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The purpose of this study is to react to COVID-19 and is intended to transcend the regular thoughts to deeper issues towards humanity and nature. This paper also extends further the article “pedagogy of life beyond extinction” published in the Journal for Multicultural Education. This paper continues this discussion by further inward reflections on the self and the search for ultimate happiness amid the current pandemic that emerged in 2020. The study focusses on a holistic perspective towards a pedagogy that extends further the previous article by focussing on issues of happiness, dialogue and self-awareness.

This study adopts a reflective and exploratory, style that is an enabler for future research into a pedagogy that is focussed on humanity and nature.

The conceptual paper explores a holistic perspective towards a pedagogy that considers issues of happiness, dialogue and self-awareness.

This study’s intention is to extend the notion of pedagogy that looks beyond educational institutions in seeking a wider understanding of humanity and nature. The concept of “pedagogy of life beyond happiness” is used as a way to understand levels of the “self” as a way to gain deeper self-awareness. This provides a lens for seeking ultimate happiness.

Unhappiness has been recognized as one of the main factors that cause political unrest in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in recent years. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of governance matters on happiness in the MENA region while controlling for other relevant determinants.

The paper applies panel random effects regression analyses by using data from 14 MENA countries over the period of 2009-2011.

The empirical results show that higher level of political stability and absence of violence, government effectiveness and rule of law significantly increase happiness in the region. Furthermore, the paper finds that voice and accountability, regulatory quality and control of corruption variables have positive relationship with happiness but are not significant.

Most studies in this area cover developed countries. Since findings for developed countries might not be directly transferable to emerging economies such as MENA countries, therefore, more work is necessary to obtain a clearer picture of the political determinants of happiness in this region.

This study attempts to explore the meaning and implication of spirituality in an accounting firm by using a Buddhist perspective of interbeing. It explains how the happiness of individuals (auditors, partners, clients and auditor family members); organisational performance and growth and auditors' commitment are interconnected and impermanent.

This study employed an interpretive case study in an Indonesian accounting firm. The researchers explored the collective and individual feelings, thoughts, actions and experiences of the firm's actors. The data collection methods were interviews, participant observations and documentary analysis.

Leadership plays a major role in cultivating spirituality in an accounting firm. The spirituality increases auditors' commitment, (conditional) happiness and performance resulting in client satisfaction and the firm's growth. From an interbeing perspective, partners, auditors and clients are interconnected and impermanent. A firm's growth creates a growing sense of unhappiness due to the diminishing of auditors' comfort zone. Spirituality in the workplace can only engender conditional happiness and organisational commitment that offset the importance of material rewards and career prospects. To reach ultimate (unconditional) happiness, one requires a continuous spiritual development.

The insights gained from this study need enrichment from cases in different contexts, e.g. multinational firms with members from different countries and cultures.

This study develops the discourse of emancipation in the accounting literature by taking into account spirituality and happiness.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of social capital on happiness. The previous literature generally measures social capital using “generalized trust”, which is a narrow dimension of social capital. In this study, social capital is measured as a multidimensional concept consisting of generalized trust, institutional trust and trust on family, neighborhood and strangers.

This study explores the relationship between social capital and average happiness using a panel data of 89 countries from 1980 to 2017. The empirical analysis is done by employing pooled OLS (POLS), fixed effects method (FEM), random effects method (REM) and system generalized method of moments.

The findings demonstrate that all measures of social capital are positively associated with happiness while comparatively institutional trust and generalized trust appear more significant for happiness. The findings are robust to different robustness checks. The findings document the importance of social capital for average happiness.

The research has certain limitations. First, the objective of study was to cover global sample of countries, however, the data series were not available for all countries. Second, the empirical is restricted to global evidence instead of exploring separate estimates for developed and developing world.

The findings document the importance of social capital for average happiness. The awareness of the importance of social capital needs to be increased. Government can develop such organizations or institutions that are conducive for social capital development.

This research explores how does the organizational culture influence internal corporate social responsibility (CSR) actions and the effect of these actions on the level of happiness of employees.

The study adopts an employee perspective since the perception of employees is the unit of analysis. By relying on a sample of 921 workers of firms from different sectors and sizes headquartered in Spain, the empirical analysis is performed using partial least squares.

The findings evidence that clan and adhocracy cultures highly foster internal CSR practices and that internal CSR activities enhance employees' happiness. The mediating role of internal CSR in the relationship between organizational culture and employee happiness is also found. These results suggest that managers could play a proactive role in fostering internal CSR by designing the organizational culture according to features of clan and adhocracy cultures such as flexibility, innovation, creativity, autonomy, communication, training and support of supervisors.

The research focuses on a single country, which makes it difficult to generalize the results and guides future research into cross-cultural analysis. Including countries that present differences in their cultural and institutional context would allow to explore the influence of the national context on the business culture, on internal CSR and on employee happiness. This work is also limited in time, as the data used are of a cross-cultural nature.

A greater effort in internal CSR by companies translates into a higher level of happiness for their workers. Specifically, occupational health and safety practices have the greatest influence on employee happiness. Hence, organizations must develop cultures that contribute to promote internal CSR—adhocracy and clan—since this would enhance employees' happiness if the values and beliefs that characterize these cultural configurations are translated into internal CSR practices such as occupational health and safety, work–life balance and equal opportunities.

