The (un)Happy Productive Brain
The happy worker hypothesis reviewed and updated
The happy productive worker hypothesis states that if you have happy workers, they will be productive. But the research has shown inconsistencies over the decades. Another issue is if this is so obvious – why don’t more companies aim to have happy workers? And finally, is that even realistic?!
The happy productive worker hypothesis stretches back decades to nigh on a century. The happy productive worker hypothesis states that happy workers are more productive and conversely that less happy workers are less productive. This has also permeated corporations with engagement studies and well-being programmes - a fixed feature of most major corporations - and the figures are tracked carefully. But there is still some inconsistency with interpretation and over interpretation of the data and the counterintuitive fact that some types of unhappy workers are very productive! Another contentious point is that we are often speaking of very different things, engagement and well-being are not the same thing nor is happiness and job satisfaction. Let’s review.
Looking after one’s workers is not a new concept and stretches back centuries – Napoleon noted that his army marches on their stomach raising the importance of giving his soldiers enough good food – in that sense this is only coming to the obvious physical understanding of food = energy. A the end of the 1800s George Cadbury built a model village to house workers in his chocolate factory with plenty of recreational space and parks to “alleviate the evils of modern more cramped living conditions”. This was the birth of Bournville – the factory in a park and this small village still exists today though long since engulfed by the expanding city of Birmingham.
But workers were still considered cogs in a machine particularly in industrial settings – this was exacerbated by Frederick Winslow Taylor’s highly influential Scientific Management whereby workers were considered parts of the productivity machine to do the bidding of management.
Hawthorne Experiments
The legendary Hawthorne experiments would change this view (to some at least). Elton Mayo conducted a series of experiments at the end of the 1920s and the early 1930s that would become standard stock in psychology and organisational psychology textbooks. The term the Hawthorne Effect has been with us since.
Mayo conducted these experiments at the Hawthorne electrical factory in the USA and this led to the development of the human relations movement. Mayo was trying to study the effects on working conditions on productivity. Would better lighting improve productivity? And so on and so forth.
However, one thing became clear is that workers improved their productivity during the study, but this dropped after the study and this is what the term the Hawthorne Effect which refers to: changing behaviour when observed or as part of an experiment. It seems pretty obvious now. Whether this cause is due to being observed or because of the interest shown in employees is still open to debate as are many of the interpretations of the Hawthorne studies.
Another interesting feature illustrated by Mayo’s famed wire-bank room experiment is that of social structures. He observed that in this workplace there were formal and informal leaders and the interactions between the individuals seemed to influence factors around productivity notable in a case of reduced productivity after been given more financial incentives because of the scepticism of the motives behind this. This showed that human beings respond to their environment not as machines but as complex socially human beings with multiple alliances and ability to infer motives and be suspicious to boot.
It is around this time, in 1932, that versions of the happy productive worker hypothesis was first posited.
From Sender et al. 2020
What are the problems
Now so far, to many people, I am sure, the concept of engagement and happiness may seem like a no-brainer – so what are the problems? Well, the first problem is that the effects that have been measured have been weak or contradictory with no clear consensus of whether happy workers are really more productive! Yup, you read that correctly. Why so?
Well, first of there are multiple problems – a review in 2011 highlights many of these. First off are we talking about the same thing? Motivation, engagement, state happiness, job satisfaction, working conditions, trait happiness, are all very different concepts and the research and discrepancies in the research are likely because of these factors. And second how can we quantify performance (more later). Then there are the unhappy high performers…
The depressive high performer
There is also some research that has pointed to some contradictions in this simplistic happy-productive concept. One is that pessimists tend to be more realistic and make more accurate predictions than optimistic people. You know the type, picture this, said in a depressing pessimistic voice “Oh great a new restructuring, you see it‘ll take a few years they’ll change senior leadership, and we’ll go back to what we were doing before” and lo and behold few years down the line a few senior leaders are replaced, and a new or different restructuring take place returning things back to, or similar to, as they were previously!
