Work, Happiness, and Unhappiness

Peter Warr

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781135599072
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Gestión

Award-winning psychologist Peter Warr explores why some people at work are happier or unhappier than others. He evaluates different approaches to the definition and assessment of happiness, and combines environmental and person-based themes to explain differences in people's experience. A framework of key job characteristics is linked to an account of primary mental processes, and those are set within a summary of demographic, cultural, and occupational patterns. Consequences of happiness or unhappiness for individuals and groups are also reviewed, as is recent literature on unemployment and retirement. Although primarily focusing on job situations, the book shows that processes of happiness are similar across settings of all kinds. It provides a uniquely comprehensive assessment of research published across the world.

Initial chapters explore the several meanings of happiness and the ways in which those have been measured by psychologists. The construct includes pleasure, satisfaction and subjective well-being, and unhappiness has been studied in terms of dissatisfaction, strain, anxiety, and depression. The impacts of principal environmental features on these experiences are reviewed through an analogy with vitamins in relation to physical health—beneficial only up to a point.

However, environmental effects are not fixed. Influences on happiness from within the person are examined in terms of principal thinking patterns, personality styles, and cultural backgrounds. Differences are explored between groups (men and women, older and younger people, employees who are full-time and part-time, and so on), and processes of person-environment fit are placed within an overall framework which emphasizes the impact of variations in personal salience.

The book is written primarily for academic readers, including senior undergraduates, graduate students, teachers, and researchers in fields of Industrial/Organizational Psychology, Management, Human Resources, and Labor Studies. However, the topic's centrality in many professions makes it important also to a wider readership.

1
The Principal Concepts

This chapter introduces the two central concepts of the book. “Work” is commonly discussed in terms of paid employment, and that will be the main focus of the chapters which follow. “Happiness” has received centuries of attention from philosophers, poets, and other commentators. It is here viewed in terms that are primarily psychological, identifying three principal dimensions of people’s experience that need to be examined in organizations and in life as a whole. The framework developed in this first chapter is used throughout the book.

The book’s primary question is: Why are some people at work happier or unhappier than others? Among possible answers is one in terms of job titles. We might observe that people in jobs with a certain title tend to be more happy or less happy than others. Examining overall job satisfaction, Rose (2003) reported some British findings of that kind. The most satisfied individuals in national surveys worked, for instance, as gardeners, hairdressers, or care assistants. On the other hand, job dissatisfaction was greatest among, for example, bus drivers, postal workers, and assembly-line workers. In another British survey, chefs and members of the clergy emerged as among the most happy, with architects and secretaries scoring particularly poorly (City and Guilds Institute, 2005). Across seven national studies in the United States, most satisfied with their job were managers and administrators, and least satisfied were machine operators and laborers (Weaver, 1980).

However, findings from this kind of investigation depend in part on which measure of happiness is applied; as is elaborated later, satisfaction is only one of several indicators of happiness. Furthermore, the content of different people’s job can vary markedly within the same title; a single average score for a job title as a whole can conceal wide diversity between job holders in their activities and experiences. Linked to that, results can depend on how broadly or narrowly a job category is defined. And in practical terms, the number of individuals in a research subsample with the same job title has sometimes been very small, perhaps less than 20, so that average scores as published can be unreliable estimates of general values.

However, the major limitation of statements about happiness linked to job titles is that they are unable to provide much by way of explanation. Even if we found reliable large-sample differences in average happiness between the holders of jobs with different titles, we would lack an understanding of their cause. What is it about jobs with a particular title that affects the happiness of those who work in them? To answer the book’s question more informatively, we need to identify the factors that are important for any job title. By specifying key features of a work role that are linked in general to happiness or unhap-piness (such as the nature of task demands, social contact, and so on), we can better understand any one job in relation to others. Happiness is expected to be greater if those desirable features are present, whatever job title is being considered.

