I study what makes work a positive, meaningful, life-enriching experience for people. Topics like flourishing, thriving, vitality, resilience, and happiness have particular appeal to me because they capture something essential about what it means to be fully alive, to be living life at its richest and best. I want to understand what work life is like at its fullest, richest, and best. Most of my research is with Amy Colbert (University of Iowa), so I am experiencing, first hand, the blessings of a very high quality work relationship! I have three primary areas of research that interest me:

1. Intrinsic motivation (IM) and affect. One of our hunches (Amy’s and mine) is that studying intrinsic motivation and affect at work, especially positive affect, will help enrich our understanding of work at its best. We have developed a model of IM that builds on the existing cognitive models, such as Hackman & Oldham’s seminal job characteristics model and Gretchen Spreitzer’s wonderful work on psychological empowerment. In our model, affect takes center stage. We discuss the vital role we think affect plays in creating IM, how it might be integral to different levels of IM (e.g., low, high, and even hyper IM), and we also explore some of the factors that might shape different levels of IM. We are using both qualitative and quantitative approaches to field test this model. So far, most of our research in health care environments.

2. Engagement. Another area of interest for Amy and me is William Kahn’s wonderful idea of engagement, bringing and using our fullest physical, cognitive, and emotional selves at work. We are engaged (pun intended!) in several studies to explore more about what this experience is like and the factors which might foster it. Perhaps our favorite current study is a qualitative investigation of physicians’ experiences of work. Relationships play a starring role in our research, so we are exploring many facets of social relationships and how they might shape both engagement and IM. I am also curious about whether there is a spiritual dimension to engagement, so I am working on this topic too.

3. Happiness. A final area of interest is happiness, both hedonic and eudaimonic varieties. I am particularly interested in the role that work plays in a person’s life happiness. Some scholars have asserted that happiness is a meta-construct that captures a person’s cognitive and affective gestalt of their entire life. If so, it could help us better understand, for example, the dynamics between work and non-work lives. Amy and I also beginning to explore questions related to meaning in work life and this fits nicely with my interest in eudaimonic happiness.