Happiness and its Impact on Performance in the Work Field: a Case Study at a Navaratna Company Plant in Bhubaneswar, India

Abstract

Happiness is a positive inner experience and is often used interchangeably with psychological wellbeing, quality of life or satisfaction. But the definition of happiness is quite different and distinct in the eastern world when we compared it with the western world. It has been described as multidimensional and does not centered around the subjective wellbeing elimination other dimensions as it is done in the west. Happiness at work is important for organizational success. It leads success, achievements and satisfaction. Researchers have found out that happiness transform people to more creative, energetic and successful. To understand the relation between happiness and performance at work, a study was conducted in a plant of a Navarantna Company at Bhubaneswar, India during June-July, 2017. A total of 201 responses were collected from the selected plant using judgmental sampling technique. Happiness among the employees was measured as per the Bhutan’s GNH index. A structured questionnaire was constructed covering all the 9 domains in GNH index, 2010. First 3 domains are familiar with human development perspective- living standards (housing conditions, earnings, wealth) education and health. Then the good governance, ecological resilience and use of time are the nest 3 domains. The final three domains were quite ground-breaking- psychological wellbeing (happiness including feelings and mysticism), cultural diversity and resilience and community vitality. The methodology we used to measure happiness was “Alkire-Foster method (2007-11) for measuring multidimensional poverty” as used in the GNH index. Whereas, the performance of each of the sample employees was taken from the last year’s office records as appraised by the company. There was no attempt made to reassess the performance of the employees by the investigator but the result was verified before taking it for analysis. The primary objective of this paper was to find out the impact of overall employees’ happiness in their performance at the workplace. Is there any positive relation between happiness and performance of employees at workplace? There was also an attempt to see the relationship of each domain of nine selected domains with the performance of the employees. After the analysis, there could not be found any significant relation between overall happiness of the employees of the selected organization and their performances in the work field.