Does the “happy-productive worker” thesis apply to managers?
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to emanate from an enduring stream of research into individual performance and organisational productivity where happy employees are believed to perform better. Decades of research have been unable to establish a strong link between workplace happiness and performance. A variation on the enduring employee happiness-productivity debate is evolving the “happy-performing managers” proposition. Design/methodology/approach – An empirical investigation reports on the impact of two important aspects of job happiness – self-rated affective wellbeing and intrinsic job satisfaction – on superiors’ ratings of managers’ contextual and task performance. An ancillary methodological objective of the study is to establish the structure of managers’ performance. Findings – A partial model of managers’ affective wellbeing, intrinsic job satisfaction and performance contributed an understanding to how specific indicators of affective wellbeing and intrinsic job sati
