The Psychology of Becoming a Successful Worker : Research on the Changing Nature of Achievement at Work

What is success at work and why is it important? How do top workers describe their success? How can work, community, leadership, family, or home and school promote success? Success at work is often associated with career-oriented individuals who sacrifice other areas of life to achieve highly in the workplace, but success can also be defined in other ways. It can consist of feelings of knowledge, competence and accomplishment, stemming from an inner drive to work well and create an expression of mastery. This book focuses on employees who have been rewarded for their skills and expertise. Based on the authors’ in-depth research into the phenomenon of success at work, this book provides a positive human-strength based approach to success and offers a fresh viewpoint to the modern, demanding and hectic work life. Drawing from the theory of positive psychology and outlining new theoretical ideas including work motivation, career orientation, work characteristics, and positive states of work, success is described as a combination of multiple elements which include other areas of life. The book is illustrated throughout with case studies from employees, and it will ignite thoughts about what success at work is and can be, and how to recognize factors which enhance or hinder success in varying contexts. Considering a variety of data, this book will appeal to researchers and academics from the fields of work and organisational psychology, positive psychology, career counselling and coaching. In this book, we introduce our research on success at work in a very broad sense. This research can be said to have begun during the fi rst years of this millennium. Adjunct Professor Uusiautti fi rst focused on work drive in nurses and midwives, expanding her analysis to Finnish Employees of the Year, while Professor Määttä conducted her studies on love and human relationships. When our specifi c research streams converged, we began studying positive development in childhood and adolescence as well as in adulthood and later life. We even managed to incorporate our ideas on leadership. Now, we think it is time to compile our fi ndings into a psychology of success. In many parts of this book, we will refer to the route to success - we hope that this book will function as a signpost showing the way to happiness-promoting success at work. The standpoint in this book rests on psychology, particularly positive psychology. This means that we deliberately aimed to combine the themes of work success with fl ourishing and favourable development. Our purpose is to inspire and challenge researchers and all those interested to examine the possibilities of this positive approach and to consider this as one example of how to seize phenomena that are diffi cult to defi ne comprehensively but, fi rst and foremost, we want them to see the connection between success and happiness