Magazine Spring 2022 Issue Research Feature

Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

A large-scale study found that well-being predicts outstanding job performance.

Paul B. Lester, Ed Diener, and Martin Seligman Reading Time: 15 min 

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The toll that working through the global pandemic has taken on employees’ job satisfaction and emotional well-being has focused business leaders on fostering workforce happiness as never before. While many — if not most — of us are motivated by genuine caring for the people who power our organizations, we also intuitively know that employee happiness should boost job performance. Still, two nagging questions remain: Which comes first, succeeding and then being happy, or being happy and then succeeding? And just how much does initial happiness matter?

The results of our recent research, published in the Journal of Happiness Studies, have gotten us one big step closer to answering those two questions. For our study, we followed almost 1 million U.S. Army soldiers for nearly five years. We first asked them to rate their well-being — their happiness, if you will — along with their optimism, and then tracked which soldiers later received awards based on their job performance. We collected our data in the midst of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, so the stakes were high: Some of those awards were for exemplary assigned job performance, while others were earned for extraordinary performance in heroic actions. Receiving an award in the Army, either for exemplary job performance or for heroism, is a relatively rare event. Of the nearly 1 million soldiers in our sample, only 12% received an award of any type during the five years that we ran the study.

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While we expected that well-being and optimism would matter to performance, we were taken aback by just how much they mattered.

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About the Authors

Paul B. Lester is an associate professor of management at the Naval Postgraduate School. Martin Seligman is the Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, director of the university’s Positive Psychology Center, and a former president of the American Psychological Association. He was named by Academic Influence as the world’s most influential psychologist during the last decade. Ed Diener passed away in April 2021. He was a professor of psychology at the University of Utah and the University of Virginia, the Joseph R. Smiley Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois, and a senior scientist for the Gallup Organization. He received the American Psychological Association’s Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions in 2012, and his work has been cited more than 250,000 times.

References (17)

1. P.B. Lester, E.P. Stewart, L.L. Vie, et al., “Happy Soldiers Are Highest Performers,” Journal of Happiness Studies, Aug. 25, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-021-00441-x.

2. E. Diener, “Subjective Well-Being: The Science of Happiness and a Proposal for a National Index,” American Psychologist 55, no. 1 (January 2000): 34-43.

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Comment (1)
Tori Davis
Interested to understand how gender bias was reflected in this study.  Men make up ~84% of the US Army.  How was this reflected when assessing the comparability of the military to the business world?