Lead yourself to the zone and be happy: The effect of self-leadership development on flow and happiness

Self-leadership has been associated with several positive organizational outcomes (e.g., performance and innovation). Yet, individual subjective well-being constructs have seldom been explored in the self-leadership literature. We hypothesized that an increase in self-leadership results in increased positive affect resources, namely flow and happiness.

A self-leadership intervention program, interlinked with a real-world longitudinal observational effectiveness-assessment design, was used to test this hypothesis. A sample of 64 middle-managers from a for-profit organization in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector went through one 8-week self-leadership training program, and provided 4383 daily measures of self-leadership, flow, and happiness during working hours on business days, plus 242 post-training modules assessments. Email surveys were used to assess self-leadership and dispositional flow, whereas the experiencing sampling method was used to assess situational (i.e., at-the-moment) flow and happiness. Linear mixed models and mediation analysis were applied to longitudinal data.

As hypothesized, an increase in self-leadership was positively associated to (1) situational and dispositional experiences of flow among employees in the FMCG sector and (2) happiness in the workplace. No mediation of flow was found between self-leadership and happiness.

Results highlight the potential of self-leadership skills development and practice to shorten the distance between perceived challenges and skills in job-related tasks, as well as to make subjects feel happier in the workplace.