Well-being at Work: Does your personality influence your "happiness"?

If the headline of this article caught your attention and you would like to go straight to the core of the topic, you are welcome to read the whitepaper by clicking this link, Well-being and MBTI? Personality Type. If you are interested why I conducted this research, how I am applying it and what you can do to improve your well-being, please read on.

When I started my career as a neuropsychologist, I worked in hospitals with patients who sustained traumatic brain injuries and neurological diseases. What struck me was that some patients, and indeed their families, found ways to not only cope with these life changing challenges but also managed to build a more positive view of their life and well-being after injury or illness. These patients left me wondering how they could grow from adversity. My interest in this phenomenon continued as I moved to working in the field of organisational psychology where I also worked with a number of clients who, despite significant setbacks such as business failures, also increased their well-being.

While conventional wisdom has proposed that it is difficult to find out why some people are "happier" than others, the growing field of positive psychology now sheds light on factors that influence our happiness or as it is now more accurately called "psychological well-being". As I studied the latest well-being research, by pioneers in the field such as Martin Seligman (2010), I began to look for answers to the question of whether our personality and culture influence our well-being.

This issue is of particular interest to me as much of my current work focuses on helping people use knowledge of their personality to improve their professional and personal lives. For example, a CEO of an insurance company asked me to find a way to evaluate if their staff were not just satisfied but "happy" at work and to look at how this affects performance of employees and the organisation. With these questions in mind, my colleague Rich Thompson and I, set out to investigate if people's well-being in the workplace differed based on their MBTI personality type, country, job roles and also if personality influenced the kind of activities that are the most effective for supporting workplace well-being.

Why is it important to look at well-being at work?

Research now shows, what people have suspected for millennia, our well-being influences a wide range of life outcomes, including health, relationships, occupational performance, creativity, collaboration and income (Diener, et al, 2000; Lyubomirsky, 2001; Seligman, 2011). This inspired me further to find out more about people's well-being at work and what could be done to achieve optimal workplace well-being. So we have published our findings in the first Well-being and MBTI? Personality Type in the Workplace: An international comparison study (2016) and this is what we found.

"Flourishing" with the PERMA well-being model

The starting point of our study was to measure well-being in an objective way. We used Seligman's PERMA model of well-being (2011) which has become one of the most used frameworks for measuring well-being. He proposes that positive well-being, or ‘flourishing’, is more than just happiness and comprises the following factors:

• Positive Emotions – feelings of happiness, contentment, pleasure
• Engagement – deep psychological connection and absorption in an activity or cause
• Relationships – mutual feelings of caring, support, satisfaction
• Meaning – having a sense of purpose and direction
• Accomplishment – pursuing success or mastery for its own sake 

Although personality and culture have been researched extensively by psychologists, the interaction between personality, culture, and well-being at work has not been investigated to the same extent – until now. Our research evaluated workplace well-being of over 3100 people in 87 countries, and how it links with personality (MBTI type) and culture (geographical location).

What influences our well-being at work?

Some key findings from our study included:

• While some differences in well-being were found between geographical regions, these differences were small suggesting country culture has a limited effect on workplace well-being.
• Having supportive relationships (the R of the PERMA model) was the highest rated aspect of people’s well-being at work globally.
• Accomplishment (the A in PERMA) was the lowest-rated of the factors globally.
• All MBTI personality types reported generally positive levels of workplace well-being (average score of 7.62 out of 10 for the whole sample of respondents), but there were differences. ENFP personality types reported the highest overall well-being while ISTP types reported the lowest well-being. Interestingly, these are close to the opposite personality types and shows well-being is experienced differently depending upon your personality. However, although the difference in overall well-being found between these two MBTI types was statistically significant, the size of the difference was relatively small.
• People with a preferences for Extraversion (E) and Feeling (F) tended to report higher well-being than those who prefer Introversion (I) and Thinking (T). This is consistent with previous research showing more extraverted people tend to report higher levels of positive emotions.

Overall workplace well-being for each MBTI? personality type (maximum score = 10, minimum score = 0). N=3113

• We also found that different personality types find particular activities to be more effective than others for improving their well-being. For example, some personality types reported engaging in work was very effective, whereas for others spending time with family and friends helped their well-being. We provide details of what works for each type in our whitepaper.

What can be done to improve workplace well-being?

Our research is ongoing, but here are three important insights from our early findings to help you get started on improving well-being.

Improve employees’ self-awareness of their personality - If your employees understand their own personality type, they can take ownership of and select activities that are most effective for managing their well-being. Understanding different personality types also allows organisational leaders to select focused strategies to support the well-being of the different personality types in the organisation.

Build and encourage supportive work relationships - Relationships were the most important aspect of well-being for all personality types in our study. The well-being, motivation and performance of people in the workplace is enhanced by opportunities for people to build and maintain supportive relationships (Steffens, et al., 2016). If you or your organisation is not fostering mutually supportive relationships, particularly between immediate colleagues, then now is the time to do this. Unsupportive relationships at work is one of the fastest ways to decrease well-being and productivity at work. Leaders who foster these relationships with staff also increase motivation and discretionary effort of employees.

Recognise accomplishments – Our research found this is an area where large gains can be made fairly easily. To address this, organisations can review and discuss with employees how accomplishment is evaluated and recognised. Managers and employees can use measures of progress and recognition tactics to help individuals and teams identify when key targets have been met, or address barriers to progress. We have also found it helps for individual employees to track their own progress, such as how many customers they successfully assisted in a day or how many problems they resolved over the week? If people are not seeing things progress at work, ask and involve them in taking steps to address this.

Talk about well-being! - Getting the conversation started about well-being – and keeping it going – is probably the first thing anyone in the workplace can do. Find out how people feel so you can work out what needs to be done. We have recently been working with individual organisations, like the insurance company I mentioned early, to help them accurately assess the well-being of staff and put in place organisational wide strategies and initiatives to improve well-being. Accurately assessing the well-being of your organisation will help identify how to improve the collective well-being of employees. Organisations wanting to improve productivity, creativity, profitability, cooperation, retention and employee health should evaluate staff well-being through an objective measure at least annually. 

Keep a look out for my next article where I look forward to sharing more from our ongoing well-being research, which will go deeper into the relationships between well-being and type, and well-being and culture.

The Author - Dr Martin Boult has worked as a psychologist in the field of management and organizational development since 1998, with a particular focus on mid-level to executive leadership development, strategic planning, team performance, talent development and well-being. He provides consulting to leading public and private sector organizations in Australia and internationally. Martin is constantly seeking ways to improve the lives of his clients by integrating his experience of working across diverse cultures and drawing from his professional background in the fields of neuropsychology, leadership, employee development and well-being.

References

Diener, E. (2000). Subjective wellbeing: The science of happiness and a proposal for a national index. American Psychologist, 55(1), 34–43. doi:10.1037//0003-066X.55.1.34

Seligman, M. (2011). Flourish: A visionary new understanding of happiness and well-being. New York: Free Press.

Steffens, N. K., Haslam, A. S., Schuh, S. C, Jetten, J., & van Dick, R. (2016, July). A meta-analytic review of social identification and health in organizational contexts. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 1–33.

Lyubomirsky, S. (2001). Why are some people happier than others? The role of cognitive and motivational processes in well-being. American Psychologist, 56(3), 239.