how many tickets they wanted to give to others and how many they wished to keep for themselves. Those who were in a good mood ended up keeping more tickets for themselves. This implies that, at least in some settings, being happy doesn’t necessarily mean we will be generous. In fact, the opposite could be true.
Finally, happiness could also make you lonely. In one experiment, psychologists asked a number of people to keep a detailed diary for two weeks. What they found at the end of the study was that those who greatly valued happiness felt lonelier than those who valued happiness less.14 It seems that focusing too much on the pursuit of happiness can make us feel disconnected from other people.
So why, contrary to all of this evidence, do we continue to hold on to the belief that happiness can improve a workplace? The answer, according to one study, comes down to aesthetics and ideology. Happiness is a convenient idea that looks good on paper (the aesthetic part). But it’s also an idea that helps us shy away from more serious issues at work, such as conflicts and workplace politics (the ideological part).15
When we assume that happy workers are better workers, we may sweep more uncomfortable questions under the rug, especially since happiness is often seen as a choice. It becomes a convenient way of dealing with negative attitudes, party poopers, miserable bastards, and other unwanted characters in corporate life. Invoking happiness, in all its ambiguity, is an excellent way of getting away with controversial decisions, such as choosing to let people go. As Barbara Ehrenreich points out in her book Bright-Sided, positive messages about happiness have proved particularly popular in times of crisis and mass layoffs.
Given all these potential problems, we think there is a strong case for rethinking our expectation that work should always make us happy. It can be exhausting, make us overreact, drain our personal life of meaning, increase our vulnerability, and make us more gullible, selfish, and lonely. Most striking is that consciously pursuing happiness can actually drain the sense of joy we usually get from the really good things we experience.
In reality, work—like all other aspects of life—is likely to make us feel a wide range of emotions. If your job feels depressing and meaningless, it might be because it is depressing and meaningless. Pretending otherwise can just make it worse. Happiness, of course, is a great thing to experience, but it can’t be willed into existence. Maybe the less we seek to actively pursue happiness through our jobs, the more likely we will be to actually experience a sense of joy in our work—a joy that is spontaneous and pleasurable rather than constructed and oppressive. But most important, we will be better equipped to cope with work in a sober manner. To see it for what it is and not what we—whether as executives, employees, or dancing motivational seminar leaders—pretend that it is.
ANDRÉ SPICER is a professor of organizational behavior at Cass Business School in London. CARL CEDERSTRÖM is an associate professor of organization theory at Stockholm University. They are the coauthors of The Wellness Syndrome (Polity 2015).
Notes
1.C. D. Fisher, “Happiness at Work.” International Journal of Management Reviews 12, no. 4 (December 2010): 384–412.
2.Ibid.
3.D. M. McMahon, Happiness: A History. (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006.)
4.Fisher, “Happiness at Work.”
5.McMahon, Happiness: A History.
6.I. B. Mauss et al., “Can Seeking Happiness Make People Happy? Paradoxical Effects of Valuing Happiness.” Emotion 11, no. 4 (August 2011): 807–815.
7.P. Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy, tr. Steven Rendall. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011.)
8.Ibid, 5.
9.J. P. Forgas and R. East, “On Being Happy and Gullible: Mood Effects on Skepticism and the Detection of Deception.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 44 (2008): 1362–1367.
10.G. A. van Kleef et al., “The Interpersonal Effects of Anger and Happiness in Negotiations.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 86, no. 1 (2004): 57–76.
11.S. Ekman, “Fantasies About Work as Limitless Potential—How Managers and Employees Seduce Each Other through Dynamics of Mutual Recognition.” Human Relations 66, no. 9 (December 2012): 1159–1181.
12.R. Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in New Capitalism. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000.)
13.H. B. Tan and J. Forgas, “When Happiness Makes Us Selfish, But Sadness Makes Us Fair: Affective Influences on Interpersonal Strategies in the Dictator Game.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46, no. 3 (May 2010): 571–576.
14.I. B. Mauss, “The Pursuit of Happiness Can Be Lonely.” Emotion 12, no. 5 (2012): 908–912.
15.G. E. Ledford, “Happiness and Productivity Revisited.” Journal of Organizational Behavior 20, no. 1 (January 1999): 25–30.
Adapted from content posted on hbr.org on July 21, 2015 (product #H027TW).