Summary:
Main theme: This paper reviews what is known about the definition, causes and consequences of happiness at work, drawing also on insights from the expanding positive psychology literature on happiness in general.
A comprehensive measure of individual-level happiness at work might include work engagement, job satisfaction, and affective organizational commitment.
Aspects of happiness have been (and should be) conceptualized and measured at multiple levels, including transient experiences, stable person-level attitudes, and collective attitudes, and with respect to multiple foci, such as discrete events, the job, and the organization. At all levels, there is evidence that happiness has important consequences for both individuals and organizations. Past research has tended to underestimate the importance of happiness at work.

Critical analysis: happiness has been found to be a highly valued goal in most societies (Diener 2000).
The rise of positive psychology in the past decade (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi
2000) has legitimized attention to happiness and other positive states as opposed to the previously dominant disease model which directed attention disproportionately to illness, depression, stress and similar negative experiences and outcomes. three sets of questions about happiness are addressed:
(1) How has happiness been defined and measured?
(2) What are the antecedents of happiness?
(3) What are the consequences of happiness?

Defineing happiness: In contrast to the hedonic view of happiness as involving pleasant feelings and judgments of satisfaction, eudaimonic well-being, self-validation, selfactualization and related concepts suggest that a happy or ‘good’ life involves doing what is right and virtuous, growing, pursing important or selfconcordant goals, and using and developing one’s skills and talents, regardless of how one may actually feel at any point in time

Happiness at work: Happiness-related constructs in organizational research vary in several meaningful ways - level at which they are seen to exist (transient, person, unit level), second is their duration or stability over time, and third is their specific content. A classic case in point is the relationship between job satisfaction and job performance. This relationship has most often been studied at the person level, asking whether employees who are more satisfied than other employees are likely to perform better. A definitive meta-analysis by Judge et al. (2001) confirms earlier findings that the uncorrected population correlation between job satisfaction and job performance is modest: about
0.18. This finding has no necessary bearing on the between-units relationship between collective satisfaction and unit performance.
Individuals
feel more satisfied than usual for them at moments when they believe they are performing better than usual compared with their own baseline.
Generally, person-level and unit-level constructs are assumed to be more stable over time.
When directly investigated, job satisfaction has been found to be modestly stable over two-, three- and five-year periods, even for those who change employers and/or occupations (Staw and
Ross 1985). This finding suggests that something constant about the person produces stability in their happiness at work across jobs and over time. Personality traits have also been invoked to explain why some individuals are consistently more satisfied than others. Group constructs such as average unit-level work engagement are also usually assumed to be fairly stable over time. Explored traditional and newer workplace variables that belong to the family of happiness constructs using sevseral scales- The most frequently studied construct by far is job satisfaction. Job satisfaction is an attitude, so should contain both cognitive and affective components. faces’ scale of job satisfaction. Organizational commitment - Organizational
Commitment Questionnaire (OCQ) scale, job involvement, engagement, thriving and vigour, flow and intrinsic motivation, affect at work - job emotions scale conclusions: There are a great many existing constructs that have something to do with happiness at work, be it fleeting and within person, stable and person level, or collective. The largest proliferation of constructs and measures is at the stable person level. The three parallel broadband measures to measure happiness at work at person level : a)engagement b)job satisfaction c) affective organizational commitment

Causes of happiness in general: it appears that happiness is a function of environmental events and circumstances, stable tendencies in the person, and the fit between the two, with the possibility of limited modification by carefully chosen and intentionally varied volitional acts. These provide some antecedents of happiness in organizations.

Causes of happiness in organization: Analysed different causes that impact happiness of an individual in organization. Also, suggested individual and organization level measures to increase happiness at work three factors are critical in producing a happy and enthusiastic workforce: equity
(respectful and dignified treatment, fairness, security), achievement (pride in the company, empowerment, feedback, job challenge), and camaraderie with team mates. so, organizational practices and qualities, and how they are perceived by organization members, are consistently predictive of happiness-related attitudes.

consequences: Chronic happiness or subjective well-being has important consequences in addition to reflecting a better quality of life across multiple life domains, including marriage, friendship, income, work performance and health. the evidence suggests that happiness at work does matter, not just to employees but also to organizations as performance, organizational citizenship behavior, and turnover are often mediated through happinessrelated constructs Relevance: improving happiness at work is a worthy goal. Evidence suggests that the ‘happy–productive worker hypothesis’ may be more true than we thought.

The use of narrow measures of happiness-related constructs and an emphasis on predicting core task performance may have resulted in organizational researchers underestimating the total impact of happiness at work. As suggested by Kraus (1995), it is time to move beyond
Wicker’s (1969) dismal conclusion that attitudes seldom predict more than 10% of the variance in behavior. When attitude measures are consistent in target and scope with behavior measures, andwhen the attitudes in question are salient, stable and have been formed based on personal experience, as is true of happiness at work, they can indeed predict behavior.

The importance of helping employees to be happy at work may be increasing. There is widespread consensus that employment relationships are changing.
Employers and employees are generally more loosely connected. Job security, loyalty, and average tenure are lower than in the past. Employer–employee relationships seem to be more contingent on both parties being satisfied with the exchange and continuing to meet each others’ expectations (cf. Roehling et al.
2000). In this environment, happiness at work is likely to be the glue that retains and motivates the high-quality employees of the future.
Research : There is scope for further research on happiness at work as it plays out at the transient, person and unit levels as research on the mechanisms connecting happiness to broadly conceived performance-related outcomes at all levels will be instructive.