Employee Happiness a Valuable Tool to Drive Organisations

Introduction

Countless experts approve that happiness is conceivably the furthermost significant component of a pleasant, synergistic and competent work environment. When we look at the organisations of past and present, those organisations having happiness among employees are typically efficacious and have spurred success. To reassure supreme involvement, commitment, proficient mastery organisations need to operate in the contemporary world as a “whole person” but the question arises how to get a “whole person”? It means mind, emotions, body and a spirit of an employee. When we embrace the resentments then we lose a part of ourselves throughout interpersonal transgression which creates an impenetrable veil of separation, disaffection, and uncertainty and generates a spiral downward to the happiness.

Here, the significance of positive psychology is very apparent which shelters the untapped areas of psychology and largely encompasses positive traits, enhancement of happiness, optimism, hope, creativity, wisdom and overall well- being. During the last couple of decades’ researchers, academicians, and psychologists have mostly accentuated on distress, anger, anxiety and depression but there has been a gradual focus on capturing the positive facets of human strengths that have become an enduring stream of research in psychology. In the modern world, owing to the economic uncertainty and amplified level of competition, on the one hand, the work has been intensified and on the other hand, sustaining a level of happiness at work has turn out to be more substantial.

The initial findings of positive psychology, propagates that constructs of positive psychology are applicable in the workplace (Field & Buitendach, 2011). Researchers believes that study of positive psychology in the workplace will confer an enhanced understanding of what impulses and reassures employees to flourish and achieve their latent abilities in the working environment and undoubtedly, the positive feelings and characteristics will deliver significant contribution to global happiness in the workplace (Fisher, 2010). With the growing realization, the well-being of employees can’t be considered solely either on physical or psychological health because the picture remains vague and lopsided lacking a unified and all-inclusive understanding of human functioning of all the levels. Even though the importance of psychological factors in the progress of employees have been emphasized for a long time but real attention has been paid in recent times.

In economics, the social indicator movement focuses on the most recent progress in happiness research which is the advent of ‘Happiness Economics’ that throws light on the fit between what we expect from a choice known as “expected utility” that does not constantly fit with the satisfaction, we get from the choice known as “experienced utility” with the rationality of satisfaction. In Happiness Economics, the attention is specifically on happiness with the logic of life-satisfaction. (Veenhoven, 2017)

All mankind is having a common goal of life that is happiness which is also the most difficult one to achieve.

Everyone knows that to make an organisation successful, happy employees are pertinent as the performance and happiness drive together (Fisher, 2003). For the sustainable achievement of pre-established goals and objectives of an organisation both an apt management system with a positive approach is required for the encouragement of employees that increases the happiness.

Based on above, this chapter gives an expelling attempt to unlock the significance of employee happiness to drive the organisation and throws light on the flourishing field of happiness at the workplace. This chapter includes the concept, Indian and western theoretical background, concise psychological research, causes and consequences of happiness and unhappiness in the workplace. Also highlights how the organisations can foster or nurture the happiness at work.