Abstract: This article provides evidence from a natural experiment on the relationship between employee affect and productivity. We link highly detailed administrative data on the performance of all telesales workers at British Telecom with survey reports of employee happiness we collected on a weekly basis. We leverage variation in the interaction between a worker’s access to windows while at work and the presence of gloomy or bright weather outside of each call center, in order to derive quasi-experimental estimates for the causal effect of happiness on productivity. We find a strong effect of happiness on sales. This effect is driven by changes in labor productivity – largely through workers converting more calls into sales, and to a lesser extent by making more calls per hour and adhering more closely to their schedule. We find no effects of happiness on various measures of high-frequency labor supply such as attendance and break-taking.

[pdf] [supplementary materials][replication materials][working paper]

Media: The Economist, Financial Times

Abstract: Are individuals more sensitive to losses than gains in terms of economic growth? We find that measures of subjective well-being are more than twice as sensitive to negative as compared to positive economic growth. We use Gallup World Poll data from over 150 countries, BRFSS data on 2.3 million U.S. respondents, and Eurobarometer data that cover multiple business cycles over four decades. This research provides a new perspective on the welfare cost of business cycles, with implications for growth policy and the nature of the long-run relationship between GDP and subjective well-being.

[pdf] [online appendix] [replication files]

Media: Financial Times, The Atlantic, Harvard Business Review

Abstract: There is a growing interest among policy makers in the use of subjective well-being (or “happiness”) data to measure societal progress, as well as to inform and evaluate public policy. Yet despite a sharp rise in the supply of well-being-based policymaking, it remains unclear whether there is any electoral demand for it. In this article, I study a long-run panel of general elections in Europe and find that well-being is a strong predictor of election results. National measures of subjective well-being are able to explain more of the variance in governing party vote share than standard macroeconomic indicators typically used in the economic voting literature. Consistent results are found at the individual level when considering subjective well-being and voting intentions, both in cross-sectional and panel analyses.

[pdf] [online appendix] [replication files] [old version]

Media: BBC News (TV), BBC News, The Times, Prospect, The Economist, HuffPost, CNN, New York Times

Abstract: A rapidly growing literature has attempted to explain Donald Trump’s success in the 2016 U.S. presidential election as a result of a wide variety of differences in individual characteristics, attitudes, and social processes. We propose that the economic and psychological processes previously established have in common that they generated or electorally capitalized on unhappiness in the electorate, which emerges as a powerful high-level predictor of the 2016 electoral outcome. Drawing on a large dataset covering over 2 million individual surveys, which we aggregated to the county level, we find that low levels of evaluative, experienced, and eudaemonic subjective well-being (SWB) are strongly predictive of Trump’s victory, accounting for an extensive list of demographic, ideological, and socioeconomic covariates and robustness checks. County-level future life evaluation alone correlates with the Trump vote share over Republican baselines at r = −.78 in the raw data, a magnitude rarely seen in the social sciences. We show similar findings when examining the association between individual-level life satisfaction and Trump voting. Low levels of SWB also predict anti-incumbent voting at the 2012 election, both at the county and individual level. The findings suggest that SWB is a powerful high-level marker of (dis)content and that SWB should be routinely considered alongside economic explanations of electoral choice.

[pdf] [online appendix] [replication files]

Media: New York Times, Financial Times,  El Mundo, The Hill (op-ed), Character & Context (SPSP)

Abstract:  Support for populism has grown substantially during the past two decades, a development that has coincided with a marked increase in the experience of negative affect around the world. Across four studies, we use a multi-modal, multi-method empirical approach, with data from a diverse set of geographical and political contexts, to investigate the extent to which the rising electoral demand for populism can be explained by negative affect. We demonstrate that negative affect---measured via i) self-reported emotions in surveys as well as ii) automated text analyses of Twitter data---predicts individual-level populist attitudes in two global surveys (Studies 1a and 1b), longitudinal changes in populist party vote shares at general elections in Europe (Study 2), district-level Brexit voting in the 2016 UK referendum (Study 3) and county-level vote shares for Donald Trump in the 2016 and 2020 US presidential elections (Studies 4a and 4b). We find that negative emotions---such as fear and anger as well as more often overlooked low-arousal negative emotions like depression and sadness---are predictive of populist beliefs as well as voting and election results at scale.

