Employees who are happy with their work are healthier, more productive and more likely to stay. They also take better care of their patients and co-workers.
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| Jo Manion |
Editor's note: This article is excerpted and adapted from Create a Positive Health Care Workplace! Practical Strategies to Retain Today's Workforce and Find Tomorrow's, a new book by Jo Manion (Chicago: AHA Press, 2005).
Why should we be concerned about whether people are happy at work? After all, there certainly seem to be more important issues that require our attention in the workplace, such as increasing productivity, ensuring a high-quality patient/customer experience, and establishing effective working relationships, to mention only a few. The truth is that all of these challenges can be better met by people who are happy and who enjoy their work. The business case for happiness is dramatically simple and clear-cut, and it is based on solid research evidence.
The benefits of a workplace characterized by people who are happy seem almost self-evident. These advantages include higher productivity, better outcomes, increased employee retention, healthier employees and a more positive environment for patients and families.
A study by M.E.P. Seligman, published in his book Authentic Happiness, measured the amount of positive emotion among 272 employees and followed their job performance over 18 months. Happier people went on to get better evaluations and higher pay. In a large-scale study of Australian youths across 15 years, happiness made gainful employment and higher income more likely. D.G. Myers, in his book The Pursuit of Happiness, notes that "compared to depressed employees, those with higher well-being have lower medical costs, higher work efficiency and less absenteeism." M. Csikszentmihalyi, in Good Business, points out that "a business organization whose employees are happy is more productive, has a higher morale, and has a lower turnover."
In trying to determine which comes first, happiness or productivity, researchers induced happiness experimentally in the laboratory and then examined later performance. It turns out that when adults and children are put into a good mood first, they select higher goals, perform better and persist longer on a variety of laboratory tests, such as solving anagrams. Research conducted by B.L. Fredrickson has also found that people in a more positive mood actually think more broadly and can solve problems more readily. (See "The Value of Positive Emotions," American Scientist 91[7].) Both of these abilities affect productivity.
Positive mood has been directly linked to a range of different performance-related behaviors, including greater helping behavior, enhanced creativity, integrative thinking, inductive reasoning, more efficient decision-making, greater cooperation and the use of more successful negotiation strategies. (See J.M. George, "Emotions and Leadership: The Role of Emotional Intelligence," Human Relations 53[8], and P. Totterdell, et al., "Evidence of Mood Linkage in Work Groups," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74[6].)
A negative mood moves us into an entirely different way of thinking from a positive mood. When we are feeling negative, we seem to become critics of each other; negativity engenders a warrior mode of thinking, a win-lose approach to problems. We concentrate on what is wrong and attempt to correct it. Conversely, a positive mood stimulates people into a way of thinking that is creative, tolerant, constructive, generous, undefensive and lateral. The focus is not on what is wrong but on what is right. (See Authentic Happiness.)
Even patient care outcomes suffer when employees are unhappy. "Results from a Press Ganey study," writes E. Strachota and colleagues, "found that hospitals with the lowest employee satisfaction had the lowest patient satisfaction, and hospitals with the highest employee satisfaction had the highest patient satisfaction." (See "Reasons Registered Nurses Leave or Change Employment Status," Journal of Nursing Administration 33[2].)
Studies of business teams are fascinating. M. Losada studied 60 business teams that were meeting to determine their annual strategic plans. Fifteen teams were considered high performers, 26 teams were medium performers and the remaining 19 teams were low performers. The performance categories were based on three criteria: profitability, customer service rankings and the number of positive performance appraisal evaluations received within the team. The planning sessions were videotaped, and all speech acts were coded for three different attributes: whether the act was positive or negative, whether it involved inquiry or advocacy, and finally, whether it was self or other related. The results were astounding. The high-performing teams had the broadest range and widest repertoire of behaviors. They had a significantly higher number of positive acts. The low-performing teams had a higher level of negativity, and they lost their ability to question and became stuck in self-absorbed advocacy. They lost their behavioral flexibility altogether. The clear conclusion is that the more positive the team, the more effective it is. (See "The Complex Dynamics of High Performance Teams," Mathematical and Computer Modeling 30[1999].)
Positivity and positive emotions are also related to flourishing, or finding the "good life," and the development of a broad repertoire of skills. Barbara Fredrickson has studied positive emotions extensively, and she has proposed a causal theory of positive emotion. (See "The Value of Positive Emotions," cited earlier, as well as "What Good Are Positive Emotions?" Review of General Psychology 2[3], and "The Role of Positive Emotions in Positive Psychology," American Psychologist 56[3].) In its study of emotions, traditional psychology has come to conclude that emotions engender thought-action tendencies. For example, anger tells us that our boundaries have been invaded and prepares us to defend ourselves. Fear induces a reaction that brings us to remove ourselves from dangerous situations. Sadness prepares us for loss. The positive emotions have only begun to be understood. Fredrickson's extensive research leads her to suggest that the purpose of positive emotions is to help us to develop our resilience and broaden our repertoire of skills. The positive emotions build and deepen our physical, emotional, social and intellectual resources. Positive emotions, therefore, clearly produce benefits in the workplace.
Just one example can illustrate this point. When we feel positive emotion, we are more approachable to others and build good relationships with other people, thus broadening our social resources. The impact in the workplace is clear. Improved social resources lead to higher levels of teamwork, cooperation and supportive behavior. All of these outcomes are desperately needed in today's demanding working environments.
