Wellbeing is shaped by your day's little highlights, not merely its mishaps

Wellbeing research has tended to model work-life as a default state punctuated by negative events such as conflicts, mistakes, or unwelcome change. In this way, it follows the broader model of psychological health research that focuses on harmful interruption to normal functioning , a model that Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi were contesting in 2000 when they launched the Positive Psychology movement. In a new paper, Joyce Bono and colleagues further this tradition by drawing attention to how positive, as well as negative, daily events have a dynamic effect on our wellbeing.

Their study tested its hypotheses using an impressive array of data types collected across 15 consecutive working days. The 61 female participants completed four two-minute surveys each day, 2,4,6 and 8 hours after arriving at work. In each survey, participants recorded whether within the last period they had experienced any positive events such as socialising or receiving recognition, any negative events such as a work setback, or experienced interference with work by thinking about family duties, as well as how stressed they had been.  Unsurprisingly, experiencing a negative event was associated with more stress in that period. Experiencing a positive event led to less stress in that period – as well as in the following period.

The participants also wore blood pressure monitors at various points across the day. Higher systolic pressure - a good indicator of workplace physiological stress and associated in the long-term with heart disease – was more frequent at the end of days containing more negative and family-conflict events. And systolic pressure was lower in the evenings following days with more positive events. This result makes sense: we wouldn't necessarily expect a positive event to lower blood pressure in the moment, as it could bring about elation, laughter, or other arousing states; it's only later that the lowering could reasonably manifest itself.

Half-way through the study, all participants were offered an intervention in the form of a positive reflection exercise to be completed at the end of the working day. This involved reflecting back on three good things that had happened during the day and recording this in a journal.  Blood pressure was unaffected by this intervention, but the second half of the study saw lower incidence of self-reported health and stress symptoms, such as difficulty concentrating or neck pain, which the participants had been asked to record each evening throughout the study. Perhaps more convincingly, days where participants forgot to do the journalling saw more symptoms than those where they adhered to the intervention.

The effect sizes due to the intervention were small, and against hypotheses there were no interactions with the impact of positive or negative effects, meaning its action wasn’t about buffering from bad moments or magnifying great ones. However, it did reduce the impact of family preoccupation upon blood pressure and the evening measurement of mental health symptoms. Bono's team did some further analysis, revealing that almost half of the positive reflections referred to a family member, suggesting that the intervention might have helped participants consider that, whatever responsibilities they may impose, family are something to be grateful for.

This study shows us the importance of both positive and negative events in shaping our work wellbeing. Noting larger negative effect sizes, the authors note that "although the effects of bad may be stronger, the effects of good may be longer, at least with respect to employee perceptions of stress" And positive events can be actively created, such as through the use of the reflection exercise, to moderate and influence longer-term health states.

Bono, J., Glomb, T., Shen, W., Kim, E., & Koch, A. (2012). Building Positive Resources: Effects of Positive Events and Positive Reflection on Work Stress and Health Academy of Management Journal, 56 (6), 1601-1627 DOI: 10.5465/amj.2011.0272

Further reading:
Seligman, M. E., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. 2000. Positive psychology: An introduction. American Psychologist, 55: 5–14.

What makes ill feeling between work colleagues shift faster?

An instance of personal friction with a colleague can create angry feelings that are slow to abate. Paradoxically, when the prickly day also involves a specific work-related dispute, bad moods don’t linger so long. This counter-intuitive finding may reflect our willingness to seek a benign explanation for unpleasant situations, blaming the context rather than the person.

The research, from a team led by Laurenz Meier, looked at day-to-day swings in ratings of anger. This longitudinal study asked the 131 participants to diarise their mood before work, after work, and before bed, over a period of two weeks. The participants also recorded daily incidents of task conflict - disagreements about how to solve problems – and incidents of personal frictions, or relationship conflict. Meier's team looked at how mood was altered following such conflicts, after controlling for start-of-day mood. Did conflicts lead to impaired well-being, in terms of a fouler mood, and if so, how much and for how long?

Study participants tended to feel angrier at the end of a day that involved interpersonal relationship conflict with colleagues, feelings that continued in a weaker form to bed-time and could even linger to the following morning. However, when the rough day also involved a task conflict as well as a relationship one, well-being was only worse at the end of the day, and tended to recover by bed-time.