A second answer to the book’s question (beyond an account in terms of job title) is thus along these lines: People at work are happier if their jobs contain features that are generally desirable. However, this can only be partly accurate. Individuals are not all happy or unhappy to the same degree, even if their jobs have the same characteristics. There is something about people themselves that influences their happiness, not necessarily connected with their current environment. We need also to look at aspects of job holders as well as at the content of their jobs.

Therefore, a more comprehensive answer might be: People at work are happier if their jobs contain features that are generally desirable and if their own characteristics and mental processes encourage the presence of happiness. An answer of that kind is developed in this book.

In addition to paid work itself, other employment-related roles are here placed within a common framework. The environmental and personal factors that bear on job holders’ happiness or unhappiness are also present to varying degrees in retirement and unemployment, and investigations into those two roles are also examined. Furthermore, the identified factors are important beyond a formal employment relationship, so that much of the book’s content is applicable to activities across a life space as a whole.

WORK AND ITS IMPLICATIONS

The term work is used in many different ways. The printout of its entry in the Oxford English Dictionary runs to nearly 50 pages. Meanings set out there include “what a person has to do; occupation, employment, business, task, function,” “action involving effort or exertion directed to a definite end, especially as a means of gaining one’s livelihood; labor, toil,” and “a particular act or piece of labor; a task, job.”

The concept is of course wider than merely paid employment, also taking in many other activities. Examples include housework, voluntary work, schoolwork, repair and decorating (“do-it-yourself “) work, and a large number of activities not explicitly identified through their titles as work. In its essence, work is an activity with a purpose beyond enjoyment of the activity itself. It can be arduous and/or tedious, involving effort and persistence beyond the point at which it is pleasurable. The term connotes difficulty and a need to labor or exert oneself against the environment; the objective is to achieve something that is physically and/or psychologically difficult. Linked to that, there is often a suggestion that work is obligatory, being required in some way; it is seen as an unavoidable aspect of living. Barringer’s (2005) summary is that work is “quintessentially performative; an expressive act of doing or making; the purposeful exercise of body or mind; the overcoming of obstacles with a particular end in sight” (p. 26). In broad terms, it is also a precondition of existence, being essential for continued living.

Work is often seen as an undesirable burden. In the Bible’s Book of Genesis, it was presented as the “wages of sin,” such that it was only through labor (“in the sweat of thy face”) “shalt thou eat bread” (Genesis 3:19). In medieval times, work almost always involved hard physical labor, with obvious potential for exhaustion and bodily damage. Adam Smith (1723–1790) observed that repetitive work leads to people becoming “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to become.” By Victorian times, mechanization had taken over some of the load, but also added to pressures through the industrialization and intensification of production and the increased competition brought about by improved transportation.

In the 1960s and 1970s workforces were said to be substantially “alienated” from their jobs, and debilitating occupational stress has since then allegedly become widespread in certain countries. Some painful themes were described by Terkel (1972): “This book, being about work, is by its very nature about violence—to the spirit as well as to the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us” (p. xi). In a historical review, Thomas (1999) emphasized “the inescapable fact that, through the centuries, the lot of most of the human race has been hard toil for small reward” (p. xviii).

Yet work has long been recognized as desirable as well as a struggle. Denis Diderot (1713–1784) incorporated this ambivalence in his definition: “the daily occupation to which man is condemned by his need, and to which at the same time he owes his health, his subsistence, his peace of mind, his good sense and perhaps his virtue.” George Berkeley (1658–1753) concluded that “there can be no such thing as a happy life without labor”; and for Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) “work is good; it is truly a motive for life.” Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) saw work as one of two important foundations of psychological health (the other being love); and for Noel Coward (1899–1973) “work is much more fun than fun.” Thomas (1999) noted that work “absorbs our energies and preoccupies our thoughts. It involves us in close relations with other people and gives us our sense of identity. It provides us with the means of subsistence, and it makes possible all the pleasures and achievements of civilization” (p. v).