Another side to this is that one study showed that the bright sparkly optimistic people were less productive and spent more time in frivolous chat and throwing themselves at projects that failed or were discontinued. The depressive pessimist just, in a depressed manner, stuck their heads down and got on with their work. Grumbling, of course.
Another aspect is that in some areas such as creativity and in the arts, there is the depressive creative person with links being found between depression and particularly bipolar disorder and different creative professions such as writing (though the overall effects are small).
One team leader I was coaching a few years ago noted how one of her team members was a real downer on team spirit, however, she noted, she wouldn’t know what she would do without him because he did the work of at least two others. For her the problem was how could she manage him dampening the spirits of other team members while keeping his productivity at the level it was. This type of depressive producer also goes under the radar in many big corporations being highly productive but passed over for promotion, or reward and bonuses, because of their personality, also making them more depressed, and justifying their negative view of the world. This is anecdotal but whenever I mention this, many people come up with examples, from voluntary organisations to big corporates.
However, a more recent review has shed more light onto this. In 2019 researchers from the University of Valencia analysed happiness and productivity patterns of 1647 workers and their cluster analysis showed that there were four groups:
Happy productive workers
Happy unproductive workers
Unhappy productive workers
Unhappy unproductive workers
Peiro et al.’s analysis included self-rated and supervisor ratings and also distinguished between hedonic (simple pleasure) and eudemonic (including values) happiness. But the point is that about 50% of workers in this study fell into either the happy unproductive or unhappy productive! This in itself explaining the discrepancies in nigh on a century of research.
If we look at the above, we can therefore see that we have two dimensions one of “happiness” and the other of productivity and they do not seem to be related. Or are they?
From Sender et al. 2020
The diagram above from Sender et al.’s analysis of the last 20 years of research show the number of constructs used as synonym for “happy” which include well-being, affect, job satisfaction, life satisfaction, burnout, and quality of work life. But also, different ways productivity has been measured.
Subjective well-being
There is now a lot of research to support positive work environments but let’s clarify what we mean by a happy worker. The first differentiation or problem is trait or state happiness. Trait happiness refers to people who are generally more positive and happier. This is therefore not a product of the work environment but their disposition. This is also one of the reasons the research is inconclusive because we may be measuring traits and not states.
Next, we come to what are often called engagement surveys. However, the terminology is misleading because engagement is a measure of how engaged one is with one’s work i.e. how does one engage, with, do and is motivated to do this. What most so-called engagement surveys actually measure is workplace satisfaction. We know this can impact motivation and hence engagement, but it is not one and the same thing. This also means that claims such as those by Gallup that up to 40% of the workforce are actively disengaged should be taken with a pinch of salt, often a big pinch (our data suggest it’s between 10% and 20%).
What the research has now generally agreed on is that subjective wellbeing is what most researchers are referring to and is the better way to quantify and measure “happy”. “I am doing well within myself in the workplace”. Unfortunately, “high in subjective well-being productive worker” does not roll of the tongue like “happy productive worker”.
In short this means that many companies, though they claim to measure engagement, are mixing up concepts. Job satisfaction is not engagement but will influence it. Similarly, subjective well-being is not engagement but will also influence it and is a good thing to have for multiple reasons such as mental health, absenteeism, and ability to engage in creative and cognitive thinking.
Many of you will know our SCOAP model which states that fulfilling emotional needs is key to fulfilment and life satisfaction. This is based on solid research and as Klaus Grawe whose model we extended said:
"This suggests that well-being depends almost entirely on the degree to which individuals manage to attain their motivational goals"
The reference to motivational goals refers to fulfilling one’s personal needs. So, in short, we find, and the research points strongly to, emotional needs as being a very accurate and robust way to measure subjective wellbeing. Our research also shows this matches strongly to well-being but also vitality and fatigue.