Consistent with previous research, the unpleasant nature of interpersonal tensions awaken negative feelings that colour the working day. Meier's team believe that their paradoxical finding for work-related conflict reflects a preference to attribute such instances to a situation: 'tempers ran high because we all want the project to succeed', rather than to a person: 'she just doesn't like me'. Taking the more benign interpretation allows us to go to bed feeling less chewed up. The researchers also looked at somatic complaints such as headaches and back pain, and again found that these symptoms were highest with relationship conflict and no task conflict, but this mirroring of the angry-mood pattern did not reach overall significance.

According to this research, the more personal 'storm in a teacup' may actually be the most insidious type. With nothing wrong to fix, it's easier to paint the other person as difficult or even malevolent, and that may be a hard place to recover from. If you want to smooth ruffled feathers it may be useful to focus attention on the task components of disagreements, encouraging reappraisal of the situation, and leading people away from a less defensive mindset.

Meier LL, Gross S, Spector PE, & Semmer NK (2013). Relationship and task conflict at work: interactive short-term effects on angry mood and somatic complaints. Journal of occupational health psychology, 18 (2), 144-56 PMID: 23506551

Further Reading:
Spector, P. E., & Bruk-Lee, V. (2008). Conflict, health, and well-being. In
C. K. W. De Dreu & M. J. Gelfand (Eds.), The psychology of conflict
and conflict management in organizations (pp. 267–288). San Francisco,
CA: Jossey-Bass.
 

Forcing a smile at work? Mindfulness can help

Mindfulness is a way of operating that involves paying attention to events in a nonjudgmental way, and psychological research is corroborating its benefits, reported for millennia in other fields of knowledge.  A new paper by Ute Hülsheger and her colleagues takes a neat angle by focusing on one mechanism through which mindfulness might act: reducing reliance on an unproductive emotion regulation strategy, surface acting. As we've discussed before, surface acting involves adjusting or controlling your emotional expression in response to a felt emotion. When you put on a smile and force a calm voice in response to a querulous customer, that's surface acting. It's a common strategy, but research shows it to be psychologically draining, leading to emotional exhaustion and burnout.

Hülsheger's team predicted that mindfulness would decrease the need to surface act, by depersonalising the negative elements of the experience and interrupting automatic thought processes that lead first to undesired physiological responses and then trigger counterreactions (such as surface acting). To investigate this, they recruited 219 Dutch and Dutch-language Belgians into a diary study in which they were asked to record their experiences after work and prior to going to bed on five consecutive days.

After work, participants recorded their daily levels of mindfulness - sample items "Today I found myself doing things without paying attention", and their daily extent of surface acting - "Today I pretended to have emotions that I did not really have". Job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion, the outcome measures of interest, were taken separately before bed to avoid common method bias, where participants' ratings of some items contaminate ratings of others recorded in the same sitting.

The study used a fairly sophisticated statistical method called multilevel structural equation modelling. Effectively this means that the data on daily mindfulness can be distinguished into what is consistent for the individual, their 'mean mindfulness', and daily variations from this mean. The team found that both mean and daily mindfulness was associated with lower surface acting, and this in turn with less emotional exhaustion and more job satisfaction.

It could be that the causality runs in reverse to what Hülsheger's team proposed; perhaps we're simply more mindful on days we happen to do without surface acting. To investigate this a second study introduced experimental conditions, with 64 participants receiving ten days of mindfulness training and a further 42 doing without. The training was self-managed with instruction from written and audio materials, and involved common mindfulness techniques such as body scanning to encourage bodily awareness, as well as guided meditations.

The team found that the mindfulness group had significantly higher daily mindfulness ratings, as you would expect, and members of this group experienced less exhaustion and higher job satisfaction. The data suggested that for job satisfaction this effect was again mediated by the reduced surface acting seen in the mindfulness group. However this mediation wasn't observed for emotional exhaustion, possibly on account of lower power due to the smaller samples used.

The paper contributes to the growing body of research on the impact of mindfulness on workplace variables, and I find it a helpful one in refining our understanding. Mindfulness is used to refer to a range of phenomena - a trainable activity, a behavioural tendency, and a particular state - all of which are together examined in these studies. This is helpful in joining the dots and suggesting that the different phenomena do appear to be pointing at the same thing. This helps us build a picture: we are all more or less predisposed to mindful awareness, with our actual access to this state fluctuating day-by-day (around 38% of the variance was within-person) and influenced by even a short period of training.

