Promoting Performance Wellbeing, Leadership and Organizational Growth
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This essay as a pdf with full graphics can be downloaded here.
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
With anxieties about work overload, burnout, stagnant wages and future job loss, these challenges create significant employee disconnect and anxiety among the work culture.
This leads to a number of issues for the company. Today’s organizations need leaders to be highly innovative and motivated to do their best work. But how can a company depend on leaders to collaborate and generate high quality products and solutions apart from emotional, psychological and physical wellBEING?
What impact are these stressors having on the day-to-day lives of people in the workplace and the company’s bottom line? What role do concepts of positive psychology have in helping people to not only effectively handle these issues but open their hearts and minds to move forward with newfound confidence, resilience, determination, hope and vision for a better future? How can workers and their organizations create a more positive and proactive workplace that bridges economic and human goals? What will give employees satisfaction?
Workers of All Career Levels and Generations Place High Value on Compensation and Benefit Related Factors When Determining Job Satisfaction, But Non-Financial Factors Also Weigh Heavily in Workers’ Satisfaction with Their Jobs. Source: Employee Job Satisfaction and Engagement (SHRM, 2016)
INTRODUCTION
Applied positive psychology (APP) in the workplace is more than being happy at work. It’s having the knowledge and skills to apply basic positive interventions in one’s life. It’s about savoring life, expressing gratitude, nurturing social relationships, practicing optimistic thinking, avoiding over thinking social comparisons, increasing flow and engagement, creating strategies for coping, practicing spirituality and utilizing a fool-proof technique for setting goals. The absence of positive psychology in the workplace can lead to adverse effects on an individual’s total wellBEING and a company’s bottom line.
The state of wellBEING among leadership is startling when you look at some statistics about stress, emotional and physical burnout. Many employers and its people lack basic wellBEING literacy. They aren’t making sound wellBEING decisions, which can lead to psychological and emotional anxiety.
What should be disturbing to employers is how much time leaders spend their waken hours at work — dealing with their personal challenges. In doing this, their performance drops and the organization’s competitive edge is negatively affected.
The breakout field of APP has spread rapidly across social and human sciences over the past decade, offering a fresh lens to address some of today’s most pressing issues.
By challenging traditional psychology, which has focused largely on fixing what’s wrong, positive psychology aims to cultivate flourishing by moving people towards building what’s right.
WHAT POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY IS
A flourishing study
Positive psychology is grounded in rigorous research. It is the scientific study of what makes life most worth living—optimal functioning, performance and wellbeing. It aims to build the best things in life and crystallizes the concepts of total wellBEING including happiness, engagement, grit, meaning, unique strengths and virtues, relationships, resilience, and optimism. In doing so, it explores the positive skills, experiences, characteristics and practices that enable individuals, institutions and communities to excel and flourish.
Positive psychology is the study of how human beings prosper in the face of adversity (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000).3 This flourishing study, spearheaded in 1998 by Dr. Martin Seligman, has changed the trajectory of mainstream psychology and has spread rapidly across social and human sciences. It now spans many branches that builds on the philosophies and practices from Socrates to Maslow.
Today positive psychology has its applications in diverse fields such as economics, human and social services, education, parenting, healthcare, politics, leadership, management and organizational behavior.
Brief history
Positive Psychology as we know it today can be traced back to Martin E. P. Seligman’s 1998 Presidential Address to the APA (Seligman, 1999).4 Following a 1997 chance meeting between he and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Csikszentmihalyi, 2003)5, and an epiphanic moment when gardening with his daughter, Nikki (Seligman, 2000)6, Seligman realized that psychology had largely neglected the latter two of its three pre-World War II missions: curing mental illness, helping all people to lead more productive and fulfilling lives, and identifying and nurturing high talent.
He noted that psychology had been overwhelmingly focused on what was “wrong” and broken, such as disease, negative emotions, and pathologies. He observed that while much was known about the nature of ill health, the effect of negative stressors and the factors that help people survive through adversity, little was known about how normal people flourish in more nonthreatening circumstances.
With this realization, Seligman resolved to use his APA presidency to initiate a shift in psychology’s focus toward a more positive psychology (Seligman, 1999).7 Seligman challenged the field to bring as much focus to what was “right” and worthy of replication, such as kindness, love, awe, and gratitude.
“Unevenly looking only at pathology victimizes people.” 8 – Martin Seligman
Past research
Research into positive psychology topics might even be traced back to the origins of psychology itself, for example, in William James’ writings on ‘‘healthy mindedness’’ (James, 1902).9
In recent years, utilitarianism and humanistic psychology were among key movements that also elevated happiness and mental health as a meaningful goal and field of study.
Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi and those who took up the task of positive psychology aimed to reset the balance.
The future
Today scholars are calling for a more balanced approach, a second wave that builds on an abundance focus by integrating study of the positive with the negative to encompass human experience in all its complexity (Wong, 2011).12
A growing and notable field
As the leading advocate of positive psychology, Seligman has been exceptionally successful at catalyzing and uniting the efforts of the many distinguished scientists who have become some of the key players in the positive psychology movement. These include the Positive Psychology Steering Committee (Csikszentmihalyi, Diener, Jamieson, and Vaillant) and the leaders of numerous positive psychology research centers. (Seligman, 2005).13
Number of positive psychology-related journal documents per year, as a percentage of all journal documents that year in the data-set (citable documents only). (Rusk & Waters, 2013)15
The Five Essential Elements Needed in A Performance Wellbeing Culture
Imagine running an organization where leaders and teams have a common language, a shared understanding of priorities and able to grow from weaknesses. Unified teams not only have a more pleasurable work experiences, but they also succeed by leaps and bounds as compared to teams that struggle with fostering performance wellbeing.
The researchers and practitioners of positive psychology have studied a range of topics at individual, group and social levels such as character strengths and virtues, leadership, wisdom, values, psychological and social capital. The studies speak for themselves.
While the key positive psychology constructs like life satisfaction, gratitude, happiness, achievement, optimism and organizational citizenship fairness have attracted a majority of research (Rusk and Waters, 2013),16 Seligman and many scholars have focused on maximizing the benefits of PERMA, an acronym for a model of wellBEING that makes up five important building blocks of wellBEING and happiness:
Positive emotions*, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Accomplishment. (Seligman, 2011)17
*Of which happiness and life satisfaction are all aspects.
These are the five essential elements that serve as the foundation for principles that can lead to a more positive environment and culture in any workplace. We see wellBEING as a ‘broad category’ that encompasses a number of workplace factors.
Positive emotions
As social psychologist Barbara Frederickson posits in her Broaden and Build Theory, positive emotions open hearts and minds to become more receptive, productive and creative (Fredrickson, 2009).18 Positive emotional intelligence can enhance team members’ ability to think creatively, help them cope with challenges, nurture their progress in their career, and aid them in getting along with others in the workplace.
Engagement
A good, productive life integrates the concept of deep and engaging involvement in naturally satisfying and motivating activities referred to as flow, a state in which people are so involved in an activity that time stops and self-consciousness is blocked. (Cskikszentmihalyi, 1990).19 (Seligman, 2002).20
Relationships
Psychological health and happiness are inextricably linked with close, meaningful, and intimate relationships. Given how essential relationships are to our success and happiness, it makes sense to work toward improving our relationships at work as well, all toward the end goal of creating a more positive and productive culture.
Meaning
Seeing the deeper layers in our work. Understanding how our work benefits others, its value, and how we are an essential member of the team increases overall job satisfaction and wellBEING.
Achievement/Accomplishment
We are wired to want to better ourselves. In pursuing positive, self-concordant goals and striving to master and accomplish them, we flourish and experience wellBEING.
Defining the Problem – The Obstacles and Stressors
Waning motivation
It was polled in a Gallup Survey that business leaders may be worse off than the people they lead, and are 11% less likely to do what they do best every day, and 6 points more likely to feel stress during the workday.23
Weakening engagement and performance wellbeing
The U.S. has long been experiencing an employee engagement crisis, similar to much of the world. Gallup has not found employee engagement to be seasonal. The metric is more dependent on factors related to an organization’s performance management and human capital strategies (Gallup, 2016).24
* Monthly employee engagement at 34.1%
* Previous record set in March 2011
* Engagement had not topped 33% since 2012
Organizations are facing increasingly complex issues that demand a higher level of performance with severe consequences for not finding a solution. Meeting this challenge requires dramatic organizational change where people are conscious of their performance and work engagement.
Not Satisfied at Work
Gallup reports only 15% of employees strongly agree the leadership of their organization makes them feel enthusiastic about the future. When leaders model and welcome self-awareness around their own emotional triggers, they encourage people to want to do their best work. The Society for Human Resource Management has also explored and identified factors that influence overall employee satisfaction and engagement in the workplace.
Ineffective and uncaring leadership
Emotional intelligence and social-emotional skills are one of the hallmarks in performance wellBEING. Productivity and morale are tied to communication.