Some other research, and this matches our internal data, suggests that having needs violated or thwarted by others is more important or more disruptive than just dissatisfaction. In the work context this means avoiding toxic team members or toxic bosses. So, it may not be the happy-productive worker hypothesis but the “avoidance-of-toxic-individuals-productive worker” hypothesis.
And indeed, when well-being is considered we can see a much clearer message in the research with strong correlation to positive outcomes in the workplace. Indeed, Sender et al.’s review reports that 82% of studies matching well-being to productivity as confirming this.
Making it personal
The term subjective well-being (SWB) that is now commonly and more accurately used has the key descriptor “subjective”. This means that it is personalised and individualised. My subjective well-being may not be the same as your subjective well-being. So how do companies measure this? The answer, in short, is they don’t. Companies measure according to a standard scale.
For example, Gallup, and their widely used Q12 asks “I have a best friend at work” which is highly subjective, culturally grounded, but doesn’t ask the obvious – how important is having a best friend at work to you?!
So, to measure subjective well-being it can only be measured against a subjective scale. How can you do this?
You have to first ask how important that dimension is to an individual and then ask how much it is fulfilled. Subjective well-being is therefore how much needs are fulfilled to a personalised level and or the gap between this.
This is precisely how we designed the SCOAP-Profile and our Brain Balance assessments which therefore truly measure subjective well-being. Argang Ghadiri, my research colleague and co-author of neuroleadership, published a study in 2017 showing that this was more predictive than just measuring satisfaction of needs.
However, the difference wasn’t as large as we expected - that was a bit of a surprise - but when we took personality into account it became much more predictive. Specifically, the personality trait of sensitivity modulated the effects of mismatches in fulfilment for an individual making the mismatch either worse if high in sensitivity or moderating it if low in sensitivity.
Into the brain
At this stage it will be good to dive into the brain and understand what is happening. More importantly once we take the brain into account, it highlights and underlines just how important mental well-being is. Simply the impacts of stress on the brain which are stimulated by violated emotional needs are quick and dramatic. This in itself impairs multiple cognitive functions which will inhibit optimal performance in the workplace. Particularly those that require cognitive skills of any sort. The link to mental health is also very strong.
Impact of fear - and stress and anxiety
Stress impacts cognition in similar ways to fear – the stress axis is essentially the same as the fear axis, the HPA axis, that leads to the release of stress hormones and particularly cortisol.
Reduced cognitive functioning (prefrontal)
Increased focus on negative
Increased emotionality
Fight or flight responses
Disrupted risk balancing
The long-term impacts on the brain however can be more dramatic with
Disrupted synaptic growth
Disrupted memory
Disrupted communication between brain regions
Changes in chemical balances
Activation or deactivation of receptors (for example increasing or decreasing sensitivity long-term to certain stimuli)
Inhibited neurogenesis
Synaptic destruction
Neuronal death
In short: stress messes with your brain - and not in a good way! Needs frustration or violation cause stress responses in individuals so the route to measuring healthy brain is through measuring satisfaction of emotional needs.
Note also that personality factors will impact this. As we noted there are people who are dispositionally happier and therefore less responsive to stress, and people who are more sensitive who are also more responsive to stress. Simply, certain personality traits will make the stress worse or, alternatively, moderate it. See page on our Balanced Brains reports to see how we measure and quantify this.
High Performing Brains
So, what we can see when we look to the brain that having a brain that is capable of its own personal high performance needs to be in an optimal state. This doesn’t mean removing stress completely because stress shows us where critical situations are and need to be dealt with but removing unnecessary stress. Individuals need to have, and be able to fulfil, their emotional needs. SCOAP:
Self-esteem: Be valued, appreciated and respected
Control: have control and some autonomy and self-direction
Orientation: understand what to do, who to speak to, and short and long-term goals
Attachment: have positive relationships, be able to bond with and trust others
Pleasure: to experience pleasurable experiences and avoid negative experiences
This should be built on a basis of a good degree of psychological safety.