Hülsheger, U., Alberts, H., Feinholdt, A., & Lang, J. (2013). Benefits of mindfulness at work: The role of mindfulness in emotion regulation, emotional exhaustion, and job satisfaction. Journal of Applied Psychology, 98 (2), 310-325 DOI: 10.1037/a0031313

Further reading:

Brown, KW, Ryan, RM, Creswell, JD (2007). Mindfulness: Theoretical Foundations and Evidence for its Salutary Effects. Psychological Inquiry, 18 (4) DOI:10.1080/10478400701598298 
pdf freely available here

Ruminative thoughts deepen the long-term impact of workplace violence

Experiencing workplace violence can have negative impacts far beyond the event itself. How do our own thoughts and cognitions influence this? And is there anything we can do about it?  Karen Niven and colleagues from the universities of Manchester and Sheffield suspected that ruminative thoughts may be a problem. Rumination involves returning to a difficult memory or thought over and over without a clear goal-directed purpose. Its generalised nature means it obstructs solutions while maintaining the negative qualities of the thought in time, extending its impact.

 After an initial experimental study, demonstrating that rumination on simulated violence prevents our emotional state from returning to normal levels in the short term, the team took the effect out into the field. This study investigated whether trait rumination - our individual tendency to fall into ruminative thinking, would predict longer-term outcomes following actual workplace violence. The sample of 78 social workers were surveyed on their experiences of violence over the last six months on the job (only 23% had experienced no violence), as well as completing measures of current psychological wellbeing, health complaints, and trait rumination.

Using regression analysis, the team found that individually both violence and rumination led to worsened physical and psychological health, but that violence didn't have an impact on wellbeing for those who tended not people to ruminate. In other words, rumination appeared to be a necessary condition for violence to cast a wider pall upon psychological health.

Existing research warns of the hazards of suppressing our thoughts, which is psychologically involving and can lead to negative outcomes. However, once thinking starts to become ruminative, going over old ground again and again, then finding a means of distraction may be effective in reducing impact both immediately, and in the longer term. Regardless, we shouldn't forget that the onus is on the perpetrators of workplace violence to change their behaviours.

  Niven, K., Sprigg, C., Armitage, C., & Satchwell, A. (2012). Ruminative thinking exacerbates the negative effects of workplace violence Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology DOI: 10.1111/j.2044-8325.2012.02066.x

Sticking with self-employment: the traits that matter

Although I'm largely self-employed, life within an organisation is recent enough that I can recall some of its attractions: regulated income, conscientious support staff, nice equipment. Still, I'm happy as I am, having never once felt the inclination to pack it in and look for a job.  Some of that owes to circumstance - and no little luck - but a recent piece of research suggests there may be important individual characteristics that differentiate those who persist in self-employment from those who leave it.

The study, by Pankaj Patel and Sherry Thatcher, gathers data on a subset of people from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, which collected waves of information on a cohort of people who left high school in 1957. Their employment history was coded to note moves into self-employment and the duration it lasted. This was used to model the influence of a number of individual variables, after controlling for a host of factors including income and prestige in jobs (which might unduly tempt individuals to stay in place), family precedents such as a self-employed parent, and so on.

Patel and Thatcher were interested in the Big Five personality traits, as these have been shown to differentiate people in entrepreneurial roles, which form part of the self-employment population. The analysis suggested that  individuals who are more emotionally stable are more likely to enter, and then to persist in, self-employment, as are those who are more open to experience. This pattern, similar to that found in entrepreneurs, is fairly intuitive: confidence and resilience in the first case, and flexibility and problem-solving curiosity in the second, are vital features of the jack-of-all-trades (and crises) that the self-employed need to be. However, while entrepreneurs are more likely to be extraverted, conscientious, and less agreeable (that is, less concerned about people's feelings), none of these factors influenced decisions to start or persist in self-employment.

The team also predicted that aspects of psychological well-being - a set of beliefs about your place in the world - would also matter, specifically those utilitarian ones concerning how we can get ahead in the world. The verdict was mixed: Personal growth, the belief that you are able to learn and grow had no impact on self-employment. Meanwhile, those who believed they could master their environment were more drawn to self-employment but no more likely to persist in it. The only aspect that influenced both entering and persisting in self-employment was autonomy, the belief that independence was important to them.  The study also found that individuals more likely to tenaciously persist with goals and re-frame negative obstacles to see them as still achievable were more likely to continue to go it alone.

