In “Do Happier People Work Harder?”, Teresa and Steven report their research that productivity of working people have a relationship with their happiness; that is, the happier they are, the higher productivity they generate; furthermore, they give the guideline to succeed in building workers’ happiness by removing obstacles, giving help, recognizing strong effort, and the single most important one – making progress in meaningful work. Nevertheless, they also report that many managers do the common mistake by ignoring this supporting progress, but strongly using cash and benefit incentives instead.
I, myself, infer from this article that if people are happy, they will devote their efforts to their jobs, they will work harder by themselves, and they will generate more productivity. Furthermore, people do not need only benefits and compensations, but they also require heart fulfilment by being admired by their leaders and being proud of their works. I definitely agree with this statement, and I think most working people agree with it because most of them should face some situations similar to this statement. For example, if you start your working day with a serious and aggressive complaint from your boss or main customer, you will generally be depressed and lose your working focus until you can recover your consciousness, and this normally requires more than one hour, or you lose your productive hour at least 12.5% of one working day.
However, the question come next is that do management people really not know this happiness effect. I do not think so. I believe that most of them know and understand this positive effect, but they also know its negative effect; that is, slack. For instance, suppose that you work for the company that require your creative ability. Your company strongly commits on employees’ happiness, builds the office as if a living room with fully facilities and some entertaining devices, and allows employees to manage their own office hours. Do you think employees of this company will work competitively compared with firm’s rivals, and they will effectively arrange meeting time and cooperate with each other? The answer is that it might be yes if this company has a very great and excellent recruitment; unfortunately, generally in reality, this company has a high chance to be failure, and we can learn it from many cases in real business. As a result, managers have to balance all relevant perspectives in business such as firms’ performance, competitiveness, sustainability, and all stakeholders including employees.
Until this point, I have a lot of questions that required me to study more and deeper. For example, what does happiness really mean, what is the balance point in business and is it necessary to distribute equally between relevant parties, how can I manage team productivity and happiness, how can I lead my team to work hard by heart, how can I achieve the balance point, and is it by economic basis, psychology basis, or requiring other sciences? I hope I will find and understand all answers for these questions by this year, 2013.
Reference
Amabile, T. & Kramer, S. (2011, September 3). Do Happier People Work Harder? The New York Times Sunday Review. Retrieved January 16, 2013 from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/opinion/sunday/do-happier-people-work-harder.html?_r=0
If I were Amabile and Kramer, I might have titled my article "Do Happier People Work Better?". Although they also seem to have solid evidence that happier does correlate positively with happiness, the more important idea that stood out to me was that the happier employees did better work: the quality of what they produced was higher than for less happy workers.
ReplyDeleteI do like the last line of Sup's summary section (¶ 2), where he points out that Amabile and Kramer disparage reliance primarily on such traditional incentives as cash and cash equivalent benefits. After the novel we read next week (I think we can manage it in one week), one of the essays I'm considering for our next class reading is by an economist and addresses exactly this essay. But now I'm worried that Sup might already have read it.
Happiness couldn't be more important than productivity and profit for enterprises. I remember Samsung tried that they changed work time such as advcing the attendence and leaving office time of workers to give chances for self-deveiopement but Samsung withralled this trial because this resulted that the leaving office time did not reduce so working time became lengthen after all. The aim looked good but the this trial finished as a poor happening. It's necessary enough investigation and consideration prior to do some actions.
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