You can always count on the folks over at the Freakonomics blog to shake up the conventional thinking, and today they’ve done it again. Everyone knows that if employees are happy they’ll also be productive, right? Hence all the corporate efforts to improve morale. But new research suggests the truth of the matter is that the kind of people who are happy make better employees. Freakonomics writes:
In a new paper called “Is the job satisfaction–job performance relationship spurious? A meta-analytic examination,” [Wright State University psychologist Nathan Bowling] re-assesses conclusions from five previous meta-analyses of the Big Five personality traits. He also conducts his own meta-analysis of the issue, focusing on studies that used data from thousands of employees and controlled for work-related self-esteem (how valuable employees think they are) and locus of control (how much they think they’ll be rewarded for a job well done).
His conclusion:
My study shows that a cause and effect relationship does not exist between job satisfaction and performance. Instead, the two are related because both satisfaction and performance are the result of employee personality characteristics, such as self-esteem, emotional stability, extroversion and conscientiousness.
Well then, that’s a lot of money wasted on in-house yoga lessons and cheerful office design. Of course whether such perks (or even less extravagant ones) help retain talent is still an open question.
(Image of smiley balloon by Marcus Vegas, CC 2.0)