The self-employed, then, are marked out by individual qualities, but they don't map neatly onto the entrepreneur model. The study suggests that a sense of independence, curiosity and a tendency not to ruminate help people persevere in this kind of work, along with a goal-focused tenacity. But it seems the field is too diverse to demand extraversion, a highly systematic outlook, or a particular sensitivity to other people. Being your own boss comes in many shapes and sizes.

Patel, P., & Thatcher, S. (2012). Sticking It Out: Individual Attributes and Persistence in Self-Employment Journal of Management DOI: 10.1177/0149206312446643

How can work be addictive?

You've been moping at home all week, your partner wisely giving you space as he senses how antsy you are. Then the phone goes: a buddy has scored, and it's a big one. Do you want in? You only want to know two things: when and where.

The weeks that follow are a blur.  You and the others – the gang - are in the same boat: when you're not doing it, you're talking about it. And when it's done, and you return to mundanity, that emptiness sets in. At the anniversary dinner your partner makes for you, all you can think about is the next big score.

This is a narrative of addiction. In a fascinating article on the New Zealand film industry, Lorraine Rowlands and Jocelyn Handy argue that this is just what freelancers experience due to the nature of their working patterns. They conducted interviews with 21 industry insiders, interpreting the data using interpretative phenomenological analysis, a technique that emphasises emotional features of responses, rather than simply looking to cluster content into themes.
They found a number of features that chimed with this addiction model. What were they?

Firstly, people tend to enter the film industry because it offers something scarce and intrinsically desirable: an opportunity for artistic expression. Moreover, freelance project work has a heightened quality: no lazy days at the office surfing the web and making small talk. As one respondent put it,

"From an artistic point of view there is a definite energy and pace.... you can actually come up with some incredible work and you couldn't have contrived it outside of that crazy environment. It's a collaborative energy that is created by pressure, by unreasonable deadlines and last minute changes."

This highlights a key feature of addiction: the addictive object or activity exists within a social context, where relationships strengthen with those who share the addiction and wither with those outside it. If all you want to talk about is the shoot tomorrow, your mundane friends are likely to seem like encumbrances; this leads to a vicious circle where the addictive context is the only thing that offers comfort.

Moreover, freelancing work involves extended periods of downtime, or withdrawal. A respondent notes that when their project came to a close "a lot of other people too went into depression. You start thinking 'oh god, I'll never get employed again'". These quieter times could be a time to reinvest in neglected relationships, but this can feel more like an obligation, whereas chasing ties with other industry figures remains urgent, as gaining new work involves being in the right networks. This means the relationships around the object of addiction continue to be prized.

Finally, freelance work is hard to quit, for the simple reason that without a company to formally exit, it's very easy to come back for another hit. What's more, given the specialisms of the industry you can very well be the necessary piece for your network of worker-friends to secure a piece of work, so exiting can be seen as a slight or even as a betrayal. One respondent took that plunge, and noted "all these people I had connected with were just like - snap - never seen me before....Even at the film première and the post thing - it was like - no one spoke to me".

The authors suggest this confluence of features may be common to other cultural industries such as “theatre, television, fashion, music and new media work.” And you never know; it might be worth examining the highs and lows offered by our own working patterns.

Rowlands, R., & Handy, J. (2012). An addictive environment: New Zealand film production workers' subjective experiences of project-based labour Human Relations , 65 (5), 657-680 DOI: 10.1177/0018726711431494

Controlled study finds mind-body stress reduction techniques effective in workplace

A large randomised controlled study has found yoga and meditation techniques to be effective for stress reduction in the workplace. The study screened employees from a single company at two location to find healthy individuals who identified themselves as stressed and did not practice those techniques. This led to 239 employees who were randomly assigned to a weekly program of viniyoga practice, a similar program focused on mindfulness meditation, or to a control group who were simply given information about resources available to help with workplace stress. After 12 weeks, participants in both programs had significantly lower stress, as well as reduced difficulties in sleeping, whereas the control participants did not.

The study also measured biological features, such as heart rate variability measured post-intervention, where the participant had to imagine an upcoming stressful event and try and apply the relevant technique (mindfulness, yogic techniques such as breath control, or simply their default coping strategy if a control). Again those participants who had been through the intervention had better outcomes, in terms of heart rhythm coherence, a measure of autonomic balance linked to better functioning.

Key to these findings were the time commitments taken on by participants: the weekly commitment was in most cases just an hour, with a total time investment of 12-14 hours leading to these health effects. We've written about even more bite-sized approaches to introducing health activities into the workplace, which itself is being evaluated in a trial form. As our scientific understanding of the valuable impact of these often-ancient activities deepens, it's very welcome that we are simultaneously investigating the pragmatic concerns: understanding which strategies are viable for introducing these techniques on a large scale into a workplace.

