With rare exceptions, happiness is not a term that has been
extensively used in academic research on employee
experiences in organizations. This does not mean that
organizational researchers are uninterested in employy
happiness at work. On the contrary, for many years we have
studied a number of constructs that appear to have
considerable overlap with the broad concept of happiness.
Undoubtedly, the most central and frequently used of these
is job satisfaction, which has a long history as both an
independent and dependent variable in organizational
research (cf. Brief 1998; Cranny et al 1992). In the past two
decades, a number of new constructs have emerged which
reflects some form of happiness or positive affective
experience in the workplace. What these constructs have in
common is that all refer to pleasant judgments (positive
attitudes) or Pleasants experience (positive feelings, moods,
emotions, flow status) at work. Happiness related constructs
in organizational research vary in several meaningful ways