Putting your best “face” forward: The role of emotion‐based well‐being in organizational research

Abstract

Summary Organizational researchers have long been interested in the role played by employee “happiness” in workplace life. What remains less clear is what exactly constitutes happiness. The present purpose is not to invent a new definition of happiness. Rather the goal is to present the extant body of knowledge about “happiness” in a more manageable and consistent manner to assist future research endeavors. To that end, an overview of the literature is provided, which summarizes the differing approaches to the study of the “happiness” and “well‐being” constructs into a more coherent framework. More specifically, the four faces of happiness taxonomy is used to highlight the conceptual diversity of happiness. These four faces include objective indicators, eudaimonic well‐being, facets of satisfaction, and emotion‐based conceptualizations of well‐being. The present research highlights the importance of emotion‐based measures of well‐being (Category 4) in the prediction of such important organizational variables as job performance and employee retention. Several avenues for future research endeavors on workplace happiness and well‐being are suggested, including the possibility of additional faces of happiness. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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