Wolever, R., Bobinet, K., McCabe, K., Mackenzie, E., Fekete, E., Kusnick, C., & Baime, M. (2012). Effective and viable mind-body stress reduction in the workplace: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 17 (2), 246-258 DOI: 10.1037/a0027278

2012 Resolution: attract and keep the right people for your workplace

Getting people in

It's all very well having the best methods of selection, but you need to get motivated, capable and well-fitted people interested in working with you.




1. Cultivate a good word-of-mouth reputation to attract highly educated graduates. So treat existing employees well and avoid allegations of hypocrisy by ensuring your internal culture fits with your external brand.  The received wisdom of 'campus presence' turns out to be on rather flimsier ground  (it may even be counterproductive for world-wise candidates), but the evidence is that people trust word-of-mouth.

2. Ensure online recruitment materials reveal the diversity within the office. There's evidence that both black and white applicants are more likely to peruse sites that present images of diversity, treating it as a marker of merit. Of course, this doesn't mean misleading applicants as to the true nature of your workplace!

3. Treat your intake of young  workers as you do graduates: as an investment in the future. Many industries rely heavily on young workers, and experts argue we should take this work more seriously, offering better working conditions, access to training and recognising good performance. That way, those who thrive will recommend their workplace to their social circles, reducing churn costs, and may themselves stay with the company into adulthood, or return after studies.

Keeping people sweet

We're living in an era of unprecedented attention to the notion of wellbeing, satisfaction and happiness. Even if we believe that material conditions are primary – for instance, that money buys you happiness – there are undoubtedly other measure we can take to better conditions in the workplace, and here the psychological literature can really help.

4. Explore whether your older employees are hankering after managerial responsibilities. Employees older than 45 have a stronger preference to supervise others than their younger colleagues. Of course, "want to" does not equate to "should", but such preferences are likely to drive engagement, so it's unwise to ignore them, especially in a workforce, which, at least in the first world, is ageing at an unprecedented rate.

5. Take up volunteering. An unexpected resolution? People who volunteer time out of work gain benefits they carry into the following working day. Actually, it shouldn't surprise: volunteering epitomises many of the evidence-based five ways to wellbeing, including giving, connecting to others, and (often) a degree of physical activity.

6. Experiment with focused breaks to enhance health and energy at work. Maintaining our health at work allows us to function better and avoid illness, stress and burnout. So you may want to explore the idea of packaging activities such as mindfulness meditation, breathing exercises or physical activity into bite-size packages during the working day.

However....

There is a potential dark side to a focus on enjoyment on the workplace. As outlined in this article, emphasis on "fun" can end up being inauthentic, pressurise everyone into the same mould, and draw young workers into unhealthy dependency on their employer as the source of their social support as well as income. So stand up to cynical uses of fun and socialising in the workplace (7).

CEOs weather personal problems better by turning to each other than to friends and family

Who can the boss, the person at the very top, turn to when personal problems arise? A recent article alerts us that the answer is often 'other leaders', examining what prompts a CEO to support another, and how this matters for the organisation.

It's understandable that people from similar circumstances may provide each other valuable support, through advice, validation or needed perspective. But what impels busy, driven people to offer it? Researchers Michael McDonald and James Westphal took an observation from social identification theory: we like to help other members of a group we identify with. They decided to explore whether CEOs help peers when they perceive themselves as members of a shared social category: the “leadership cadre”. Their study used surveys year-on-year to investigate CEO personal circumstances, their attitudes towards identity, and a range of behaviours – both towards other CEOs and within their organisation.

Because of the study's fairly complex recruitment methodology, which used their initial 300 respondent CEOs to identify informal CEO support groups to further recruit from, we should be aware that the sample is more focused on CEOs disposed to offer help. With that in mind, the average participant offered support eight times in a year, either to another member of their company board over a round of golf, or through the informal groups. And, as predicted, participants who identified themselves as part of a leadership group were more likely to then offer their fellows support: if their identification grew by a standard deviation, this would lead them to provide social support on an extra eight occasions.

The study shows how such support matters. Each CEO reported any personal problems such as strained marital relations, things that are likely to distract and deplete the energy available for work. These problems, especially when severe, led to a reduction of non-obligatory but vital leadership behaviours, such as mentoring subordinates, over the twelve months that followed them. However, availability of social support from other CEOs substantially mitigated this. In fact, their support had beyond double the impact of that of support from family and friend networks.

