Examining Happiness: Towards Better Understanding of Performance Improvement

It is well accepted that happiness can provide immense motivation for someone to achieve higher performance. Generating happiness in the workplace is one way of empowerment to induce productivity. This empowerment has been widely studied and explored in many industry sectors but only limited studies have been done for construction industry. This research tries to enrich this topic by conducting study to engineers of construction firms. In the study, in addition to happiness, psychological well-being and stress were included to cover better understanding of the subject. For the performance side, two perspectives were considered: a self-performance assessment by the engineers and a performance assessment by engineer's supervisor (project manager). A total of 114 engineers and 21 project managers from 21 construction sites in Sri Lanka were surveyed for the purpose of this research. The result revealed that a significant positive strong relationship between psychological well-being and performance can be identified. The same also applied to happiness and performance, only at a lesser degree. As expected, stress had a negative association with performance; however, the degree was only weak and not statistically significant. The study also found that age, marital status, salary, and construction experience have similar and different roles in defining the level of happiness, psychological well-being, and stress at work. For example, single engineers are significantly happier and perform better in their work than married engineers. Meanwhile, years of experience are significantly associated with performance and stress but not with happiness and psychological well-being. Therefore, it is important to understand how happiness, psychological well-being, and stress levels are differently associated with the socio-economic and experience of engineers. Each factor may relate uniquely in defining the happiness, psychological well-being, and stress at work as different level of engineers has different concerns, and needs different motivational approach to improve their performance.