It is almost impossible to sort out whether higher job satisfaction makes you happier or a happy disposition makes you more satisfied with your job. Clearly, however, these two factors are closely interrelated. Happier people are more satisfied with their jobs, and job satisfaction is clearly linked to employee retention. Engagement and commitment among employees are related to their attitude toward their work and have an influence on retention rates. (See M. Buckingham and C. Coffman, First, Break All the Rules; B. Kaye and S. Jordan-Evans, Love 'em or Lose 'em; and Kaye and Jordan-Evans, "Retention in Tough Times," Training and Development 56[1].)
In addition, happier people form more positive connections with others. Happier people are friendlier and others gravitate toward them. A happier workforce clearly leads to a higher level of effective organizational commitment, as one of the reasons that people stay in their jobs is because they like their co-workers. Employees who are happier are not only looking for settings with a good work environment; they also help to create that environment.
A great deal of research in positive psychology has focused on the relationship between positive emotions and health status. Although health status does not seem to be directly linked to a person's perception of happiness, there is no question that overall happy people are healthier than unhappy people. "Optimism and hope cause better resistance to depression when bad events strike; better performance at work, particularly in challenging jobs; and better physical health," writes Seligman in Authentic Happiness. Research studies have also shown that happiness and other positive emotions can actually undo some of the adverse physiological effects of negative emotions, such as the effect of adrenalin released in response to fear or threat. Experiments on nonhuman primates have shown that recurrent emotion-related cardiovascular activity injures the inner walls of the arteries and can initiate atherosclerosis. In empirical studies, it has been found that positive emotions reduced the amount of time the negative emotion had an impact on the cardiovascular reactivity that occurs after negative emotion. (See Fredrickson's "The Value of Positive Emotions.")
Positive emotions also seem to fuel resiliency. A study was conducted on students who had been tested for resiliency and optimism shortly before the terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001. The students were interviewed again within days after the Sept. 11 attacks, and more than 70 percent of the participants reported feeling depressed. Yet, those participants who had been identified as resilient during the earlier interviews also expressed strong positive emotions immediately after the attacks and were half as likely to be depressed as those participants who had been identified earlier as being nonresilient. The statistical analysis of the study's results showed that the tendency to feel more positive emotion buffered the resilient people against depression. Resilient participants expressed gratitude about the good things they had learned from the crisis and felt optimistic about the future. (See "The Value of Positive Emotions.")
Study after study has shown that chronic negative emotions, especially anger and depression, correlate with a broad range of disorders and diseases ranging from back pain and headaches to heart disease and cancer. For example, one remarkable long-term study has been widely reported. At the beginning of the study in the 1930s, almost 200 young Catholic nuns were asked to write a personal essay when they entered the novitiate at the age of 20. Many wrote about their lives and the reason they chose to become nuns. Their essays were archived and eventually came to light during the 1990s as part of a larger study on aging and Alzheimer's disease. Researchers read the essays and scored them for positive emotional content, recording specific instances of happiness, interest, love and hope. The findings were quite remarkable: "The nuns who expressed the most positive emotions," writes Fredrickson in "The Value of Positive Emotions," "lived up to 10 years longer than those who expressed the fewest. This gain in life expectancy is considerably larger than the gain achieved by those who quit smoking." Healthier employees translate to a number of advantages in the workplace, including lower levels of absenteeism, less illness and therefore lower medical benefit costs, and potentially longer tenure on the job because of overall wellness.
It seems almost self-evident that happier employees contribute to a more positive patient care environment. Patients quickly and easily pick up on the moods of the people who care for them. Certainly, the quality of interactions among employees in the various departments is also a critical factor in the patient care environment. The research on emotional intelligence clearly documents that emotions are highly contagious from person to person, especially from manager to employee. (See C. Cherniss and D. Goleman, The Emotionally Intelligent Workplace; D. Goleman, Emotional Intelligence; and Goleman, et al., Primal Leadership.)
Furthermore, some research suggests that happy people are more altruistic than their unhappy counterparts. Happy people are likely to be more giving, not just of money but of time and emotion as well. In laboratory studies, both adults and children who are happy display more empathy and are more willing to donate money to those in need. Although you would think that people who have experienced adversity in their lives would identify with the suffering of others and behave more generously, this assumption is not necessarily true. When we are happy, we are less self-focused, we like others more, and we are more willing to share ourselves and our good fortune. It turns out that looking out for No. 1 is more characteristic of sadness than of well-being. (See Authentic Happiness.)
The strong business case for happiness at work is clear. In spite of the corporate scandals in today's world and the apparent increasing negativity in the workplace, many organizations work hard to create an environment that is a challenging and enjoyable place to work. "Contrary to common perception," writes Csikszentmihalyi in Good Business, "there are many successful executives who understand that 'good business' involves more than making money, and who take the responsibility for making their firms an engine for enhancing the quality of life."
Jo Manion, Ph.D., is president of Manion & Associates, an organizational development consulting practice in Oviedo, Fla. She is also an occasional contributor to H&HN OnLine and speaks widely on leadership issues.
For more information on Create a Positive Health Care Workplace! by Jo Manion, please visit www.ahaonlinestore.com or call AHA order services at (800) 242-2626 and ask for item no. 088177.
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This article 1st appeared on August 2, 2005 in HHN Magazine online site.
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