Given the amount of research on leadership, it's surprising how little focuses on the person within the suit. This research outlines how home-life can take a toll on leadership effectiveness – especially those activities that can be put off to tomorrow – and how sometimes the solution is for leaders to turn to each other.


Michael L. McDonald, & James D. Westphal (2011). My Brother's Keeper? CEO Identification with the Corporate Elite, Social Support Among CEOs, and Leader Effectiveness Academy of Management Journal, 54 (4), 661-693

Using work technology at home hinders our ability to detach from work

We know that psychologically detaching from work is important, leading to less fatigue, more positive working-week experiences, and higher overall life satisfaction. How you fill your leisure time has a big impact on psychological detachment - for instance, we've reported on the beneficial effects of volunteering on detachment. A recent study confirms what many suspect – it's harder to switch off when technology keeps you plugged in.

In their study, YoungAh Park, Charlotte Fritz and Steve Jex looked at work-home segmentation: how much we partition our domains of leisure and work. Some of this is preference – for example, you might choose not to take a job likely to intrude into your home life. And some is about surrounding norms: if it's typical to take work home, or to call a colleague on a work issue in an evening, it's difficult not to be drawn into these activities.

But the authors suspected that a major factor was technology use at home, and investigated this through a survey completed by 431 university alumni now in full-time employment. As well as measures of detachment from work, segmentation preference eg “I prefer to keep work life at work”; and perceived segmentation norm, they also looked at frequency of use of different technologies (email, internet, phone, pda) for workplace purposes when at home.

As expected, both a preference for and a culture of less segmentation led to less psychological detachment. People who used technologies for work purposes while at home struggled to detach from work, and the analysis showed that this was a major route through which weak segmentation had its effect on detachment. In part, weak segmentation manifests as work-technology behaviours at home.

It's important to note that technology did not explain all of the variance, which means that setting strict rules about technology use is not the only way to help psychological detachment, nor necessarily sufficient; you may want to develop habits that deal with ruminations, develop end-of-day rituals, or establish clearer boundaries with colleagues. But technology certainly plays a part, and so it's worth considering the practices of your own workplace: for instance,are the trends towards shedding work desktops for laptops, and “bring your own computer” programs, helping or hurting us?


Park, Y., Fritz, C., & Jex, S. (2011). Relationships between work-home segmentation and psychological detachment from work: The role of communication technology use at home. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0023594

Some of us experience bigger 'emotional hangovers', whether from fun activities or hurricanes

While some of us may be generally happier than others, all of us experience different emotions from day to day. A fascinating new study suggests that these fluctuations are due to two factors: a cycling of emotion levels across the working week, and our unique personal sensitivity to both good and bad daily events. The study even has hurricanes.

Daniel J. Beal and Louma Ghandour from Rice University set out to track the daily affect patterns of participants from an IT services company. They were particularly interested in how intrinsic task motivation – how fulfilling the participants found their work that day – influenced emotion or affect. Ten days in, Hurricane Ike struck the region. Recommencing some weeks later, the study also took the chance to examine how this negative one-off event influenced matters.

The 65 participants completed 21 end-of-day surveys (prompted by an email reminder), rating intrinsic task motivation, together with how much they felt emotional states like frustrated, discouraged, happy and proud. As per other recent research, the negative emotions showed a cyclical pattern, peaking at Wednesday with a projected bottoming out on Saturday; positive emotions showed the inverse pattern. There were also individual differences in average scores: some people are generally more frustrated than others.

The authors also calculated each participant’s ‘affect spin’, a measure of day-to-day emotional volatility, a high score meaning that person experienced a wide range of different affect states from day to day. The authors found that having a motivating day's work affected that day’s positive mood for everyone, but individuals with high affect spin saw a kind of positive hangover into the next day as well.

After Hurricane Ike, everyone experienced lower levels of positive affect. This began to recover as the event receded into the past, but not for those with high affect spin, who seemed to be suffering a longer hangover again, but this time with negative consequences.

Individual differences in emotional state matter, and this study reminds us that we don't just differ on average, but also in how dynamically our mood responds to events. It's possible that offering a fascinating problem to your reactive employee on a Monday will generate benefits that carry forward, and battle the mid-week dip. The authors conclude that “mapping the terrain of positive and negative affective events and their implications for worker well-being can help to ground the field of organizational psychology in a truly experiential understanding of work life.”

