The Economist's Schumpeter column this week takes on a recurring fad:
Lord Percy of Newcastle, Britain’s minister of education in 1924-29, was no fan of the fad for happy-clappy “progressive” education that spread among the country’s schools on his watch. He declared that it was all nonsense: “a child ought to be brought up to expect unhappiness.” This columnist feels the same suspicion of the fashion for happy-clappy progressive management theory that is rushing through the world’s companies and even some governments. ...
A weird assortment of gurus and consultancies is pushing the cult of happiness. Shawn Achor, who has taught at Harvard University, now makes a living teaching big companies around the world how to turn contentment into a source of competitive advantage. One of his rules is to create “happiness hygiene”. Just as we brush our teeth every day, goes his theory, we should think positive thoughts and write positive e-mails. ...
Disneyland is still “the happiest place on Earth”. American firms regularly bid their customers to “have a nice day”. One of the sharpest books published on the phenomenon is “The Managed Heart” from 1983, in which Arlie Hochschild, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, noted that many employers demanded “emotional labour” from workers in the form of smiles and other expressions of “positive emotion”. Firms are keen to extract still more happiness from their employees as the service sector plays an ever greater role in the economy. ...
Various academic studies suggest that “emotional labour” can bring significant costs. ... But the biggest problem with the cult of happiness is that it is an unacceptable invasion of individual liberty.
I concur. As I detailed in my article, Privately Ordered Participatory Management, the evidence does not support the happiness cult:
Over two decades ago, Nobel economist Kenneth Arrow opined that “the empirical evidence, such as it is, points to very little relation between the morale of workers and their performance.” Kenneth J. Arrow, The Limits of Organization 76 (1974). The intervening years have done little to change that conclusion. A more recent literature review likewise concluded that there is “simply no direct connection between job satisfaction and subsequent productivity.” Edwin A. Locke et al., Participation in Decisionmaking: When Should it be Used?, 14 Org. Dynamics 67, 71 (1986). Accord Thomas A. Kochan et al., The Transformation of American Industrial Relations (rev. ed. 1994) (same); Oliver E. Williamson, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism 270 (1985) (same); Tom Juravich, Empirical Research on Employee Involvement: A Critical Review for Labor, 21 Lab. Stud. J. 51, 56 (1996) (based on research to date no proof that “happy workers are necessarily more productive”); Charles D. Watts, Jr., In Critique of a Reductivist Conception and Examination of “The Just Organization,” 50 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 1515, 1518 (1993) (“I do not see the propagation of just or participative organizations that one would expect if these benefits [i.e., increased job satisfaction etc...]” were as significant as the proponents of participatory management suggest); cf. Alan Hyde, In Defense of Employee Ownership, 67 Chi-Kent L. Rev. 159, 201 (1991).
Because that article was written circa 1997, of course, there may be more recent research. And so there is. But the more recent research is consistent with my rather pessimistic view:
Job satisfaction has traditionally been thought of by most business managers to be key in determining job performance. The prevailing thought is if you are satisfied and happy in your work, you will perform better than someone who isn’t happy at work.
Not so, according to a research project by Nathan Bowling, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychology at Wright State. His findings, which will be published soon in the Journal of Vocational Behavior, show that although satisfaction and performance are related to each other, satisfaction does not cause performance.
“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,” he explained.
Bowling, who specializes in industrial and organizational psychology, said his findings are based on reviewing data from several thousand employees compiled over several decades. His subjects, mostly in the United States, involved several hundred different organizations.
Bowling said the public, and even researchers, can get confused over the relationship between job satisfaction and job performance. “Just because two things are related doesn’t mean that one causes the other. For example, there is a relationship between the amount of ice cream sold on a given day and the crime rate for that day. On days when ice cream sales are high, the number of crimes committed will also tend to be high. But this doesn’t mean that ice cream sales cause crime. Rather, ice cream sales and crime are related because each is the result of the outdoor temperature. Similarly, satisfaction and performance are related because each is the result of employee personality.”
