💾 Archived View for gmi.noulin.net › mobileNews › 5483.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 05:21:33. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
2015-07-23 12:10:07
Andr SpicerCarl Cederstr m
July 21, 2015
Recently, we found ourselves in motivational seminars at our respective places
of employment. Both events preached the gospel of happiness. In one, a speaker
explained that happiness could make you healthier, kinder, more productive, and
even more likely to get promoted.
The other seminar involved mandatory dancing of the wilder kind. It was
supposed to fill our bodies with joy. It also prompted one of us to sneak out
and take refuge in the nearest bathroom.
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. Being happy in the moment, Samuel Johnson
said, could be achieved only when drunk. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, happiness
was to lie in a boat, drifting aimlessly, feeling like a God (not exactly the
picture of productivity). There are other definitions of happiness, too, but
they are neither less nor more plausible but those of Rousseau or Johnson.
And just because we have more advanced technology today doesn t mean we re any
closer to pinning down a definition, as Will Davies reminds us in his new book
The Happiness Industry. He concludes that even as we have developed more
advanced techniques for measuring emotions and predicting behaviors, we have
also adopted increasingly simplified notions of what it means to be human, let
alone what it means to pursue happiness. A brain scan that lights up may seem
like it s telling us something concrete about an elusive emotion, for example,
when it actually isn t.
Happiness doesn t necessarily lead to increased productivity. A stream of
research shows some contradictory results about the relationship between
happiness which is often defined as job satisfaction and productivity.
One study on British supermarkets even suggests there might be a negative
correlation between job satisfaction and corporate productivity: The more
miserable the employees were, the better the profits. Sure, other studies have
pointed in the opposite direction, saying that there is a link between feeling
content with work and being productive. But even these studies, when considered
as a whole, demonstrates a relatively weak correlation.
Happiness can be exhausting. The pursuit of happiness may not be wholly
effective, but it doesn t really hurt, right? Wrong. Ever since the 18th
century, people have been pointing out that the demand to be happy brings with
it a heavy burden, a responsibility that can never be perfectly fulfilled.
Focusing on happiness can actually make us feel less happy.
A psychological experiment recently demonstrated this. The researchers asked
their subjects to watch a film that would usually make them happy a figure
skater winning a medal. But before watching the film, half of the group was
asked to read out a statement about the importance of happiness in life. The
other half did not. The researchers were surprised to find that those who had
read the statement about the importance of happiness actually were less happy
after watching the film. Essentially, when happiness becomes a duty, it can
make people feel worse if they fail to accomplish it.
This is particularly problematic at the present era, where happiness is
preached as a moral obligation. As the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner put
it: Unhappiness is not only unhappiness; it is, worse yet, a failure to be
happy.
It won t necessarily get you through the work day. If you have worked in a
front-line customer service job, like a call center or fast food restaurant,
you know that being upbeat is not an option. It s compulsory. And as tiring as
this may be, it makes some sense when you re in front of customers.
But today, many non-customer facing employees are also asked to be upbeat. This
could have some unforeseen consequences. One study found that people who were
in a good mood were worse at picking out acts of deception than those who were
in a bad mood. Another piece of research found that people who were angry
during a negotiation achieve better outcomes than people who are happy. This
suggests that being happy all the time may not be good for all aspects of our
work, or jobs that rely heavily on certain abilities. In fact, for some things,
happiness can actually make us perform worse.
Happiness could damage your relationship with your boss. If we believe that
work is where we will find happiness, we might, in some cases, start to mistake
our boss for a surrogate spouse or parent. In her study of a media company,
Susanne Ekmann found that those who expected work to make them happy would
often become emotionally needy. They wanted their managers to provide them with
a steady stream of recognition and emotional reassurance. And when not
receiving the expected emotional response (which was often), these employees
felt neglected and started overreacting. Even minor setbacks were interpreted
as clear evidence of rejection by their bosses. So in many ways, expecting a
boss to bring happiness makes us emotionally vulnerable.
It could also hurt your relationship with friends and family. In her book Cold
Intimacies Eva Illouz noticed a strange side effect of people trying to live
more emotionally at work: They started to treat their private lives like work
tasks. The people she spoke with saw their personal lives as things needed to
be carefully administered using a range of tools and techniques they had
learned from corporate life. As a result, their home lives became increasingly
cold and calculating. It was no wonder, then, that many of the people she spoke
with preferred to spend time at work rather than at home.
It could make losing your job that much more devastating. If we expect the
workplace to provide happiness and meaning in our life, we become dangerously
dependent on it. When studying professionals, Richard Sennett noticed that
people who saw their employer as an important source of personal meaning were
those who became most devastated if they were fired. When these people lost
their jobs, they were not just loosing an income they were loosing the
promise of happiness. This suggests that, when we see our work as a great
source of happiness, we make ourselves emotionally vulnerable during periods of
change. In an era of constant corporate restructuring, this can be dangerous.
Happiness could make you selfish. Being happy makes you a better person, right?
Not so, according to an interesting piece of research. Participants were given
lottery tickets, and then given a choice about how many tickets they wanted to
give to others and how many they wished to keep for themselves. Those who were
in a good mood ended up keeping more tickets for themselves. This suggests
that, at least in some settings, being happy does not necessarily mean we will
be generous. In fact, the opposite could be true.
It could also make you lonely. In one experiment, psychologists asked a number
of people to keep a detailed diary for two weeks. What they found at the end of
the study was that those who greatly valued happiness also felt lonelier. It
seems that focusing too much on the pursuit of happiness can make us feel more
disconnected from other people.
So why, contrary to all of this evidence, do we continue to hold on to the
belief that happiness can improve a workplace? The answer, according to one
study, comes down to aesthetics and ideology. Happiness is a convenient idea
that looks good on paper (the aesthetic part). But it s also an idea that helps
us shy away from more serious issues at work, such as conflicts and workplace
politics (the ideological part).
When we assume that happy workers are better workers, we can sweep more
uncomfortable questions under the carpet, especially since happiness is often
seen as a choice. It becomes a convenient way of dealing with negative
attitudes, party poopers, miserable bastards, and other unwanted characters in
corporate life. Invoking happiness, in all its ambiguity, is an excellent way
of getting away with controversial decisions, such as letting people go. As
Barbara Ehrenreich points out in her book Bright-Sided, positive messages about
happiness have proved particularly popular in times of crisis and mass layoffs.
Given all these potential problems, we think there is a strong case for
rethinking our expectation that work should always make us happy. It can be
exhausting, make us overreact, drain our personal life of meaning, increase our
vulnerability, make us more gullible, selfish and lonely. Most striking is that
consciously pursuing happiness can actually drain the sense of joy we usually
get from the really good things we experience.
In reality, work like all other aspects of life is likely to make us feel a
wide range of emotions. If your job feels depressing and meaningless, it might
be because it is depressing and meaningless. Pretending otherwise can just make
it worse. Happiness, of course, is a great thing to experience, but nothing
that can be willed into existence. And maybe the less we seek to actively
pursue happiness through our jobs, the more likely we will be to actually
experience a sense of joy in them a joy which is spontaneous and pleasurable,
and not constructed and oppressive. But most importantly, we will be better
equipped to cope with work in a sober manner. To see it for what it is. And not
as we whether executives, employees, or dancing motivational seminar leaders
pretend that it is.
Andr Spicer is a professor of Organizational Behavior at Cass Business School
in London and the co-author of The Wellness Syndrome.
Carl Cederstr m is an Associate Professor of Organization Theory at Stockholm
University and the co-author of The Wellness Syndrome.