Beal, D., & Ghandour, L. (2011). Stability, change, and the stability of change in daily workplace affect Journal of Organizational Behavior, 32 (4), 526-546 DOI: 10.1002/job.713

Measuring happiness: a view from management science

This year's BPS Annual Conference was visited by Stephen Hicks of the Office of National Statistics, to present the latest on the new measurement of national well-being. Still in final development, the content presented seemed well-considered and balanced – capturing elements of hedonic feelings of current happiness as well as a sense of meaning. A recent review in the Academy of Management Perspective looks at the history of the measurement of happiness and provides some of the more consistent findings.

Authors David G. Blanchflower and Andrew J. Oswald present data from several large surveys – 48,000 and 300,000 – conducted in the United States. Their approach is to report how variables such as age, income, or marital status contribute to equations that predict measures of happiness, in terms of their strength and direction. These suggest, for instance, that in America being black is associated with lower average happiness, as is (to a smaller extent) being male. The variable most relevant for this blog is joblessness; while it's impact has been well-communicated (for instance by Richard Layard) the striking size of the effect – twice the impact of being black or five times being male– is illuminating. However, the authors point out that less than 10% of the variance of the happiness measure is explained by the variables covered: we haven't come close to bottoming out a comprehensive happiness equation.

The authors point to a consistent association between income and happiness in the cross-sectional samples – in their view, “money buys happiness”. However, they also point to the phenomena, identified by Richard Easterlin in the 1970s, that a country's economic growth tends not to be tracked by happiness. It's currently certainly a useful buffer, with the have-nots experiencing a subjectively less happy life vs those secured by money, but whether wealth is intrinsically linked to happiness still seems unclear.

Blanchflower and Oswald also present data on job satisfaction from the US. Overall, this has trended slightly downwards since the beginning of that data set in 1972, suggesting that we are struggling to deliver the working conditions that people desire. Higher levels of satisfaction were associated with being white, highly educated, older, in part time employment, and, to a substantial degree, self employed. Additionally, workers who feel secure in their jobs show a large premium to their ratings of satisfaction.

The authors point out a 2008 paper they authored which demonstrated that happiness levels are tracked by healthy blood pressure from country to country, with citizens of Denmark and the Netherlands thriving by both measures. They argue that the future of this field will be of convergence, where “the social science literature on happiness will slowly join up with a medical and biological literature on physical well-being.”

David G. Blanchflower, & Andrew J. Oswald (2011).
International Happiness:
A New View on the Measure of Performance Academy of Management Perspectives, 25 (1), 6-22

Volunteering supports workplace wellbeing

In Britain nowadays we're all voluntary workers in the making. The government has branded us a Big Society, where voluntary schemes take on traditional state activities, strengthening community and making us feel useful. Research from Germany suggests another reason to run the jumble sale: it can increase well-being in our paid place of work.

Eva Mojza and colleagues from the University of Konstanz identified a number of features of voluntary work they propose could give psychological benefits. By immersing us in non-employment activities, it helps us to switch off from the grind, a valuable recovery process called psychological detachment. It's freely chosen, makes us feel useful, and often involves additional social contact, satisfying core needs of having autonomy over what we do, feeling competent, and connecting to others. And it provides mastery experiences: opportunities to learn and take on challenges.

To test these hypotheses, the research used a survey technique where people recorded their activities and states on a daily basis. The sample was composed of 105 German people who between them surveyed 476 days; participants were all in at least half-time employment and volunteered for at least a day a week. The bulk of the survey was completed at bedtime, when participants recorded how much of their day they spent on voluntary work or other activities such as exercise or childcare, and provided ratings on the psychological variables of detachment, needs satisfaction and mastery experiences.

Usefully, the participants also filled out a one-off survey to look at overall 'trait' levels of the same psychological variables. This allowed the researchers to determine whether volunteering work had any distinct effect on needs satisfaction, once overall need satisfaction and any effects due to activities like exercising were factored in. Just such an effect was found, meaning people felt more connected to others, competent, and in control of their lives after volunteering. Equivalent effects were found for psychological detachment and mastery experiences: volunteering helped to shrug off workplace concerns and gave opportunities to meet challenges.

Did this influence how participants were at work the following day? To answer this, the survey included a section that was completed immediately after work, with participants rating adjectives such as “enthusiastic” or “tense” to report positive and negative mood across the day, and rating how much they actively listened to their colleagues. These reflected aspects of wellbeing the researchers were interested in.