91% of employees say communication issues can drag executives down. The data shows that the vast majority of leaders are not engaging in crucial moments that could help employees see them as trustworthy (Interact/Harrison Report, 2016).26 In rank order, the following were the top communication issues people said were preventing business leaders from being effective:
“The two most powerful experiences in life are achieving and connecting. But if we focus on achieving, we’re not doing well at connecting. Connection is a mindset and an energy exchange between people who are paying attention to one another.”- Dr. Edward Hallowell, author and former faculty member at Harvard Medical School
No culture of wellBEING
Organizations can have a big influence over individuals’ wellBEING. Employers have the power to coordinate a wellBEING culture that attracts, motivates, engages and retains exceptional people. WellBEING is not wellness. WellBEING refers to a more holistic whole-person—the total BEING experience, whereas wellness refers only to physical health.
With the shift from corporate wellness programs to executive and individual wellBEING strategies, organizations have opportunity to look beyond an individual’s physical health and create a head-to-toe wellBEING strategy that touches the emotional, mental, spiritual and financial health of your workforce. A head-to-toe wellBEING approach does more than create a healthy workplace—it’s good for business (Ruddy, 2015)27.
For employers, having healthy leaders and teams mean greater performance and a healthier workplace culture, which in turn leads to higher levels of workplace productivity, satisfaction and morale, reduced healthcare costs, and a better bottom line.
Factors Contributing to WellBEING Budget Changes
As organizations look to maximize their wellBEING spending, they’ll be examining their vendor partnerships with an eye on adding or consolidating wellBEING vendors. WellBEING permeates every aspect of work, and more organizations are taking a holistic approach to it as a result — offering programs that address physical energy, mental focus, and emotional drive (Virgin Pulse, 2016)28.
The Impact
When job dissatisfaction strikes it is merely an emotional state; in response to the emotional state people will devise an alternative plan that is dependent upon the individual, his estimation of the situation and his own capabilities or aspirations. The alternative plan (see diagram above) will be behavioral or psychological (Henne & Locke, 1985).29
Performance – It’s almost intuitive to conclude that people who are dissatisfied don’t perform as well as people who are satisfied with their job. (Zhou & George, 2001).30
Withdrawal – Absenteeism and/or leaving the job is another recourse a worker may take when they become dissatisfied in their workplace.
Change reaction – He or she may choose to avoid aspects of the job they are unhappy with, using psychological defense mechanisms such as repression and evasion (Henne & Locke, 1985).31
Consequences of Choices
* Life Satisfaction – (Henne & Locke, 1985) believed that work is a component of a person’s life and will affect one’s attitude towards life as a whole.33
* Mental Health – (Locke, 1976) suggests that the existence of dissatisfaction implies conflict in the employee’s mind and the conflict may lead to issues.34
* Physical Health – If the dissatisfaction event increases stress levels in an individual, it may have health implications (Henne & Locke, 1985).35
Bottom line
Gallup research shows managers who are creating active disengagement costs the U.S. an estimated $450 Billion to $550 Billion annually (Clifton, 2013).36
“If your company reflects the average in the U.S., just imagine what poor management and disengagement are costing your bottom line.” – Jim Clifton, Gallup Chairman and CEO
Lack of loyalty – Research shows that workplace stress leads to an increase of almost 50% in voluntary turnover. Associated turnover costs are significant (American Institute of Stress, 1999). 32
The Solution – Bridging the Gap
Positive organizational behavior
We all know there will be some pressure and how this pressure interacts with positive emotions to shape the attitudes and behaviors of people in the workplace.
Organizations are trying to go beyond fixing these issues and into promoting excellence. Because of this perspective the business world needs to turn to the branch of psychology that deals with human flourishing and human strengths, namely positive psychology (Donaldson & Ko, 2010; Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000).37
Organizations can benefit from any number of research initiatives in positive psychology, particularly with respect to strengths (Park, Peterson & Seligman, 2004)38; job design (Berg, Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2010)39; work identity and company fit (Dutton, Roberts & Bednar, 2010).40
Positive psychology, with its forward-focused approach, offers us tools for coping with negative events and the potential for a more hopeful, productive and satisfying future.
Research shows that 40% of life satisfaction is dependent on intentional activity—what we think, feel and do (Lyubomirsky, Sheldon & Schkade,2005).41
Positive psychology views people as self-determined and creative, capable of accessing the 40% to create their desired outcomes rather than languishing as passive victims of external forces.
It looks at the nature and impact of positive emotions, positive traits and positive organizations.
Positive emotions at work
Dr. Barbara Fredrickson maintains positivity can enhance relationships, work, and health, relieve depression, broaden minds, and build lives. Positive emotions expand people’s repertoire for effective thinking and action, helping us build intellectual, physical, psychological and social resources (Frederickson, 2001).42
These emotions can be stimulated and sustained by supportive organizational environments. They outlast fleeting emotional states, increase our resilience, propel us in upward spirals toward optimal performance, growth and wellBEING.
