Who controls workplace happiness?
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Are you happy in your current job? And who is responsible for it? Teresa Amabile researches creativity, happiness and motivation at work. Her research shows everything from small wins to inner work life make a big difference in an individual's ability to be creative, happy and productive at work.
From Amabile's Marketplace Money report:
When my research team and I studied 26 teams of professionals in seven companies, we found that generally, the work environments of the team and the organization matched -- whether good or bad. But for six of those teams, their local environment was either much worse or much better than the organizational environment. Our analysis of day-by-day mood and motivation for those six teams found that the organizational context -- such as top management criticism -- was overshadowed by the local things, like a team leader's encouragement and coworkers' support.
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Amabile, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, will join The Daily Circuit Tuesday to discuss workplace happiness. Cal Newport, assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown University, will also join the discussion.
He wrote about career happiness and following your passion for The New York Times:
Growing up, we were told by guidance counselors, career advice books, the news media and others to "follow our passion." This advice assumes that we all have a pre-existing passion waiting to be discovered. If we have the courage to discover this calling and to match it to our livelihood, the thinking goes, we'll end up happy. If we lack this courage, we'll end up bored and unfulfilled -- or, worse, in law school...
If we're not careful, it tells us, we may end up missing our true calling. And even after we make a choice, we're still not free from its effects. Every time our work becomes hard, we are pushed toward an existential crisis, centered on what for many is an obnoxiously unanswerable question: "Is this what I'm really meant to be doing?" This constant doubt generates anxiety and chronic job-hopping.
VIDEO: Amabile on "crisis of disengagement" at work
LIVE CHAT: How do you create a happy, creative, and fulfilling work life?
