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Abstract
The happy/productive worker thesis has long fascinated organizational scientists and practitioners alike. According to this thesis, happy employees exhibit higher levels of job-related performance behaviours than do unhappy employees. However, despite decades of study, support for this hypothesis remains equivocal. We propose that these inconsistent findings may be a consequence of the disparate manner in which happiness has been operationalized. To that end, the present two-year longitudinal field study provides the first opportunity to simultaneously examine the contributions of psychological well-being, job satisfaction and dispositional affect to job performance. While psychological well-being predicted job performance, the results failed to establish relations between job satisfaction and dispositional affect as predictors of job performance.
Resume
La these du travailleur heureux/productif fascine depuis longtemps les scientifiques, tout comme les praticiens, de la psychologie organisationnelle. Selon cette these, l'employe heureux manifeste des niveaux de comportements lies a son emploi qui se rapprochent davantage des attentes que ne le font les employes malheureux. Or, malgre les etudes entreprises au cours des decennies, les el&ments qui viennent corroborer cette these demeurent equivoques. Nous avancons que ces conclusions incompatibles avec l'hypothese peuvent avoir ete causees par la maniere disparate d'operationaliser l'etat du travailleur heureux. A cette fin, l'etude longitudinale sur le terrain de deux ans permet pour la premiere fois d'examiner simultanement comment le bien-etre psychologique, la satisfaction professionnelle et l'affect de disposition jouent un role dans le rendement au travail. Bien que le bien-etre psychologique permet de predire le rendement au travail, les resultats ne permettent pas de demontrer des liens entre la satisfaction au travail et l'affect de disposition en tant qu'element previsionnel du rendement au travail.
At least since the seminal Hawthorne studies, the happy/productive worker thesis has intrigued both organizational scholars and practitioners alike. According to this hypothesis, "happy" workers demonstrate higher levels of job-related performance behaviours than do "unhappy" employees. Yet, despite the longevity of this debate, the veracity of the happy/productive worker thesis remains in doubt. Part of this confusion may result from the disparate manner in which happiness has been understood and measured (Wright & Cropanzano, 2000). While each of these perspectives has its merits, each may also house certain limitations. In the present two-year longitudinal field study, we investigated...