Are happy workers productive workers?

Originally published 1/06/08

I first became interested in human resource management while working at an underwear factory in South Carolina. Throughout my high school years, I spent my summers and vacations loading trucks with boxer shorts headed for Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Sears, Target and other stores around the country.
Most people wouldn’t describe this experience as fascinating, but I was intrigued by the fact that common sense was violated on a daily basis. Common sense, for example, tells us that happy workers are productive workers. Managers who believe this tend to think that they can squeeze more productivity out of people by making them happier.
At the underwear factory, however, the people who were the happiest were happy precisely because they could get away with being unproductive. The people I worked with in the warehouse were often absent and spent much of their time at work talking or sitting around listening to music.
The most productive employees, on the other hand, were usually the least satisfied. We worked harder because it made the time go by faster and we couldn’t wait to get away from that place.
Because of this experience, I’ve always questioned common sense approaches to management. In fourteen years of teaching, I don’t think I’ve ever told students that they could increase productivity by making people happy.
When I got to graduate school, I discovered that many people had studied the connection between job satisfaction and job performance. Most of those studies show a small positive relationship between the two. In other words, on average, satisfied people tend to be slightly more productive.
Most people interpret that to mean that an increase in satisfaction causes a (small) increase in performance.
It could also mean, however, that people who are more productive end up more satisfied. People who are more productive tend to receive more recognition, praise, bonuses, and the other kinds of things that might make someone more satisfied. If this is true, it really wouldn’t make much sense to try and directly increase satisfaction in order to increase productivity.
A recent study by Wright State Professor Nathan Bowling offered another explanation for the small relationship between satisfaction and performance. He found that the reason satisfaction and performance are related is because they are both caused by similar kinds of personality characteristics.
In other words, the personality traits that make someone a productive employee are the same traits that make someone view their job positively.
The most important implication of this finding is that employee productivity and satisfaction begin during the selection process. It’s highly unlikely that any company can take a person with low ability and a poor work ethic and turn them into a productive employee by making them happy.
The second implication of this study is that companies are not likely to make anyone more productive just by making them happy. Each semester I ask my students if they will work harder during the semester if I make them happy by promising them A’s no matter how much they learn. Even they are willing to admit it won’t work.
This doesn’t mean that job satisfaction isn’t important. Satisfied employees are more likely to remain with the organization and do other things that help the organization succeed. But if you’re hoping that a Christmas turkey will make your employees sew underwear faster, you’re barking up the wrong tree.