The improvement of employee happiness creates social value and can be enhanced through an organizational culture that promotes CSR. The research findings might be useful when defining institutional policies to promote job quality, as encouraged by the social policy agenda of the United Nations embodied in the Sustainable Development Goals.

Promoting internal CSR through organizational culture will have positive effects for companies internally by enhancing employees' happiness. Therefore, the article contributes to overcome the lack of evidence about the antecedents of internal CSR and its relationship with employees' happiness, an emerging variable in the management literature.

This research primarily aims to study the role of leader-member exchange (LMX) in frontline employees' (FLEs) innovative behaviors, whereby a mediating effect of employee happiness is proposed in this relationship. The moderating effect of service climate is also examined on the indirect effect of LMX on innovative behaviors through happiness.

The study used a sample of 303 FLEs working in various service organizations in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Structural equation modeling was used to test the proposed model.

The findings show that LMX has a positive and significant effect on FLEs' innovative behaviors and that employee happiness is an intervening variable. Service climate moderates the indirect effect of LMX on FLEs' innovative behaviors through happiness, and the effect is stronger in a low (unsupported) service climate.

The findings of this research provide prescriptive insights into the critical role of supervisory behavior in FLEs' innovative service behaviors and how positive emotions contribute to employees' willingness to innovate. Thus, these findings make a unique contribution to research in service management.

Studies examining how and when LMX can affect FLEs' innovative behaviors are limited. These findings offer new insights into the relative importance of supervisor and organizational support (service climate) in FLEs' innovative behaviors. The interaction effect of LMX and service climate has not been previously examined along with positive employee affect (happiness) and innovative behaviors.

This paper applies a recently developed method of ranking socioeconomic inequality in health to ranking U.S. happiness from 1994 to 2012 using the GSS data. We also compare happiness between subgroups as decomposed by gender, race, and age. We establish and test a monotone condition of happiness – a richer person is likely to be happier. Under the monotone condition, standard tools of welfare and inequality ranking can be applied straightforwardly.

In this study, the authors build on the current frameworks of happiness provided by the PERMA model, the World Happiness Report Index and the theoretical framework provided by the proponents of job-satisfaction model, motivation, employee engagement and commitment. The authors argue that, the existing theoretical framework in the management and the HR literature are just different aspects of a common goal – happiness. This position is consistent with the overall happiness projects championed by governments across the world, including the UK, Bhutan, several Scandinavian nations and essentially the United Arab Emirates. A chasm that currently exists in the literature is the availability of a universally acceptable definition for happiness and protocols for measuring happiness. The authors conclude that more research is required to keep pace with industry development relating to employee happiness initiatives.

Using quasi-literature review, the authors analysed selected studies on the theory of happiness to identify how each have treated the concept of happiness in organisations.

It is erroneous to promote national or international happiness initiatives without starting from the micro level – in this case, the institutions of society should start measuring happiness from the micro level to help understand what happiness actually means.

As an opinion piece, its recommendations need to be applied cautiously.

Till date, only a few studies have explored the concept of happiness from micro-organisational level.

This chapter describes and tests the principles of configural theory in the context of hospitality frontline service employees’ happiness-at-work and managers’ assessments of these employees’ quality of work performances. The study proposes and tests empirically a configural asymmetric theory of the antecedents to hospitality employee happiness-at-work and managers’ assessments of employees’ quality of work performance. The findings confirm and go beyond prior statistical findings of small-to-medium effect sizes of happiness-performance relationships. The method includes matching cases of data from surveys of employees (n = 247) and surveys completed by their managers (n = 43) and uses qualitative comparative analysis via the software program fsQCA.com. The findings support the four principles of configural analysis and theory construction: recognize equifinality of different solutions for the same outcome; test for asymmetric solutions; test for causal asymmetric outcomes for very high versus very low happiness and work performance; and embrace complexity. The theory and findings confirm that configural theory and research resolves perplexing happiness–performance conundrums. The study provides algorithms involving employees’ demographic characteristics and their assessments of work facet-specifics which are useful for explaining very high happiness-at-work and high quality-of-work performance (as assessed by managers) – as well as algorithms explaining very low happiness and very low quality-of-work performance.

For many years now, both organizational researchers and practitioners alike have been interested in the role played by employee happiness on a number of workplace outcomes. In particular, many have been fascinated by the happy/productive worker thesis. According to this hypothesis, happy employees exhibit higher levels of job-related performance behaviors than do unhappy employees. However, despite decades of research, support for the happy/productive worker thesis remains equivocal. These inconsistent findings primarily result from the variety of ways in which happiness has been operationalized. Most typically, organizational theorists have operationalized happiness as job satisfaction, as the presence of positive affect, as the absence of negative affect, as the lack of emotional exhaustion, and as psychological well being. I will review this literature using the circumplex framework as the taxonomic guideline. In addition, drawing on the impetus of the “positive psychology” movement, I propose Fredrickson’s (1998, 2001, 2003) broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions as one approach especially well-suited for future research to better understand the happy/productive worker thesis.