The Research We’ve Ignored About Happiness at Work; Harvard Business Review, 7/21/15

Andre Spicer and Carl Cederstrom, Harvard Business Review; The Research We’ve Ignored About Happiness at Work:

"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 increased traction in corporate circles as of late. 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 actually 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. 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 Darrin M. McMahon shows in his illuminating study Happiness: A History, ever since the 6th Century B.C., when Croseus is said to have quipped “No one who lives is happy,” we have seen this slippery concept being a proxy for all sorts of other concepts, from pleasure and joy to plenitude and contentment."