Flow at Work

Introduction: What Is Work?

Work is not a stable, unchanging entity. Under favorable conditions it can be the best part of life, under badly designed social conditions it can be an almost unendurable burden. The work of anthropologists who have observed contemporary groups of hunter‐gatherers have often remarked that in these societies men and women seem to enjoy whatever work they have to do to survive – and that for them, the distinction between what we would call “work” and what we would call “leisure” – such as dancing, playing music, telling stories around the campfire – was practically non‐existent (Evans‐Pritchard, 1956; Sahlins, 1972; Turnbull, 1961). It took a long time for work to become an alienating experience. What made it so was the evolution of technology that allowed people to accumulate food like grains and cereals, that could be stored without spoilage; in turn, this allowed some sections of the population to become full‐time soldiers, others to farm full‐time, or to become masons, carpenters, servants, and scribes. Society turned from a democratic group made of people who all did the same thing for a living, to an increasingly differentiated workforce ruled by the armies of despotic tyrants.

Despite the many negative changes in the conditions surrounding work, some of the most satisfying and meaningful moments of life still happen when we are working (Csikszentmihalyi, 2003; Csikszentmihalyi & LeFevre, 1989). The reason for this is not difficult to find. Living organisms are built for extracting energy from the environment, and when they are allowed to do it well, they usually feel a deep sense of satisfaction, or even enjoyment. Bees living in a mountain meadow full of flowers might lazily flit in the sun, while still filling their hive with fine nectar. But no matter how hard an animal has to work, it is difficult to say that it finds the struggle stressful or boring. In fact, most animals – at least those that are close enough to us to observe and interpret – are at their best when engaged in what we would call “work,” that is, when they practice the activity that makes it possible for them to survive.

Thinkers across the ages have remarked that living beings are at their best when they do what they are specifically adapted to do. The recently developed discipline of positive psychology is reaching similar conclusions. Individuals have different strengths – 24 according to Peterson and Seligman (2004) – and when they are using their strengths they are not only more efficient, but also feel more positive moods. A good example was quoted in the obituary of Richard Grossman, a physician specializing in the treatment of burn victims, whose “fierce dedication” to his work and the new techniques he developed for alleviating the pain of his patients had become legendary. When he was asked what led him to become so addicted to such grueling work, he did not mention the good he was accomplishing, but simply answered: “You develop a skill, and you want to use it” (Nelson, 2014). But this is not true only of professionals or other fortunate individuals. Assembly‐line workers, service workers, people who apparently would have very little to enjoy about their work, are often as eloquent about what they do for a living as a poet or a physician. “I still take care of the cows and tend the orchard,” said a 62‐year‐old woman living in the Italian Alps. “I feel special satisfaction in caring for the plants: I like to see them grow day by day. It is very beautiful” (Delle Fave & Massimini, 1988, pp. 197, 199).

And yet, surveys around the world show that “work” is often disliked and rarely found engaging by most adults (Gallup, 2013). Despite improved working conditions, something is still clearly lacking. It is still very rare for workers to feel that their job is an expression of their best qualities, that it is a personally meaningful activity, that it is fun. Where can we look for ideas that can change this state of affairs? In this chapter, we are going to review the concept of flow – a psychological state in which a person feels completely engaged with what he or she is doing, and which is experienced as some of the most rewarding and worthwhile moments of life; discuss how flow can be experienced at work; and then review the recent literature on the topic of flow at work to determine what some of the convergent findings have been, and what might be missing in the studies that have been conducted so far.

Reconstructing Enjoyable Work

What we, and other researchers who have studied enjoyment of work have found, is that when a person is deeply engaged in his or her work, they begin to find the work intrinsically rewarding, and the phenomenology they report is in many ways indistinguishable from the phenomenology reported by artists, musicians, and athletes describing how it feels when their performance goes well. For instance, in describing how it feels to do an operation that is very engaging, surgeons say that it is “like skiing down a slope,” “like sailing with the wind,” or “like body contact sport” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975). These common elements of experiences that are enjoyable by themselves, even when they do not result in any conventional gain, characterize what has been referred to as the flow experience (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975, 1990; Csikszentmihalyi & Csikszentmihalyi, 1988).

In this chapter we will present a short summary of the flow model of optimal experience, and then summarize what psychologists and other social scientists have written about how it feels, what causes it, and what are the consequences of experiencing it in a work environment.

The development of flow

The concept of flow was developed in a series of studies aimed at understanding “optimal experiences,” or those moments in life when people claim to have been feeling at their best. Contrary to expectations, it was found that these optimal experiences were described in much the same way whether they occurred when the person was composing or playing music, forging a sculpture, writing a poem, scaling a mountain, swimming across the British Channel, or having a good conversation. As the research progressed, it was found that this kind of optimal experience could happen also at work – in elite professions such as surgery or poetry, but also in apparently menial jobs like working on an assembly line, or making sandwiches in a delicatessen.

