The Effect of Mood on Work Performance

In an article today on Knowledge at Wharton, I read about a study conducted by researchers from the Wharton School to look into the impact of mood on productivity.

The researcher studied a group of employees at a call center and came to the following conclusions:

• Daily mood at work can influence important work outcomes
• The mood that people bring with them at the very start of the workday influences employee mood more powerfully and consistently than any other variable
• People in the study who started the day in a good mood tended to stay that way
• Non-work and work domains are "permeable," and research suggests that mood often spills over from one to another.
• The workers who came to work in a good mood were less liable to be brought down by negative perceived customer moods.
  

In short, the researchers found that the positive mood that you bring to work is very strong and that people actually do a pretty good job of walling off the negatives.

Sounds like paying attention to our "morning moods" might be a very effective mechanism to indirectly boost our own performance and increase the odds of having a "good day" overall.