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The purpose of this paper is to explore flow as an underlying mechanism linking psychological ownership (PO) and subjective happiness and identify how flow affects employees’ subjective happiness.

Two separate samples were used. Sample 1 examined the responses of 120 female spa workers. Sample 2 examined the responses of 334 male logistics technicians. Data were collected through paper-based questionnaires across two time points.

PO was positively related to employees’ subjective happiness across both samples. Furthermore, PO has distinct impacts on employees’ subjective happiness through two distinct measures of flow: immersion and mastery. The authors found that immersion fully mediates the relationship between PO and employee subjective happiness in Sample 1, and mastery in Sample 2.

This is one of the first empirical studies to examine whether and how PO increases employees’ subjective happiness. The results contribute to the literature by providing a theoretical rationale for and an empirical analysis of a model wherein flow mediates the linkage between employees’ feelings of PO and their subjective happiness.

The increasing ethical misconduct at job place demands to understand the role of ethics in a wide variety of disciplines. This paper aims to empirically investigate the mediating mechanism of life satisfaction and subjective happiness between Islamic work ethics – innovative work behavior (IWB) and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB).

The sample comprised 296 employees and 58 head of departments (HODs) of top 11 business schools in Pakistan. The data of the study were collected in three waves and from two different sources (faculty members and their HODs) through questionnaire. The statistical technique SEM analysis was applied to inspect the proposed direct and mediating hypotheses.

Taken together, the findings revealed that Islamic work ethics (IWE) improves quality of life and by following IWE at workplace, employees feel pleasure and show satisfaction from life. The results supported the mediating role of both life satisfaction and subjective happiness between IWE-IWB and IWE-OCB.

This study provides practical insight that Islamic business ethics plays an important role at workplace and improves quality of life and individual behavior.

The current research is unique, as it empirically investigates the mechanism quality of life phenomena which connects IWE and individual behavior (innovative and citizenship). The mechanism quality of life is less studied, and therefore this study fills the gap of scant literature.

Drawing upon a contractarian lens of corporate social responsibility (CSR), this study aims to explore community construals of happiness and evaluates conceptual boundaries of CSR for happiness.

Using a mixed-methods design, natural language processing and thematic analysis techniques were used to analyse large volumes of textual survey data collected from over 1,000 research participants through an online survey.

Results indicated that lay construals of happiness were primarily defined in terms of socioeconomic conditions and psychoemotional experiences. In explicating the boundary conditions, community perceptions regarding the extent of businesses’ social responsibilities for happiness were evidenced in five themes: that businesses have a responsibility not to harm happiness, a responsibility to enable conditions for happiness to occur, a responsibility to exercise awareness of happiness implications in decision-making, a responsibility for happiness that is limited by strategic purpose and resource capability and a responsibility for happiness that is limited by stakeholder proximity.

This study contributes to the theoretical and empirical foundation of CSR for happiness while simultaneously developing and applying a novel approach for processing and analysing large volumes of qualitative survey-based data.

The objective of this study was to improve understanding of frontline staff's subjective happiness and anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic by investigating the roles of employees' busy mindset and leader conscientiousness.

The link between employee anxiety and subjective happiness was also explored, and the cross-level mediating effect of employee anxiety was tested using a multilevel design. A survey of 373 frontline staffers and 74 team leaders in the integrated resorts (IRs) was conducted in three waves: April (Time 1), May (Time 2) and June (Time 3) in 2020. The data were analysed with SPSS and Mplus using a hierarchical linear modelling (HLM) method.

The results indicated that during the COVID-19 pandemic, a busy mindset increased frontline staff's anxiety and thus decreased their subjective happiness, and leader conscientiousness remedied the effect of anxiety on subjective happiness.

The findings are relevant to frontline staffers, team leaders in the hospitality industry and corporate service departments. Against the background of COVID-19, conscientious leaders can significantly help employees to overcome their anxiety and insecurity and improve their subjective happiness, answering the urgent call to deal with the challenges of the new work–life environment.

The study differs from previous other studies in two dimensions: First, the authors explored the interactions of the affective events from the cross-level perspectives, i.e. both team level and individual level. Second, the authors conducted this research on the mental issues of the hospitality frontline staffers in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which remains a black box to be explored.

Workplace social courage is a courageous behavior that can damage the actor's social relationships, social image and accrue face-loss costs. Sometimes, it is difficult to differentiate courageous behavior from incivility that predicts higher levels of psychological distress. While workplace social courage is widely discussed in the management literature, less is known about the conditions under which individuals are more or less likely to exhibit courageous behaviors. Given the theoretical considerations, in the present study, the authors consider two indicators of quality of life, which are life satisfaction and happiness, and set the aim of the study as to investigate the relationships between organizational justice and two dimensions of quality of life – life satisfaction and happiness – with particular attention to the mediation function performed by courage.

Cross-sectional survey data (n = 408) were obtained from employees working in Turkey Fortune companies and analyzed with variance-based structural equation modeling (VB-SEM) technique.

The results showed that perceived organizational justice is a strong antecedent for workplace social courage. Workplace social courage emerges as a facilitator for subjective happiness and life satisfaction. Workplace social courage mediated the association between perceived organizational justice and subjective happiness, and between perceived organizational justice and life satisfaction. Prescriptions for theory development and practitioners are highlighted, research limitations and future directions are acknowledged.