Respondents who described how it felt when they had this kind of experience generally mentioned eight characteristics they could remember feeling at the time. What was unexpected is that the same phenomenological profile of optimal experiences emerged regardless whether the activity was a game, a sport, or involved making music, or poetry, or work – ranging from computer programming and surgery to farming and building machinery. And when our studies in the United States were replicated in Italy, Germany, South Korea, Japan, and many other cultures, the same phenomenological profile emerged.

The first surprise was that the accounts focused a great deal on a challenge that started the process that led to the optimal experience. The challenge could have been to play Chopin for an aspiring violinist, or to climb a particularly difficult pitch of rock in Yosemite for a climber; for a scientist it was to prove a hypothesis by running the most relevant experiment, or to develop the most satisfying theory to explain hitherto unrelated facts. For a mother the challenge could be to teach important issues to her child, and for the child it could be to learn how to use a key to open a door. The point is, contrary to popular opinion, the most memorable moments in people’s lives do not seem to occur when they experience comfort, relaxation, or external success based on financial gains or popular acclaim; but they occur when a person has been able to meet a challenge that he or she had thought to be difficult and daunting.

Which means, of course, that optimal experience depends not only on challenges but on the availability of skills to meet them. When the challenges far outpace skills, the person feels worried and anxious; when the skills are higher than the challenges, one feels bored. When both challenges and skills are low, the best word to describe the phenomenology is apathy. Later studies suggest that flow is at its peak when the challenges are a few percentage points above the person’s skills; it is still almost as high when the two variables are matched exactly, but it drops very quickly when the skills are even slightly higher than the challenges (Abuhamdeh & Csikszentmihalyi, 2012).

The challenge one takes on determines the goals that a person must reach in the activity. In a chess game, each move has a particular goal within the overall goal of winning the game. The goal might be to defend one’s territory, or one’s king, and it might have short‐term or overall strategic purposes. Or the goal might be to capture one of the opponent’s pieces, or to establish control of one side of the board. During a game hundreds of decisions must be made, each requiring the best solution to the problem presented by the opponent’s moves. Winning the game is the overall purpose of the game, but what makes the game enjoyable is the fact that it offers hundreds of opportunities for solving problems, each presenting a goal that when solved provides a moment of rewarding accomplishment.

What makes singing or playing music enjoyable is not to finish the song; it is to get every chord, every note as well expressed as possible in the process of playing. A rock climber is attracted not so much by the reward of reaching the top of the wall, but by the ability to make each of the hundreds – or thousands – of moves required to complete the ascent, each providing a different problem, a different goal that must be solved for the overall challenge of reaching the top to be met.

The next characteristic common to optimal experiences is that one knows moment by moment what one needs to do, and how well one is performing. Games, whether physical or mental, have built‐in rules that make it clear “what’s the score”; the tennis player knows at each moment whether the ball is going where she intends it to go; the musician monitors the stream of sound she produces and can tell when it is not what she would like it to be; the rock climber can see he is a few feet higher up after each move, and that he has still not fallen into the void … Physicians say that one of the reasons surgery is so satisfying is that “you always know when you made a mistake – there is blood in the cavity, you have cut an artery …”

When these conditions are present – a matching of skills with slightly higher challenges in an activity that provides a chain of clear goals, and that provides immediate feedback – the activity will require focusing of attention; a degree of concentration that excludes irrelevant distractions, the usual existential worries that take up our attention in normal life. If the climber indulges in worrying about himself, or the future of mankind, he is likely to fall off the rock face; the pianist will hit a wrong note, the chess player sacrifice her Queen unwittingly. With the unwanted distractions of everyday life temporarily removed, one can experience the fullness of life by engaging with challenges that will bear witness to one’s skills. And this is the ultimate reason for engaging in such activities: one feels what the Greeks called an autotelic experience, that is, an experience that is its own reward.

It seems that, in the course of evolution, some of our ancestors established a connection between effortful engagement with challenges, and the pleasure centers of the brain. How this happened is a mystery, and it must have been accidental; however, those individuals whose brains were rewired this way were likely to benefit from this neurophysiological accident, because they would be more likely to be curious, experimental, more willing to take risks in the pursuit of new challenges. Although this inference must remain speculative, there is evidence that supports it. For example, neurophysiologists at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm have shown that individuals who experience flow more often tend to release dopamine to areas of the brain that are involved in effortful pursuits; whereas those who report fewer flow experiences release dopamine almost exclusively to the centers of the brain involved in producing passive pleasure (de Manzano, Cervenka, Jucaite, Hellenäs, Farde, & Ullén, 2013). This connection between effort and pleasure could be entirely genetic, or it could be that the potential for experiencing flow is present in everyone’s brain, but needs to be activated by exercise to become habitual. In any case, it seems that enjoying challenges is part of our nature, and it should be something that we can experience in work as well as in activities that exist for the purpose of providing enjoyment, such as sports, games, music, and art. But what can organizations do to make it more likely that their workers will experience flow?

