Perceptions of Authentizotic Climates and Employee Happiness: Pathways to Individual Performance?

Abstract

We discuss how six dimensions of the authentizotic psychological climate explain stress and affective well-being at work, and how stress and affective well-being explain self-reported individual performance. The sample comprises 199 employees from 118 organizations. The findings indicate the good psychometric properties of the authentizotic climate measure, and suggest that (a) affective well-being, mainly enthusiasm and vigor, explain unique variance of selfreported performance and (b) the perceptions of authentizotic climates explain unique variance of stress, affective well-being and self-reported performance. A configurational approach is also presented for dealing with the ways people combine their perceptions of authentizotic climates, emotional states, stress and self-reported performance.Keywords: authentizotic psychological climate; stress; affective well-being at work; self-reported individual performance 3 In a paper on the value of happiness in the workplace, Gavin and Mason (2004) stressed that economic productivity has been extracted from the average worker, in large measure, at the cost of his/her health and happiness and that this trend towards dysfunctional effects needs to be reversed.This reversion is what the "positive organization studies" movement (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000;Luthans, 2002;Cameron et al., 2003) have been looking for. It suggests that more efforts must be devoted to developing people's strengths, to help people achieve happiness and to contribute to make life meaningful. Gavin and Mason (2004) illustrated their arguments with companies ranked in Fortune's "100 best companies to work for". This ranking, published in several countries, considers five dimensions as characteristic of the good workplace: credibility, respect, fairness, pride and camaraderie. The ranking affords the idea a great deal of attention, with featured companies serving as potential benchmarks to organizations in search of improvement and good publicity. The presence in the ranking may be a significant source of reputation in the job market in this era of "war for talent" . The model represents the popular expression of a focus on the human side of the organization, which is also present in projects such as the Best Companies for Working Mothers and APA's Psychologically Healthy Workplace Award.A useful dialogue between the managerial and scholarly fields can be seen in the interest shown by the academia in the positive impact of "best places to work for" on organizational performance (Filbeck & Preece, 2003;Fulmer et al., 2003). One prominent example of this dialogue arose when Kets de Vries' (2001) notion of the "authentizotic organization" to capture the essence of these workplaces. "Authentizotic" is a neologism that combines the Greek words "authentekos" and "zoteekos", meaning that an organization is trustful and reliant, and vital to life, respectively.The idea underpinning the authentizotic theory is that organizations can be a source of meaning and growth for people, instead of l...

How happiness mediates the organizational virtuousness and affective commitment relationship

“…Empirical evidence by Cunha, 2008a, 2009a;Rego et al, 2009) also supports the model, although only after removing several items. Rego and Cunha (2008a) and Rego et al (2010) also find that a second-order factor model, with the five factors loading onto an overall AWB factor, fits the data reasonably well. Through usefulness analysis, Rego et al (2010) also show that overall AWB increases the R 2 value of organizational citizenship behavior above and beyond the five AWB components.…”

“…Before proceeding, a clarification is necessary: regarding OV, the study focuses on psychological climates (James et al, 2008), without aggregating the individual's perceptions at the organizational level. Studying psychological climate seems an appropriate way to investigate well-being and AC because people's subjective perception and evaluation are most significant for happiness and satisfaction, not so much the objective situation itself (Haller and Hadler, 2006;Rego and Cunha, 2008a;Rego et al, 2009).…”

Perceptions of Organizational Virtuousness and Happiness as Predictors of Organizational Citizenship Behaviors

“…Empirical studies by Rego and his associates Cunha, 2008a, 2009a, b;Rego et al, 2009) also support the model, although only after removing several scales. Rego and Cunha (2008a) also found that a second-order factor model, with the five factors loading onto an overall AWB factor, fits the data reasonably well.…”

“…We measured AWB with the instrument validated by Daniels (2000), which covers five dimensions (anxiety-comfort, depression-pleasure, boredomenthusiasm, tiredness-vigor, and anger-placidity), and later validated by Rego et al (Rego and Cunha, 2008a;Rego et al, 2009) in the Portuguese context. Participants were invited to think about their feelings over the last three months in the organization, and to respond to the 30 items on a seven-point scale ranging from never (1) to always (7).…”

“…Leaders and organizations risk exacerbating employee cynicism if they adopt a facade of virtuousness without substance (Grant et al, 2007;Rego and Cunha, 2008a). A consequence of this may be to encourage employees to perform only what they are ''forced'' to do, and increase retaliation and counterproductive work behaviors (Andersson and Bateman, 1997;Avey et al, 2008;Dean et al, 1998).…”