Is a happy nation a productive nation? An exploration of the relationship between job satisfaction and productivity at the national level

Is a happy nation a productive nation? Our study investigated this question by analysing records of the United States’ aggregated level of job satisfaction and productivity as well as a cross sectional sample of countries throughout the world. Archival data from national surveys of job satisfaction and several indices of individual worker productivity from the Bureau of Labor Statistics database across the years 1987–2004, as well as international job satisfaction data and an index of the corresponding country’s productivity, revealed that these two factors are not consistently related.