Organizational scholars Donald Gibson and Sigil Barsade found that positive emotions are critical to business outcomes, impacting job performance, decision making, creativity, turnover, pro-social behavior, teamwork and leadership (Barsade & Gibson, 2007).43
Researched evidence
- Happiness – people are more likely to find work with more autonomy, meaning and variety (Lyubomirsky, King & Diener 2005).44
- Hope – found to support and sustain the capacity of workers to be more resilient and to bounce back in ways that strengthens their effectiveness (Youssef & Luthans, 2007).45
- Self-regulation – found to be associated with positive emotions of interest, excitement and confidence and are more likely to be associated with more productive work performance outcomes (Ryan & Deci, 2000)46
- Social-emotional skills – when people were presented with solutions they could actually implement themselves, problem-solving on subsequent unrelated tasks increased by 20%. Reminding the brain that there is a path forward allows you to import that empowered mindset to other challenges. Also reported in feeling better: 19% less agitated, 23% less uptight (Gielan, 2016).47
Positive psychology interventions
The workplace and teamwork should be exciting, motivating and energizing.
Appreciative Inquiry: Appreciate Inquiry (AI) provide leaders and change agents with a powerful new approach to achieving this kind of organizational excellence.
Developed by David Cooperrider in the 1980’s, AI is a collaborative search to identify and understand an organization’s strengths, its potentials, its greatest opportunities and people’s hopes for the future.
AI is different than problem solving. AI’s four steps include:
- Appreciate and value the best of what is
- Envision what might be
- Dialogue about what should be
- Innovate and create what will be
The language we use creates our reality (Hammond, 1998).48
Character strengths and virtues – the backbone of positive psychology
A growing body of evidence is finding that developing our strengths—doing what we do best each day—leaves us feeling up to six times more engaged in our work, helping to boost our confidence, lower stress and find more meaning and satisfaction (Linley, Willars & Biswas-Diener, 2010).49
Criteria applied to character strengths:
1. Universal – valued across time and cultures
2. Measurable – identified based on how we think, feel and act.
3. Morally valued – we value this way of being in the world
4. Fulfilling – developing these strengths will leave us feeling more fulfilled,
satisfied and happy.
5. Trait like – our strengths are what make us consistently unique (Peterson
& Seligman, 2004).51
Mindfulness
An emerging body of research is demonstrating the links between mindfulness and performance across a number of tasks.
Mindfulness contributes to performance by improving cognitive flexibility and alertness, and guarding against distractions and performance blunders. In the work environment, mindfulness has value not only by increasing engagement, but also in focusing attention (Dane&Brummel, 2013).52
Gratitude
Research indicates that gratitude is an important component of workplace culture that contributes to positive outcomes. For example, among teachers, gratitude is linked to less burnout (Chan,).53
Researchers have explored the relationship between dispositional gratitude—chronic, stable levels of gratitude, state gratitude —temporary shifts in gratitude levels and workplace gratitude. The results confirmed the importance of gratitude at work; both state and workplace gratitude predicted job satisfaction (Waters, 2012).54
Conclusion
The science of Positive Psychology offers powerful insights and proven strategies founded on the belief that people want to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives, to cultivate what is best within themselves, and to enhance their experiences of love, work, and play.
For employers, positive psychology in the workplace means having loyal employees, higher productivity, increased engagement and a progressive culture.
WellBEING literacy offered through applied positive psychology should be of urgent concern to employers. It fuels every aspect of work, and more organizations are taking a holistic approach to it as a result—offering programs that address performance, vitality, mental focus and emotional drive.
Executives and organizations should take steps to steer the holisitic conversation, recognizing that if they want organizational change through individual change, they’ll need to address positive psychology in the workplace.
Workers are more than mere bodies. Together with their minds and emotions makes up the total package of their human existence. The more organizations address the total nature of applied positive psychology in the workplace, the better they’ll be able to keep employees satisfied— cultivating what is best within themselves—and their businesses flourishing.
DecisionLab Global, a certified performance and executive wellbeing solution provider to corporations with a vision to help leaders become aware of what drives their thoughts, decisions and actions. We rethink performance improvement through teaching holistic wellbeing and evidence-based strategies.
We are skilled in performance science combining the art of wellbeing and human flourishing with the tools of optimal functioning as a strategy to to help your organization meet the demanding challenge of high performance levels.
We understand that leaders and their leadership are totally inseparable. To us, high-performance is about integrating whole self resources for long-lasting performance improvement for your organization. We work with people in South Africa, Australia, India and North America.
Contact us to learn more about whole-person leadership, raising resilience, effective energy management, prepared-for-you performance workshops, executive coaching and performance wellBEING in yourself and the people you manage, develop and lead.
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