A new look at employee happiness: How employees’ perceptions of a job as offering experiences versus objects to customers influence job-related happiness

Wilson Bastos and Sigal G. Barsade

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2020, vol. 161, issue C, 176-187

Abstract: People gain more happiness from purchasing experiences than material objects. We examine whether this intriguing psychological effect also occurs for the employees who provide those experiential and material goods to customers. Evidence from a field survey of employees across multiple jobs and industries (Study 1) and three experiments (Studies 2–4) indicates that people who perceive their jobs as primarily providing experiences (vs. material objects) gain more happiness from those jobs. Furthermore, we hypothesize and find support for a two-step sequential mediation explaining this effect. Experiential (vs. material) jobs are associated with greater employee involvement of the self with the goods they provide to customers and employee perceived positive impact on customers (step 1 mediators), each of which increases job meaningfulness (step 2 mediator), leading to greater job-related happiness. Additionally, as a moderator, we find that when the good turns out negatively for customers, employee involvement of the self with the good and job meaningfulness sequentially mediate the effect, but employee perceived positive impact on customers and job meaningfulness do not. These findings extend the experience versus object superiority effect from the customer-side to the employee-side of the interaction, contributing to the job design, job meaningfulness, and employee affect literatures. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

Keywords: Experiential job; Material job; Job meaningfulness; Affect; Job-characteristics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749597820303654
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jobhdp:v:161:y:2020:i:c:p:176-187

DOI: 10.1016/j.obhdp.2020.06.003

Access Statistics for this article

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes is currently edited by John M. Schaubroeck

More articles in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().