[pdf] [supplementary materials] [working paper] [replication files]

Abstract:  For over a century, organizational researchers and practitioners alike have been interested in the role played by employee happiness in shaping workplace performance. Whereas prior work has focused on the potential effects of happiness on productivity and retention, in this paper, I study the effects of workplace happiness on a firm's ability to compete in the labor market and attract workers. I provide evidence from a field experiment involving over 23 million job seekers on a large online jobs platform in the USA, in which treated users were shown aggregated information about the happiness of incumbent workers at over 20,000 of the companies to which they were considering applying. I provide experimental evidence that providing information about others' happiness increases application selectivity, with treated users redirecting applications away from companies with low levels of worker happiness to happier ones. These effects on labor supply are driven largely by job seekers "screening out" low happiness firms from their job search, a finding that is replicated in subsequent field experiments on the platform in Canada and the UK.  Using a discrete choice experiment embedded in a follow-up survey of a representative sample of the US labor force, I find consistent evidence that people value workplace happiness and are willing to trade off salary to work at happier companies. Taken together, the findings suggest that people are motivated to work at happier firms and, ultimately, that employers face incentives to invest in organizational and management practices that are conducive to worker happiness.

[pdf] [MIT Sloan Working Paper 6607-22]

• Distinguished Paper Award in Behavioral Strategy, AOM Annual Meeting 2023

• Selected for the Best Paper Proceedings at AOM 2023 

• Media: Fast Company

Abstract:  Worker wellbeing is widely studied in organizational behavior, where research has primarily focused on individual-level determinants and outcomes. This paper takes a strategic perspective, examining workplace wellbeing at the more macro levels of firms and industries, using a unique linked employer-employee dataset comprising self-reported wellbeing from over 14 million U.S. workers across 130,000 firms. I construct and validate firm-level measures of job satisfaction, meaning and purpose, enjoyment of work, and stress, and analyze their distribution across organizations and industries down to 5-digit NAICS level. Using a variance decomposition analysis, I present an important new stylized fact: The majority of variation in workplace wellbeing occurs within, rather than between, industries. The finding that workplace wellbeing varies significantly across observationally similar firms, even within tightly-defined industries and locations, suggests that organizations play a strong role in shaping employee experiences. Workplace wellbeing is not merely a reflection of industry dynamics or the nature of different types of work, but is rather a firm-specific resource. I discuss implications for management theory and suggest various avenues for future research aiming to further understand the determinants and consequences of workplace wellbeing at multiple levels of analysis.

[pdf]

Abstract: As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly capable of performing human tasks, public discourse has largely focused on potential job losses. However, understanding AI's potential impact on job quality is equally important. This paper provides the first empirical analysis of the association between worker wellbeing and exposure to generative AI. Using data from 10.3 million surveys on job satisfaction, meaning and purpose, enjoyment of work, and stress in the United States, we find that work activities and occupations with higher levels of workplace wellbeing are most exposed to advances in generative AI. There is a positive dose-response relationship between exposure to generative AI and worker wellbeing, an association that holds across a variety of specifications and after controlling for occupational income and education. This pattern of exposure stands in contrast to earlier waves of automation from technologies including robotics and software, which we show are more concentrated in low wellbeing occupations. While these correlations do not forecast changes in job quality from AI adoption, they reveal a fundamental shift in the type of work most exposed to automation, and point to potential implications for occupational inequality.