Enabling fulfilling of emotional needs provides a basis within which brains can perform to their best. Remember Klaus Grawe’s statement that “well-being depends almost entirely on the degree to which individuals manage to attain their motivational goals”. This should be managed individually by team leaders and team members, encouraged by middle managers and built into processes and policies by senior managers. Toxic behaviours must be identified and remediated immediately.
The misunderstanding is that this only provides the internal chemical environment within which a brain can perform optimally, or best be able to use its resources. Productivity within an organisation will be dependent on this but also be dependent on many other factors and this is the second reason why the research has been inconclusive.
Productivity and performance factors
Though SWB may well contribute to productivity itself, productivity is also dependent on other factors – you may have read the article below I wrote on team performance previously:
This highlights this issue nicely. One, that just having high performers in a team does not necessarily give better results – how the team operates together i.e. complementarity is what counts. So, having fulfilled SCOAP provides a basis for high performance but other factors will need to be focused on to actually increase productivity and these will include:
Right skills: to do the job well
In-role performance: personal expertise
Extra-role performance: helping others
Resources: financial, time, personnel, infrastructure, knowledge
Bottlenecks: external bocks in the system
Politics: taking resources, and blocking
Strategy: how to approach productivity
Planning: planning of resources
So, we can see that there are a lot of factors affecting productivity that are not directly related to SWB. SWB should enable an individual to perform better and navigate many of the above challenges better but may also be blocked by factors out of their control. Another aspect is that of personality. Some personality traits may contribute more to productivity in certain environment, these include obvious traits such as conscientiousness, or industriousness, but also pragmatism.
However, this comes with the caveat that it depends on the role within the team and organisation, creativity may be important in some contexts, as is communication to third parties. So, this is likely very role dependent and the issues I outlined in my article on team performance.
Productivity has also been measured in multiple different ways, as we can see with the diagram previously, and listed here from Sender et al’s recent review. Another dimension that has rarely been mentioned in the happy productive research is that of role type, or role complexity - other research showing, for example, that autonomy increases well-being in simple monotonous roles, but guidance and clarity is important in more complex roles. It is therefore likely that productivity will respond to different stimuli in these different contexts.
From Sender et al. 2020
However, the beauty of the SCOAP approach is that as it is always measured against personal satisfaction, it will always stimulate a response in measurement of the needs. If you have too little autonomy, it will be measured as a deficit in Control, if you need more guidance, it will be measured as a deficit in Orientation.
The final question to answer before we can bring all the multiple strands of evidence together to make a coherent summary is that of short term vs. long term. Though some studies have been conducted longitudinally, over time, most haven’t. Some impacts may take a long time to manifest. These include absenteeism which may increase slowly over time, burnout which may take years to manifest, and employee turnover which may slowly increase over time. Some of these will be associated with increase in costs such as cost of recruiting and hiring.
The Holy Grail: SWB + Team + Organisation
So, this looks like a confusing picture with multiple dimensions to consider and multiple and multitudes of conflicting evidence. So, let me now clarify.
Based on brain science increasing or having high subjective well-being provides the basis for human performance. Let me use a slightly derogatory analogy: a milk farm. The health of the cows gives the cows the potential to produce more milk. In our employees this will
Increase cognitive ability
Increase performance ability
Reduce risk (performance, decision-making, mental health)
Reduce long-term costs (absenteeism, mental health costs)
Subjective well-being provides the basis for high performance but is not necessarily high performance - you can be in a good place and be unproductive - although arguably, and we do argue this, this will always come out in emotional needs – it feels good to perform and our research shows that the vast majority of people do want to perform – it feels good after all. In our analogy we now have cows that can produce a high quantity of milk but if the processes and milking machines are not in place and effective, you still will not have a productive milk farm you just have happy cows.
Therefore, productivity is a separate dimension that must be managed effectively through:
Effective team composition
Effective team support
Effective team leadership
Effective middle management
Structures and processes to enable performance and productivity
Senior leadership enabling SWB fulfilment and productivity focus
When you have this you now have “happy” (according to an internal scale) and productive cows.
