Measuring happiness at work Simon Lutterbie & Jessica Pryce-Jones Happiness at work is a mindset which enables actions to maximise performance and achieve potential. This article presents a 10-item scale for measuring happiness at work, within the context of the practitioner-focused iPPQ, and presents correlational evidence of the relationship between happiness at work and performance outcomes. The 10-item scale complements the 25-item iPPQ, providing a useful tool for measuring and increasing an organisation’s, team’s or individual’s happiness at work.
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APPINESS at work is a mindset which enables actions to maximise performance and achieve potential. It is characterised by ‘broadening behaviour’ (Frederickson, 1998) and is related to the state of working towards a goal with the belief that it will be achieved (Sheldon & Elliot, 1999). Happiness at Work is a form of ‘mindset happiness’: it is relatively stable over a period of weeks to months (Lyubomirsky, Sheldon & Schkade, 2005), but also sensitive to change through environmental factors and focused interventions (Kurtz & Lyubomirsky, 2008; Seligman et al., 2005). There is widespread support for the benefits of positive mental states (Lyubomirsky, King & Diener, 2005), and happiness at work relates to a number of positive psychology constructs. General happiness is one’s overall evaluation of the quality of their life (Diener, 2000); it provides a more global evaluation, whereas happiness at work is specifically relevant to work. Well-being is a more diffuse concept, including such elements as mental health (e.g. Ryan & Deci, 2001), although it has also been applied to the workplace (e.g. Sparks et al., 2001). Job satisfaction is a classic attempt to quantify employees’ feelings towards their work (Brief & Weiss, 2002); however, the link between job satisfaction and performance is still unclear (e.g. Judge et al., 2001). Engagement, generally defined as a feeling of maximum effort and commitment to one’s job (e.g. Kahn, 1990), is the concept most closely related to happiness at work. The Job Demands–Resources (JD–R) model describes engagement occurring when the individual has sufficient job and personal resources to meet current job demands (e.g. Bakker, 2009). We hypothesise that happiness at work represents the feeling the individual has, and can continue to develop, the necessary resources, but this prediction is still under investigation.
Measuring happiness at work The iPPQ (Edmunds et al., 2009) is a practitioner-focused measure that collects feedback on 25 specific elements relevant to happiness at work. The original items and scale were generated based on focus groups and interviews with general managers, senior leaders, and MBA students (Edmunds et al., 2009). We hypothesised that a shorter scale could be constructed from the 25 items of the iPPQ. This would provide a general measure of happiness at work to complement the iPPQ’s ability to identify specific workplace issues. Together, the short- and long-form scales combine a ‘headline’ score for happiness at work with the specific recommendations for improving an organisation’s, team’s or individual’s happiness at work. Assessment & Development Matters Vol. 5 No. 2 Summer 2013
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