Sad Workers = Better Workers

from the time-to-bring-out-the-task-masters dept

A new study suggests that sad workers focus more on the task at hand and are actually better workers than happy workers. However, their happiness/sadness has to be task independent - so don't think the way to motivate your employees now is to make them unhappy. I'd like to see more about the actual methodology used for the study. While I could see how sad workers use work to keep their minds off of whatever they're sad about - I would also expect to see happy workers who find their work to be interesting, to be more inspired and creative. I wonder how the study (1) determined who was happy and who was sad and (2) how they determined what was "better" work. It looks like they just did it based on the number of "errors" made on the production line of some factory workers, which isn't exactly a result that I'd extrapolate to all professions.