Linked to those and other positive views, individuals who are unemployed (“out of work”) overwhelmingly want to gain a job. Surveys have repeatedly indicated that most people would continue in a job even if they won a large sum of money, and that employed people generally report feeling positively about their work. For example, between 70% and 90% of workers in a wide range of countries say that they are satisfied with their job (Sousa-Poza & Sousa-Poza, 2000; Weaver, 1980). (Precise conclusions depend on where the threshold is set for “satisfaction.”) Examining workers’ experiences through reports obtained on several occasions in the course of a day, Miner, Glomb, and Hulin (2005) found that positive job events occurred about four times as frequently as negative ones. Terkel (1972) continued the account excerpted earlier to recognize the favorable as well as the negative features of work: “It is about a search, too, for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying. Perhaps immortality, too, is part of the quest. To be remembered was the wish, spoken and unspoken, of the heroes and heroines of this book” (p. xi).

The fact that work has both negative and positive aspects has been central to discussion over the centuries. Martin Luther’s (1483–1546) religious perspective included the view that people should diligently pursue the “calling” into which they had been born: “The human being is created to work as the bird is created to fly.” Luther believed that God valued good work of any kind, including that which is hard and punishing: “Your work is a very sacred matter. God delights in it, and through it wants to bestow His blessing on you.” John Calvin (1509–1564) emphasized that everyone, including the rich, must work, because that is the will of God and work is the way through which He is to be glorified. Calvin argued that potential gains should not be desired in terms of personal wealth; instead, hard work should be valued for its own sake, it was a duty, and it provided its own reward.

These ideas fed into the development of Protestantism, with its “emphasis on the moral duty of untiring activity, on work as an end in itself, on the evils of luxury and extravagance, on the necessity for foresight and thrift, and on the beneficial effects of moderation, self-discipline, and rational calculation” (Applebaum, 1992, p. 331). However, the unpleasantness of much work could not be ignored, and negative as well as positive emphases were retained in Victorian commentators’ accounts of what were sometimes described as “instrumental” versus “expressive” features. In the former case, struggle through labor was recognized as necessary in order to meet the needs of individuals and society. However, in “expressive” terms, work could bring out the goodness in a person. Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) wrote, “There is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in work,” such that “a man perfects himself by working.” For John Ruskin (1819–1900), work was the process through which human identity is formed. Embedded within these forms of Protestantism “was the notion that work tests, and displays, the moral fibre of the individual, by which he can earn a place for himself, not only on earth but also thereafter” (Barringer, 2005, p. 29).

Work, unpleasant or pleasant, is undoubtedly of great importance to us, with or without any religious connotations. As with other important aspects of life, it has been the target of humor as well as of serious observation. Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) described it as “the curse of the drinking classes,” inverting a traditional view of alcohol as the curse of the working classes, and the opinion of Alfred Polgar (1873–1955) was that “work is what you do so that some time you won’t have to do it any more.” Referring particularly to paid work in large organizations, Northcote Parkinson (1909–1993) proposed “Parkinson’s Law,” that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,” and Laurence Peter (1919–1990) offered the “Peter Principle,” that “work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.”

The majority of adults spend much of their life in paid employment (“at work” or “working”), and that expenditure of time and effort is essential to earn money for oneself and one’s family. The personal value of work comes partly from the demands and opportunities inherent in a work role, exposing a person to goals, challenges, situations, and people not otherwise present in his or her life, but its importance derives also from consequences and indirect effects. For example, money from a job can purchase pleasures and access to other pleasures that themselves have no direct link to their origins in a person’s employment. Jobs also place people in different locations in society, exposing them to particular values, norms, and pressures. For example, the leisure activities and social networks of many professional employees are quite unlike those of many manual workers. Similarly, long-term unemployed people live their lives and interact with society in ways that contrast sharply with the activities and experiences of people in stable employment.