But the above will be influenced by the type and scope of individual roles and specifically complexity and amount of cognitive and independent decision making in each. In short you can develop great processes but if your cows can’t implement it, it goes to waste. So, you need to consider individual roles by their:
Complexity vs simplicity
Structured vs unstructured
And important to note is that toxic individuals and leaders must be dealt with quickly
Avoid toxicity
An aggressive cow may stress other cows and therefore reduce their milk production (even if their own production may be high) but also increase other costs.
To summarise focus on SWB and productivity as separate measures but in tandem and make sure the policies and changes support each other. A process that fulfils emotional needs and increases productivity is in the sweet spot. A process that increases productivity but decreases SWB may backfire. Similarly increasing SWB without focusing on productivity increases costs. In an ideal world these are nicely interlinked. Indeed, they are interlinked because successful performance is an important component of SCOAP so enabling high performance and high productivity also increases SWB.
Toxic Leaders
A short note is that of toxic or autocratic leaders who claim their methods work best. There is no doubt that a toxic leader can have some success but on review we see there are plenty of risks involved (this will be for another article another day) and this can be summed up as such:
Can increase productivity short-term
…but…
Increases mid/long-term risks
Increases turnover (potential know-how loss and increase costs)
Increase absenteeism
Increase mental health issues
Risk of reputation loss
Increased risk of employee litigation
So, in summary short-term unhealthy productivity increases are almost never likely to outweigh the long-term negative impacts of a toxic leader and the damage often far outstrips any short-term benefits. Unfortunately, it often takes a long time to weed out toxic leaders.
In times of pandemic
The covid19 pandemic is still with us at the time of writing and a few short notes on this as this can and will be affecting SWB.
Be proactive in managing stress factors
Support workers in their roles and situations
Understand that some individuals will be in contextually difficult situations
Be communicative and listen to employees
Be human first
In Closing
Healthy brains, with clear goals, and an opportunity to achieve their goals, and the resources and abilities to do this, are highly productive. This is the goal for all businesses. The difficulty is in operationalising it.
Team leaders need to be able to engage the individuals in the team (including unhappy productive workers and making the happy unproductive more productive) and build effective teams.
Organisations need to set the processes and structures to enable high performance and also the policies and structures to enable individuals to fulfil their emotional needs because this provides the solid basis for high performance.
It is therefore not the happy productive worker that should be the focus but the healthy productive organisation.
References
Happy Productive Worker Reviews
Peiró, J. M., Kozusznik, M., Molina, I. R., and Tordera, N. (2019). The happy-productive worker model and beyond: Patterns of wellbeing and performance atwork. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 16. doi:10.3390/ijerph16030479.
Sender, G., Nobre, G. C., Armagan, S., and Fleck, D. (2020). In search of the Holy Grail: a 20-year systematic review of the happy-productive worker thesis. Int. J. Organ. Anal. doi:10.1108/IJOA-09-2020-2401.
Wright, T. A. (2005). “The Role of ‘Happiness’ in Organizational Research: Past, Present and Future Directions,” in Research in Occupational Stress and Well Being (No longer published by Elsevier), 221–264. doi:10.1016/S1479-3555(04)04006-5.
Wright, T. A., Cropanzano, R., Denney, P. J., and Moline, G. L. (2002). When a happy worker is a productive worker: A preliminary examination of three models. Can. J. Behav. Sci. 34, 146–150.
Wright, T. a., and Cropanzano, R. (1997). Well-Being, Satisfaction and Job Performance: Another Look At the Happy/Productive Worker Thesis. Acad. Manag. Proc. 1997, 364–368. doi:10.5465/AMBPP.1997.4988986.
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Well-being in workplace
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Depressive realists
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Sinclair, R., and Lavis, C. (2001). Sad Workers May Make Better Workers. Sci. Dly. Available at: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/06/010612065304.htm
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