There are few important points to note about happiness at work:

Happiness at work is a choice
You can’t force or pressure people to be happy, no matter how genuine your concern for others. If you create a mood where it’s right to be happy and wrong to unhappy or dissatisfied, people will rebel against that and actually become less happy.

Happiness at work is different for everyone
One mans happiness is another persons living hell. We’re all different, and the same things will make some people happy, and others unhappy.

Happiness at work is long-term
It’s never about blowing off what must be done, in order to have fun and be happy instead. It’s not just about being happy here and now – it’s happiness for tomorrow and next year and 10 years from now.

Knowing as little about the situation as I do, it’s almost impossible for me to advise you, but this is the question I think you can ask yourself: Even if this person is one of the top retailers, are there hidden costs to having him around that offset his high turnover?

Would you in fact be better off without him?

Happy-Performing Managers: The Impact of Affective Wellbeing and Intrinsic Job Satisfaction in the Workplace
Peter J. Hosie, Peter Sevastos, and Cary L. Cooper

This book provides contemporary means to solve an age-old conundrum in management – do happy workers perform better? Decades of research and empirical evidence have been unable to establish a strong link between affective well-being, intrinsic job satisfaction and managers’ performance. A unique methodology, fresh empirical evidence and a definitive analysis of previous theory and research are employed to support the happy productive worker thesis.

The authors test a kindred idea – the ‘happy-performing managers’ proposition, using advanced statistical techniques. Performance is measured to a previously unachievable level. New empirical evidence is used to predict how affective wellbeing and intrinsic job satisfaction influences managers’ contextual and task performance. These findings are argued to have significantly progressed our understanding of what underpins human performance at work.

The book prescribes how managers’ jobs might be changed to enhance or avoid a decline in happiness because managers’ performance is impacting as never before on organisational productivity and the economic prosperity of nation-states. Extraordinary shifts in the global corporate environment mean managers’ ‘personal troubles’ have now become ‘public concerns’. An emerging movement to Positive Organisational Scholarship is countering such forces by developing ways to create positive human and organisational wellbeing.

Happy-Performing Managers will be invaluable to academics, postgraduate students, human resource practitioners, executives and managers who are interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the factors that influence human performance in the workplace.