Jobs are thus a primary reflection, and also cause and effect, of a person’s place in society. They strongly influence the nature and quality of other environments to which a person is exposed, and factors operative in those correlated nonjob environments have effects far from their partial source in paid employment.

Paid employment is often identified as either full-time or part-time, in the first case taking an average of between 35 and 45 hours per week. Traveling to and from a place of full-time employment typically adds several hours per week, with jobs in large cities often requiring considerably more travel time (e.g., Williams, 2004). Part-time jobs of course vary in their duration, but 30 or 35 hours per week is often taken as their upper limit for statistical and survey purposes.

Recent years have seen changes in the content of jobs. For instance, expansion has occurred in technical, professional, and managerial work. That shift is particularly marked in larger organizations, and is commonly attributed to greater use of technology, more complex working processes, more international competition and transfer of knowledge, and an increased emphasis on customer requirements. At the same time, there has been a general trend away from agriculture and production industries into service work. Developed countries have lost many jobs in farming, textiles, iron and steel, mining, and the wood industry. The principal growth sectors in those countries have been health and social work, business services, hotels and restaurants, education, and recreational services. Most developed countries now have approximately three-quarters of their jobs in service sectors.

PERSPECTIVES ON HAPPINESS

The words happiness and unhappiness are avoided by most academic psychologists in their professional life. Instead, they have often used terms that are less widely familiar, such as affect or well-being. In addition, much of psychologists’ thinking and empirical research exhibits a general bias in favor of negative states, such as anxiety, depression, or strain. Myers and Diener (1995) and Schaufeli and Bakker (2004) recorded negative and positive emphases in recent research studies in the ratio of 17 to 1 and 15 to 1, respectively. Examining reported correlates of job satisfaction, Thoresen, Kaplan, Barsky, Warren, and de Chermont (2003) found that previous investigators had examined negative job attributes more then twice as often as positive attributes.

The use of happiness as an organizing construct, rather than affect, well-being, or similar notions, has four principal advantages. First, people are fascinated by the presence or absence of happiness, recognizing a strong personal relevance and wishing better to understand the experience. Kim-Prieto, Diener, Tamir, Scollon, and Diener (2005) reported from a survey of college students in 47 countries that happiness was overwhelmingly rated as the most important of all personal values, above wealth, health, love, and similar others. Citizens’ “inalienable right” to “the pursuit of happiness” has been affirmed in political documents in the United States since the Declaration of Independence in 1776. This enduring personal and political interest means that research into people in organizations and other settings is likely to have greater impact on the wider population if it is framed in terms of happiness or unhappiness, rather than through the more technical concepts that are usual in the academic world.

Second, apparently diverse variables can be brought together within a single framework. Happiness and unhappiness include many subordinate constructs, whose interrelationships can be more clearly identified and analyzed as members of a single conceptual structure. Third, philosophical examination of happiness has pointed to themes that so far have remained largely outside psychologists’ research and conceptualization. Those need to be incorporated in a more comprehensive account than is traditional, in order better to understand a construct that has so far been examined in too narrow a manner.

A fourth reason for using the term happiness in scientific research derives from its connotative rather than denotative meaning. The latter (a question of literal, representational, or dictionary meaning) is considered shortly. The connotative meaning of a term concerns its implied associations based on personal and sociocultural interpretations. These color a literal (denotative) meaning with emotional and value-laden possibilities.

Most terms employed by psychologists in this area have connotative meanings that tend to be either negative or passive. Thus, strain is a concept with clearly unpleasant connotations, and well-being tends to imply in many cases a sense of positivity that is desirable but inert. On the other hand, the connotative meaning of happiness emphasizes associations that are more active and energy-related. Not only are such implied themes essential to the concept, but they can also be important in scientific understanding of the experience and its consequences.

The term’s denotative meaning derives in part from the Middle English hap, meaning “chance” or “luck,” as also in happenstance, perhaps, hapless, and mishap. (A charact...