Work-Related Flow in Contrast to Either Happiness or PERMA Factors for Human Resources Management Development of Career Sustainability

Abstract

In promoting career sustainability, psychological theories historically have informed human resource management (HRM) development—three assessment directions are among them: work-related flow, happiness promotion, and appraising PERMA (Positive Emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment) factors. Csikszentmihalyi’s work-related flow represents an optimally challenging work-related process. Happiness promotion strives to maintain a pleased satisfaction with the current experience. PERMA represents measurable positive psychological factors constituting well-being. Reliable and validated, the experience of flow has been found to determine career sustainability in contrast to the more often investigated happiness ascertainment or identifying PERMA factors. Career sustainability research to inform HRM development is in its infancy. Therefore, publishers’ commitment to sustainability provides integrity. Given MDPI’s uniquely founding sustainability concern, its journal articles were searched with the keywords “flow, Csikszentmihalyi, work”, excluding those pertaining to education, health, leisure, marketing, non-workers, and spirituality, to determine the utilization of work-related flow to achieve career sustainability. Of the 628 returns, 28 reports were included for potential assessment. Current studies on Csikszentmihalyi’s work-related flow ultimately represented three results. These provide insight into successful, positive methods to develop career sustainability. Consequently, HRM is advised to investigate practices for assessing and encouraging employees’ engagement with work-related flow with the aim of ensuring career sustainability.

Work-Related Flow in Career Sustainability

“…A reason for this high rate of citation for Csikszentmihalyi's publications may be that the theory of flow is reliable, has been validated [13], and except for some refinement [14], is identical to as it was first developed [15]. This assessment of Csikszentmihalyi's influence has been noted elsewhere [16].…”

“…Previously [16], regarding psychological assessment in work settings, two related concepts were contrasted with work-related flow in studies of career sustainability [22][23][24]. They are happiness promotion and assessing PERMA (Positive Emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment) factors.…”

“…The two other reports [44,45] published in disparate fields represent studies directly influenced by the work-related flow theory of Csikszentmihalyi regarding career sustainability. An examination of these three reports of Csikszentmihalyi's influence has been provided elsewhere [16]. Also included in Figure 1 are the references to the citations made to the works by Csikszentmihalyi in each of these three studies [5,9,11,32,[46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53].…”