How Psychology Can Transform Your Business Success

Psychology can play a critical role in helping your organisation achieve its goals – real bottom-line benefits – by recognising and releasing the talent in your people. Whether you’re in the private sector, public sector or a charitable organisation, it’s an established fact that highly successful organisations have highly motivated, driven and happier staff. The key to unlocking this potential is through increasing people’s subjective well-being, which is known to be linked to a whole range of organisation-level outcomes (e.g., superior customer/client service, innovative problem-solving, and the other benefits that come with high levels of engagement and commitment, and ‘corporate citizenship’).
However, these desirable psychological qualities do not just emerge spontaneously; they need to be recognised, nurtured and properly managed. But, when achieved, the outcome for the organisation is greater competitive advantage and improved organisational effectiveness.
This short summary of how you can use psychology to transform your people and organisation is aimed at:
Greater staff commitment, engagement, motivation, and job satisfaction
More authentic leadership and strategic vision
Reduced absence, sickness and turnover
Superior customer service
Greater organisational effectiveness
Enhanced ‘bottom-line’ results

PSYCHOLOGICAL WELL-BEING AT WORK
In this section the importance of well-being to a wide range of organisational outcomes is discussed.
What is Well-being?
Well-being is a term that is used in different ways by different people. In psychological terms, it reflects a cluster of work-related processes all tied together by an affective/emotional orientation either to: (a) engagement, motivation, satisfaction and commitment (high well-being); or (b) disengagement, withdrawal and lack of commitment (low well-being).
There’s many sources of well-being, but irrespective of the precise type, years of research show that strong sense of purpose and meaning are important for higher levels of effectiveness.
It’s interesting that being happy by itself is not enough; it is having this happiness directed to a specific purpose. Psychology reveals that the most content people have a ‘mission’ in life – something to believe in and to strive towards (psychologists often refer to be as ‘meaning’ in life). It’s difficult for people to work for any organisation if it does not provide them with this purpose and ‘meaning’.