The Fine, The Good, and the Meaningful

Can philosophy really offer advice on happiness? Certainly this was one of its traditional aspirations.

In the seventeenth-century, it was taken for granted that the philosopher’s job included talking about how to achieve a happy life.

When René Descartes was a schoolboy, one of the state-of-the-art textbooks he studied was a massive compendium of philosophy in four parts published in 1609 by the now forgotten scholastic philosopher Eustachius; it discussed logic and metaphysics and physics and psychology, but it also stated that “the final goal of a complete philosophical system is human happiness.”

This was following a long tradition, that stretched back through the middle ages, and indeed right back to classical times. The Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote a treatise called De Vita Beata, “On the Happy Life”; and much earlier his Greek Stoic predecessors had offered many recommendations on how to live in a calm and balanced and tranquil way, how to achieve a “good flow of life”, as Zeno, the founder of Stoicism put it, in the third century before Christ.

Going back just a little earlier, Aristotle, the co-founder of Western philosophy along with Plato, gave lectures on ethics which described the goal of human life as what he called eudaimonia, that is to say, happiness or human fulfilment.

Contented, fullfilled employees is the key to success…for organizations

We spend a lot of our waking time at work, so it’s not surprising that work has an influence on our well-being: Numerous studies have linked general attitudes towards work to mood outside of work and health outcomes such as coronary heart disease. However, psychological scientist James K. Harter of Gallup, Inc. and his colleagues found that employee perceptions of work conditions may also have a big impact on the bottom line of employing organizations.

In this study, the researchers examined data from more than 2,000 business units (e.g., retail stores, factories, sales offices) of ten companies. The data consisted of employee satisfaction surveys, employee retention rates, customer loyalty, and financial performance of the organizations. Analyses of the data were conducted to identify relationships between employee job satisfaction and outcome measures of the organizations.

The results indicate that employee work perceptions predict important organizational outcomes — if employees have positive perceptions of their jobs, their organizations benefit via higher employee retention, increased customer loyalty, and improved financial outcomes. Interestingly, the analysis suggests that employee perceptions affect outcomes more than outcomes affect employee perceptions of their jobs.

“One implication is that changes in management practices that improve employee perceptions of specific work situation variables will increase business-unit outcomes, including financial outcomes,” the authors note. Additionally, Harter and colleagues offer that one way managers can help boost job satisfaction and help their organization may be to “clarify expectations for employees by helping employees see the ultimate outcomes the organization is working to achieve and how they play a role in achieving those outcomes.”

For further reading on workplace discontent, please read:

LeBlanc, M. M. & Barling, J. (2004). Workplace aggression. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 13(1), 9-12. doi:10.1111/j.0963-7214.2004.01301003.x

Riley, H. R. & Gelfand, M. (2010). Status and the evaluation of workplace deviance. Psychological Science, 13(1), 49-54. doi: 10.1177/0956797609356509

Spector, P. E. (2002). Employee control and occupational stress. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 11(4), 133-136. doi:10.1111/1467-8721.00185