What Is Happiness at Work?

What makes you happy?

For years, psychologists and scientists have studied happiness. Everyone seems to agree that a happy worker is likely to be more effective, productive, and contribute positively to the organization.

Emiliana R. Simon-Thomas, science director of the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California Berkeley, wrote in her article “The Four Keys to Happiness at Work”:

In fact, evidence from psychology, leadership and management studies, and even neuroscience supports a different view: that not only is it possible to find happiness at work but that doing so is unambiguously good.

To many of us, finding happiness at work is not easy. What we face daily is likely a combination of policies, politics, and deadlines. We have very little time for happiness when we are busy fighting fires or delivering numbers. Yes, the relationship between happy workers and effectiveness makes absolute sense.

But there is one caveat — it’s a correlation, not causation. We can be happy and ineffective, or we can be effective but unhappy.

Two prominent research studies, the BBC Prison Study and the Stanford Prison Experiment, went to great lengths to evaluate how we respond to social pressure, in part as a wider response to the original Milgram’s Experiment on obedience. A new insight into the Stanford Prison Experiment posits that we tend to act according to the role we are assigned according to how we internalize the identity of the given role.

Similarly, embodied cognition, an area of cognitive psychology, affirms that we tend to behave the way we are perceived. As Professor Thomas Blass, author of the book, The man who shocked the world: The life and legacy of Stanley Milgram, puts it:

It is not the kind of person we are that determines how we act, but rather the kind of situation we find ourselves in.

A decade-old blog post on Scientific American titled “A Brief Guide to Embodied Cognition: Why You Are Not Your Brain” written by Samuel McNerney offers a glimpse into what this piece of science is all about.

So, can we think “happy” to be happy at work? Well, we can certainly act like we are happy, knowing that embodied cognition can work its wonders. But when it comes to true happiness in the workplace, we have nuances like aspiration and motivation that lie beneath the facade.

Happiness at work is ultimately about fulfilling our inner identity — one that supports our self-image, self-esteem, and self-efficacy. Happy feelings can come and go, while our sense of self stays with us for the long haul.

Have you found your happiness at work?

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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