[under review]

Abstract: This paper uses novel, large-scale data from millions of U.S. workers to revisit a long-standing theoretical proposition: That employee wellbeing critically influences turnover decisions. Using survey responses on job satisfaction, meaning and purpose, happiness, and stress collected via a major employment platform, I construct firm-level wellbeing estimates for tens of thousands of organizations. Among publicly listed firms, a one-unit increase in organization-level wellbeing (on a 1–5 scale) predicts a 6-7 percentage point reduction in voluntary turnover rates as reported in company annual reports, a relationship that is robust to extensive controls and relying on within-company variation over time. At the individual level, analysis of over one million employment spells shows that employees hired into higher-wellbeing firms remain at the organization longer. Moreover, a one-unit increase in an individual's self-reported wellbeing after being hired is associated with a 16-18% decrease in subsequent turnover risk. These effects persist across a diverse range of industries and occupations—as well as when accounting for detailed information on job characteristics and labor markets, and when exploiting within-firm and even within-worker variation—but are strongest in higher-wage roles, managerial positions, cognitively demanding jobs, and female-dominated industries and occupations. The broader market context also significantly moderates the relationship: it intensifies in tight labor markets and high-productivity industries but diminishes with greater employer concentration, highlighting the role of labor market power in the wellbeing-turnover dynamic. The findings underscore the strategic importance of employee wellbeing as a driver of organizational performance and offer new avenues for theory-building across multiple disciplines.

[pdf]

Abstract: This paper uses large-scale data from a major online jobs platform to investigate how employees’ subjective wellbeing affects subsequent job search behavior. I analyze data on millions of US workers who report their workplace wellbeing and then observe their application activity over the following seven days. Workers with lower wellbeing—whether measured by satisfaction, meaning and purpose, happiness, or high stress—are consistently more likely to engage in active search and, when they do, submit more applications. This relationship remains robust after accounting for fine-grained job, company, and labor market characteristics, as well as when leveraging within-company and within-worker variation over time. Notably, no relationship exists between wellbeing and search behavior when users are answering surveys about previous employers. Low-wellbeing workers appear less selective and lower their reservation wage, engaging in broader searches. Additionally, aggregated company-level wellbeing independently discourages on-the-job search, over and above individual-level wellbeing. The link between wellbeing and reduced application activity strengthens in higher-wage, cognitively demanding, and senior roles, while weakening in tight labor markets, concentrated industries, and areas with high union density—highlighting how external constraints and institutional factors moderate the relationship. These findings underscore how workplace wellbeing can influence retention and shape labor market transitions.

[pdf]

Abstract:  We use novel large-scale data from Indeed, a major jobs website, to assess the relationship between workplace wellbeing and firm performance. Our measures of employee wellbeing include self reported job satisfaction, purpose, happiness, and stress, which we aggregate to over 1,600 listed companies in the United States. Using company-level employee wellbeing measures to predict firm performance, we find that wellbeing is associated with firm profitability and that companies with the highest levels of wellbeing also subsequently outperform standard benchmarks in the stock market. Overall, these descriptive results show a strong positive relationship between employee wellbeing and firm performance. We discuss a number of limitations to the analyses and point to future directions for further research.

[Wellbeing Research Centre Working Paper 2304]

• Media: Financial Times, Financial Times

Abstract: Stress is a pervasive feature of modern society and is on the rise worldwide. In this paper, we explore the degree to which work centrality---the importance of the role that work plays in one's life---moderates the relationship between the experience of stress and subjective wellbeing. We theorize that for highly work-centered individuals, as well as for those living in cultures where work is particularly central to people's lives, the negative effects of stress on wellbeing will be less pronounced. Across six studies, including data from over 2 million employees living and working around the globe, we8 present empirical evidence that the negative impact of stress and measures of job satisfaction, life satisfaction, and affective happiness depends critically upon both individual and cultural work centrality. Investigating mechanisms using time-use data, we find evidence that much of the moderating role of work centrality can be explained by the extent to which it shapes how enjoyable leisure activities are, rather than how it affects people’s experience of work itself. These findings emphasize the role of the cultural and psychological fit in shaping the downstream impact of behaviors and circumstances on subsequent organizational outcomes like worker wellbeing.

[working paper]