Happy people really do work harder

Where Slough's most famous office manager leads, eminent economists follow. David Brent's declaration that he wanted to be remembered as "the man who put a smile on the face of all who he met" may once have been dismissed as management mumbo jumbo.

But it appears the Brentmeister General may have been on to something. A team of economists has now produced research that suggests there are clear links between workers' happiness and their productivity.

The team, led by Andrew Oswald, a professor of economics at Warwick Business School and a leading authority on the relationship between economics and mental health, said its research has important implications for the worlds of politics and business.

"We find that human happiness has large and positive causal effects on productivity," the team said. "Positive emotions appear to invigorate human beings, while negative emotions have the opposite effect."

The team conducted a range of exercises in their research. In one, students were asked to add a series of five two-digit numbers in 10 minutes. The subjects were paid an attendance fee, and a performance fee based on the number of correct answers.

Some were then shown a 10-minute film based on comedy routines performed by a well-known British comedian. The film succeeded in raising the reported happiness levels of those who saw it, compared to those who did not see it, or who watched a "placebo" film – a clip depicting patterns of coloured sticks.

Among the subjects who reported higher happiness levels after seeing the comedy film, productivity was significantly higher than for the other subjects, for both men and women. The Warwick economists noted: "Happier workers, our research found, were 12% more productive. Unhappier workers were 10% less productive." Significantly, subjects who watched the comedy film but did not report higher levels of happiness were unable to demonstrate higher levels of productivity.

The findings led the economists to claim: "The increase in productivity seems to be linked to the increase in happiness, not merely to the watching of the comedy movie per se." The team also found that those who had experienced a death or illness in their families within the past two years performed 10% worse than others.

"Given the extraordinarily homogeneous sample of our subjects, the difference in productivity was unexpectedly striking," it wrote in the latest issue of the University of Warwick's Economic Research Institute journal.

Questioning the students about their family backgrounds also led to interesting results. The researchers, for example, found that subjects whose parents had recently divorced did not appear less happy or less productive. They noted: "One exception to our findings concerns the subject of parental divorce. Students whose parents have recently divorced did not report being less happy than others in the study, and they did not demonstrate reduced productivity.

"Though we do not know why this was the case, we surmise that divorce may well be harder to classify as a 'negative life event', in the sense that it might have been perceived by our subjects as a release from a more difficult situation and may also have been a longer-term issue granting additional time for the subjects to get used to the situation."

Economists have long debated how productivity can be raised through improved skills and the education of workers, or the introduction of new technology. But the Warwick team suggested that their work has opened up a new line of inquiry: "Our recent research investigates an important but often overlooked ingredient – that of human emotion."

The team suggested that their findings should "provoke thought among scholars in psychology and economics and in the business community".

They concluded: "If happiness in the workplace brings increased returns to productivity, then human resource departments, business managers and the architects of promotion policies will want to consider the implications."