Why happy managers perform better

This is an age-old conundrum in management- do happy workers perform better?

Decades of research and empirical evidence have been unable to establish a strong link between psychological well being, intrinsic job satisfaction and manager’s performance.

Recently,using a unique methodology, fresh empirical evidence and a definitive analysis of previous theory and research, researchers have started supporting the original ‘happy productive worker’ thesis.

An Australian study of 19 organisations has yielded strong evidence to support the existence of a clear relationship between managers’ job-related psychological well being, intrinsic job satisfaction and performance. Middle managers were surveyed across a variety of public agencies and private and multinational companies in Western Australia. The findings establish that positive psychological disposition and intrinsic satisfaction with a job is a great motivator for people to perform.

Happy managers seem to be more effective compared to their miserable compatriots, especially at motivating employees. Since the main role of managers is to achieve organisational objectives through people, this is an important issue for all organisations to address. Research, including my own, provides rigorous and specific data to support the proposition that happy managers perform better.

Managers’ jobs can be changed to enhance or avoid a decline in happiness because their performance is impacting, as never before, on organisational productivity and economic prosperity of nation states. Extraordinary shifts in the global corporate environment mean maangers’ personal troubles’ have now become public concerns.

The emerging concept of Positive Organisational Scholarship (POS) is countering such forces by developing ways to create positive human and organisational well being. POS serves as a means of using the research to discover ways organisations can improve people’s psychological well being and in particular, offers advice on how changes in psychological well being and job satisfaction can assist in identifying what can be done to promote a healthier and more productive work environment for managers.

POS has an affirmative bias towards the health model’s capacity to discover and maintain ways that organisations can improve people’s working lives. From this perspective, employee health and well being are seen in terms of the presence of the potential for growth, optimism, contentment and actualisation – not simply as the absence of dysfunctional behaviour. The time has come to move away from negative forms of psychology (based on a ‘deficit model’) and affirm managers’ future by embracing the ‘happy-performing managers’ proposition.

Factors such as pressure and stress begun to take a heavy toll on people’s lives today. High-profile cases involving people such as South Australian premier, Don Dunstan, in the late 1970′s – who called a media conference in his pyjamas to announce his resignation – and more recently, the resignations of New South Wales opposition leader, John Brogden, and former Western Australia premier, Geoff Gallop, highlight the effects of heavy workload resulting in depressive illness. Others suffer in silence.

In today’s management, it is imperative to be more attentive to enchancing the positive emotions of employees. The ‘happy productive worker’ assumption spurred the human relations movement in the 1960′s. In the 1970′s, some researchers suggested that causation flowed in the opposite direction, in that performance led to job satisfaction.

The pendulum has now swung firmly back in support of the ‘happy-productive worker’ thesis, however, as evidenced by the current popularity of the new science of happiness. Researchers had earlier not established strong empirical support for the link between employees’ happiness and their performance. New studies provide comprehensive, robust evidence to support the existence of a relationship between one set of employees’ (in this case, managers’) job-related psychological well being, intrinsic job satisfaction and performance. There is every reason to believe that this line of thinking is going to dominate the world of management in the days to come.

Dr. Peter Hosie is Associate Professor, University of Wollongong in Dubai. He intends to replicate the research into Happy-Performing Managers internationally, with particular emphasis on the Middle East.