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Employee Happiness: Why We Should Care

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Abstract

Albert Schweitzer once stated that “success is not the key to happiness, happiness is the key to success.” Despite this widespread belief, employee happiness is often perceived by organizations as an insubstantial topic, irrelevant to bottom-line outcomes. Equally as problematic, past investigations have primarily utilized other positive emotion variables as a proxy for happiness, thus convoluting the relationships between happiness and work outcomes. As such, taking a scientist-practitioner approach, the present study sought to address the need to: (a) directly measure employees’ happiness, (b) link employee happiness to outcomes of organizational interest, and (c) assess the impact that organizational psychosocial factors have in decreasing employee happiness levels. Therefore, by measuring employee happiness, job demands, and organizational outcomes through a two-wave full panel design, the present study provided evidence for employee happiness’s ability to significantly mediate the relationship between job demands and organizational outcomes. Explicitly, a high level of job demands decreased employee happiness, which subsequently decreased employees’ organizational commitment, task performance, and contextual performance, while increasing turnover intentions and counterproductive work behaviors. These results carry significant theoretical and practical implications. Future QOL (Quality of Life) and organizational research would benefit from building on the present findings and establishing a nomological net of employee happiness. Additionally, practitioners have the opportunity to utilize this evidence to demonstrate the impact that employee happiness has on organizationally-relevant outcomes and the role that organizations can have in fostering employee happiness.

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Acknowledgements

This study was funded by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)/ National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) through the Sunshine Education and Research Center (ERC) at USF (5T42OH008438-13). The views and opinions in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the opinion of NIOSH nor USF.

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    Arieana Thompson & Valentina Bruk-Lee

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Thompson, A., Bruk-Lee, V. Employee Happiness: Why We Should Care. Applied Research Quality Life 16, 1419–1437 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-019-09807-z

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