What is more important for national well-being: Money or autonomy?

What is more important for national well-being: Money or autonomy? A meta-analysis of well-being, burnout, and anxiety across 63 societies. - Fischer, Ronald; Boer, Diana -Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 101(1), Jul 2011, 164-184. doi: 10.1037/a0023663

Abstract

What is more important: to provide citizens with more money or with more autonomy for their subjective well-being? In the current meta-analysis, the authors examined national levels of well-being on the basis of lack of psychological health, anxiety, and stress measures. Data are available for 63 countries, with a total sample of 420,599 individuals. Using a 3-level variance-known model, the authors found that individualism was a consistently better predictor than wealth, after controlling for measurement, sample, and temporal variations. Despite some emerging nonlinear trends and interactions between wealth and individualism, the overall pattern strongly suggests that greater individualism is consistently associated with more well-being. Wealth may influence well-being only via its effect on individualism. Implications of the findings for well-being research and applications are outlined.

via @neuroscience

Source: psycnet.apa.org

Scotland To Break The Union With England?

Unrest in Scotland over fiscal austerity measures have led to the Scottish National Party to capture a majority in the Scottish Parliament for the first time since it was founded. This may portend a push for greater autonomy, even separation.

Alan Cowell, Liberal Democrats Dealt Huge Blow in Britain Votes

With the final results tallied, according to the BBC, the Scottish National Party had won 69 of the 129 seats in Scotland’s regional Parliament. The result gave the nationalists a majority there for the first time since the assembly was created in 1999 — a triumph that resounded loudly some 77 years after the party was founded as a minority group promising to reverse the three-centuries-old Act of Union between England and Scotland.

The nationalists’ victory was seen by analysts partly as a reward for its track record in a regional government that, in marked contrast to the English authorities, maintained Scots’ free access to university education and to broad social benefits, even in hard economic times.

Alex Salmond, the party leader, said he would introduce a referendum on independence “to increase the powers of our Parliament.”

Mr. Cameron promised a fight against Scottish separatism, saying, “I will campaign to keep our United Kingdom together with every single fiber I have.”

Source: The New York Times

Management isn’t natural.

I don’t mean that it’s weird or toxic – just that it doesn’t emanate from nature. “Management” isn’t a tree or a river. It’s a telegraph or a transistor radio. Somebody invented it. And over time, most inventions – from the candle to the cotton gin to the compact disc – lose their usefulness.

Management is great if you want people to comply – to do specific things a certain way. But it stinks if you want people to engage – to think big or give the world something it didn’t know it was missing. For creative, complex, conceptual challenges – i.e, what most of us now do for a living—40 years of research in behavioral science and human motivation says that self-direction works better. And that requires autonomy. Lots of it.

If we want engagement, and the mediocrity- busting results it produces, we have to make sure people have autonomy over the four most important aspects of their work:

Task – What they do
Time – When they do it
Technique – How they do it
Team – Whom they do it with.

After a decade of truly spectacular underachievement, what we need now is less management and more freedom – fewer individual automatons and more autonomous individuals.

Daniel H. Pink, on Autonomy

Daniel H. Pink is the author of A Whole New Mind. His new book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, comes out in late December.

via What Matters Now