The Chief Happiness Officer in Academia: New Professional Perspectives?

Abstract

Several organisations have recently started to pay more attention to their employees’ happiness since they have realized the tight relationship between employees’ well-being and productivity. In fact, research studies (Adams 2019; Kossek et al. 2014) have demonstrated how staff job satisfaction can be influenced by work-life balance and consequently help increase the profits of organisations. Since the growth of job stress among academics has been endangering their well-being (Bhatia and Mohsin 2020), a few scholars (Bailey and Phillips 2016; Bell et al. 2012; Heiden et al. 2021) have analysed the link between job pressure stress and health and the negative implications for both the performances of academics and the outcomes of students. In order to fight against the feeling of living in a threatening work context, some universities have begun to promote some initiatives and stress management practices to help their members to cope with increased symptoms of ill-being and psychological distress. As it is becoming increasingly usual that non-academic organisations include in their organigrams a new professional profile, the Chief Happiness Officer (CHO), in order to monitor their employees’ well-being, the present paper is intended to be the starting point of a debate on the potential role of the CHO in academia to promote a new academic culture based on happiness, satisfaction and sustainable positivity. In particular, the interest in this new profession raises the question of whether a CHO can actually contribute to improving well-being in academia or whether it can be more beneficial to focus on a “chief happiness officer mentality”, rather than a chief happiness officer person.