The authors looked for relationships between these and volunteering time and the psychological variables from the previous day. They found that active listening was influenced by yesterday's levels of psychological detachment from work and need satisfaction. Moreover, volunteering reduced negative mood at work the following day, operating through the benefit volunteering has for need satisfaction.

Positive mood wasn't directly influenced by any variable, suggesting that yesterday's volunteering can cushion against today's unhappiness but is less able to provoke happiness (maybe that's down to having cake in the office). As all participants were existing volunteers, we don't know if the observed benefits extend to someone less inclined to volunteering. And these benefits could vanish should voluntary work become mandatory, as some have suggested, or otherwise stripped of its valued features.

Nevertheless, this research suggests that volunteering gives back in many ways. Far-sighted organisations would do well to encourage and support volunteering within their workforce, as it gives back to them, too.



Mojza, E., Sonnentag, S., & Bornemann, C. (2011). Volunteer work as a valuable leisure-time activity: A day-level study on volunteer work, non-work experiences, and well-being at work Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 84 (1), 123-152 DOI: 10.1348/096317910X485737

Booster breaks at work enhance health and energy, and could ripple through organisations

Many of us in developed countries know that our lifestyle gets in the way of achieving a level of health in line with our level of wealth. With around half our waking hours spent in work settings, Wendell C. Taylor recommends an evidence-based workplace policy aimed to boost our health, with follow-on benefits for the organisation.

Taylor's paper, an eclectic review of research and practises including US federal recommendations, yogic techniques and sports science, points out that the modern workplace is laced with health hazards. These include a lack of strenuous physical activity, prolonged bouts of sitting still, weight gain (often due to unhealthy consumption), and of course stress. His solution is to take fifteen minute 'booster breaks' that involve health-promoting behaviours such as physical activity, meditation and breath training.

Fifteen minutes may seem like small beer, but Taylor lays out the evidence that these small efforts may have big effects. The US Department of Health and Humans Services, through a review of hundreds of studies, concluded that having some moderate-to-heavy physical activity in your routine improves health, even when the doses are small; indeed, no minimum level has been identified for producing health benefits.

Sedentary behaviour has serious effects on health - the risk of obesity increases by five percent for every two hours spent sitting at work - and the effects are worse when not interrupted; luckily, that's just what taking a booster break will do. Snacking and smoking, both common ways to use or even to justify work breaks, are suppressed when alternatives are promoted to fill our time. Given that on average we can prevent weight gain by tipping our energy intake-outtake by 100 kilocalories, these small effects matter.

We can also put in time to change our state of mind. Meditation can reduce anxiety and increase clarity of thought, and it can be hacked to fit even the short times of work breaks. Taylor asserts that rhythmic breathing can affect stress and immune function as well as reduce depression, and cites evidence for decreases in blood pressure from three months of practice of a few daily fifteen-minute sessions. Of course, all these types of break can increase blood flow and energy levels, which are both important for work effectiveness.

Taylor recommends sanctioning and promoting these health-enhancing practises in the workplace as booster breaks where employees get together to breathe, work out, or experience Big Mind together. He argues that such a policy can have multiple effects in a ripple-like fashion: the primary impact is at the centre, on individual behaviours; a smaller but profound effect takes place for individual outcomes like health, stress, energy, fun; then increasingly smaller effects occur for organisational morale, productivity, healthcare costs, and even for the organisation's image.

Taylor argues that breaks can enhance daily productivity even if they reduce the total time working, citing research conducted with data entry workers. This might seem strange if we see the capacity for work purely in terms of 'time available', but once we see energy as a major limiting factor this makes a lot of sense. Organisational morale is boosted partly by the group design, which encourages worker cohesiveness and a sense of collective fun.

We all want to stay well at work - the challenge is to know what we can do within our busy schedules. This article argues that even as little as fifteen minutes from our day can make a personal difference, and by taking our colleagues along we can multiply that impact, for ourselves and for the organisation. The full Booster Break methodology is currently being assessed using an ongoing randomised control trial - rest assured we'll bring you a follow-up once it's completed.

Taylor, W. (2011). Booster Breaks: An Easy-to-Implement Workplace Policy Designed to Improve Employee Health, Increase Productivity, and Lower Health Care Costs Journal of Workplace Behavioral Health, 26 (1), 70-84 DOI: 10.1080/15555240.2011.540991