Maybe high expectations aren’t quite as positive as you thought

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen has a piece in TIME magazine’s ‘Work in Progress’ blog that throws an odd sidelight on what it may really mean to approach your work in a positive frame of mind (”Positive thinking leads to…job dissatisfaction?“).

She cites a forthcoming research study by Dr. Olivia O’Neill, assistant professor of management the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business, showing that: employees “higher in positive affect had higher salary expectations, and changed organizations more frequently, which leads to lower overall job, career, and life satisfaction.”

If I’ve got that right, she’s saying people who have a positive outlook on life expect more from their work than they get. As a result, they end up with worse careers and lower levels of satisfaction with their life. Whew! That seems like a good reason to be miserable.

The problematic mechanism, according to Dr. O’Neill, is job change. Faced with salaries that don’t match their (positive) expectations, these folk are more likely than others to leave and seek greener pastures elsewhere.

This seems like a reasonable set of actions, but there’s a down side:

“Ultimately, changing organizations did not increase satisfaction for highly positive employees. This suggests that highly positive people’s resilience in adjusting to new organizations cannot offset the disappointment they experience when their high expectations are not met.”

The study apparently shows that people with high expectations never find anything to match up and so feel dissatisfied all the time. Other positive people who swallowed the realities of working life and stayed where they were fared better; and the more aggressively some pursued their ideal job, the worse their prospects of happiness.

This all sounds a little odd to me. The study as quoted seems to be less about being positive and more about being continually dissatisfied with your lot in life. I find it hard to believe positive people are less happy than others, but very easy to accept that a career spent chasing a set of expectations that might be largely unrealistic is not a sound recipe for happiness or job success.

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