So far, most of the work done in this subject is mainly in western countries, and it is considered as a virtue, feature, emotion and behavior in the studies of social scientists, and mainly focused on how employees need the courage to perform the desired behaviors that affect organizational outcomes positively such as organizational citizenship behavior, job performance, job satisfaction, life satisfaction, psychological well-being. Also, the authors studied how social courage positively relates to beneficial voice and silence, as well as negatively relates to detrimental voice and silence, how courage is correlated with psychological empowerment, coaching and how courage mediates on quality of life. As can be seen, there is little empirical work when it comes to the antecedents of courage in business life. Therefore, this study, which has been done with different variables in a different culture and country, aims to support and bring a new breath to the subject. Besides, the mediating effect of courage on the organizational variables is also among the trendiest subjects.

To provide a coherent theoretical framework for interdisciplinary research on happiness, integrating the psychological, physiological/biological, and social/cultural levels, permitting integration of disparate approaches within and across disciplines.

Principles and findings of cybernetics are combined to shed light on difficulties encountered by research on happiness. Using a problem‐oriented approach, the reference system is defined as a psychological information‐processing and decision‐making system. This is an actor system in the social world needing orientation to act. Bossel's systems theory of orientation is applied to emotionality as a subsystem of the psychological system. Happiness, in terms of orientation theory, can be conceived as a meta‐orientor indicating wholeness, health, and the functioning of the overall‐system.

Emotionality and rationality are complementary decision‐making systems. Conditions are identified for developing the capability for emotional orientation and happiness in individuals. These conditions are strongly dependent on the social/cultural environment. Among them are the need for diversity in real‐life experience and for psychological acceptance of both oneself and the (sociocultural) environment. They can permit (relative) stability of happiness defined as an emotional state.

Further research can produce methods to improve happiness both by coaching individuals and by developing social conditions more conducive to happiness, e.g. in education. Happiness is a subjective indicator for physical, psychological, and social wellbeing taken together, which is the definition of health of WHO.

This sociocybernetic approach, combining systems concepts with orientation theory, can serve as an integrative theoretical framework for so far separate theoretical approaches.

This study aims to examine the subjective well-being of self-employed persons relative to wage employees in Ghana. Two measures of subjective well-being, comprising life satisfaction and happiness, are considered.

The current study focuses on Ghanaian working adults, uses pooled cross-sectional datasets from the 2005 to 2014 World Values Survey (WVS), applies survey weights, estimates ordered probit models and computes marginal effects.

The results show that being self-employed is associated with a lower probability of being satisfied with life than being wage employed. The result for happiness is negative but not statistically significant. The perceived low level of life satisfaction among the self-employed in Ghana could explain the rationale behind the desire of some Ghanaians to seek wage employment rather than pursuing self-employment. The results also could partly explain the non-survival of some entrepreneurial firms in Ghana over time.

Data relating to factors such as business size, location (urban or rural), degree of internationalization (domestic or foreign), number of years of being in self-employment, the number of employees, financial knowledge and behavior and personality traits are unavailable in the WVS for analyses. The present study also uses a pooled cross-sectional dataset for the analyses; thus, causal inferences are not possible.

The study provides empirical evidence on the relationship between self-employment and subjective well-being in the context of Ghana. The study provides insights into how self-employed Ghanaians perceive well-being relative to wage employees.

This study aims to extend the knowledge in the domain of intellectual capital and entrepreneurship by investigating whether happiness may have a positive influence on entrepreneurial initiative and intellectual property or not.

The used large-scale dataset for 2018 is drawn from the Eurostat. It includes information on individual happiness, sustainability, start-ups, creativity, intellectual property and quality of life, grouped by European countries. Hypotheses are tested through using the linear regression method.

The findings confirm that happiness, along with creativity, fosters both entrepreneurial initiative and intellectual property.

Future studies should test the model by extending the analysis to different world regions and by considering further variables, such as country culture.

The study suggests that policy makers have to focus on improving life conditions and sustainability as a means to foster local economies and communities.

This cutting-edge study is unique in its genus, because the prior literature never focused on these topics jointly. At an academic level, it ties happiness to creativity and to “the entrepreneurial spirit”, thus opening up to a new and vast domain of researches.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate, at a national scale, how self-reported happiness varies with the different levels of environmental conditions resulting from national policies, while also considering different levels of freedom.

The authors estimated the effects of environmental performance on happiness using the log-log regression model presented.

Environmental performance is shown to have a direct impact on happiness. Nonetheless, the explanatory influence of freedom is only significantly positive for free countries, where the institutional and political arrangements are better established and thereby the effective democracy is more solid.

This article offers insights into happiness levels within the context of the current clamour for environmental protection and more sustainable development goals.

This chapter presents a research model aimed to investigate internal communication satisfaction (ICS) and employee engagement as prerequisites of employee happiness. Employee engagement is seen as a dependent variable to ICS and as an independent variable to happiness. The research is based on quantitative data collected from 174 employees working in 12 international firms who specialize in IT and creative industries and have representative office in Serbia. Partial least squares structural equation modelling is used to identify relationships between constructs. The results demonstrate that ICS increases employee engagement, which in turn increases employee happiness. Employee engagement represents complementary mediation of the relationship between ICS and subjective happiness. The outcomes reveal how organizations can employ an internal communications strategy in order to enhance engagement of their employees and their happiness as the ultimate goal. This chapter addresses an understudied topic in the public relations and strategic communication field and its findings are opening new questions which may inspire research community to search for detailed explanation of the effect that ICS has on employee happiness.