The implications of flow for the workplace

To start, this could be accomplished simply by providing professional development opportunities to teach employees about how to find enjoyment in their work. The first step toward employees finding more flow in work is increasing their understanding of what flow is and how to find it. Secondly, organizations can explicitly support employees by talking about flow‐inducing and flow‐blocking components of the work during performance reviews and other opportunities where managers or leaders can hear from employees. In documented cases of introducing flow as a corporate priority, managers have helped employees to figure out ways to overcome the parts of their job that seem to be resulting in boredom, anxiety, or other negative states; and then help them to give them more responsibilities for aspects of the job they enjoy doing (e.g., Marsh, 2005).

Finally, organizations can provide the resources to allow employees the opportunity to develop their skills and provide more challenging opportunities. Recently the CEO of one of the major Asian technological companies employing over 80,000 workers showed Csikszentmihalyi the balance sheets for the company through the past 25 years. He pointed to an inflection point a dozen years earlier, when the profits of the company, which had been stagnant for the last dozen years despite steadily increasing revenues, had taken a sudden surge upwards. He then said that from that point, where flow was introduced into the management system, the company made 6.5 billion dollars more profit than had been projected on the basis of past performance. Not an important reason for taking flow seriously, perhaps, but not entirely insignificant, either.

A likely consequence of being in flow is that the skills of employees will constantly grow. In order to remain in flow, employees need to have greater challenges on which they can utilize their increasing skills. Organizations that fail to provide for the growth of their employees will likely experience an unmotivated workforce as boredom and apathy set in. And they are likely to face an exodus of their best employees, who will move to jobs where their skills are recognized and used, and where they can grow.

These suggestions derive directly from flow theory. To complement this, what is needed is a synthetic review of the empirical basis for translating flow theory to applied recommendations that extend earlier (e.g., Delle Fave, Massimini, & Bassi, 2011) and briefer (e.g., Nakamura & Dubin, 2015) reviews of the literature on flow at work. Given the changing face of work, these recommendations should be relevant to current work conditions. Toward this end, we conducted a focused review of recent research on flow at work to determine what is known that can inform practitioners, and where the gaps lie that future research might address.

A Short Review of the Literature on Flow and Work for the Past Decade

Many recent studies on flow in work settings have focused on the factors that facilitate or inhibit flow in employees. Some studies have also emphasized the outcomes generated as a result of flow experiences at work. Because the literature on flow and work has been expanding rapidly, we decided to focus on a subset of studies that would indicate the trends and gaps in the research base. For the purpose of this chapter, studies related to flow and work that were published from 2005 to mid‐2015 were considered to give as updated a view of trends as possible. Most of the studies taken into consideration involved discussion of either facilitators or inhibitors of flow at work, or mentioned quantifiable outcomes of flow; 28 studies met these criteria, with 25 studies focusing on the antecedents of the flow experience, 9 studies focusing on inhibiting factors, and 13 on the outcomes of the flow experience. Apart from these studies, there was one article that investigated the experience of flow at work, but did not contribute to the understanding of flow at work in terms of facilitators, inhibitors and outcomes of flow.

Future Research

Even though many studies have focused on flow, relatively few have dealt with flow in work. Even fewer have studied factors that facilitate or inhibit flow, or have measured the results of experiencing flow at work. Based on the studies above, a few suggestions for future research can be recommended. First, more studies should be carried out to find out interpersonal facilitators and inhibitors of flow. There were few studies that mentioned the influence of other people in facilitation of flow; there was no study of whether other people play a role in inhibiting flow or not. For example, one study found that presence of flow in supervisors accounted for presence of flow in the subordinates (Bakker, 2005). Similarly, more such studies could be carried out in the interpersonal and social domain, to explain how the presence of other people influences the flow experiences.

Second, work‐related situational factors, which have mostly been studied as facilitators of flow, should also be studied to find out how they inhibit flow. Work‐related situational factors that inhibit flow, such as job demands, structure of job, job resources, and so on, should be studied in more detail. Third, nonworking situational factors such as home environment, cultural factors, societal influences, should be studied in order to understand their influence on flow. From the studies that were reviewed, only one outlined the influence of nonwork situation as a facilitator of flow (Demerouti et al., 2012) and no studies attempted to understand the the influence of such factors to inhibit flow. Fourth, most studies that focus on outcomes of flow emphasize personal outcomes such as emotional, behavioral, or cognitive changes, but few studies have attempted to find out situational outcomes that result because of flow experienced at work. Thus, there is a lack of studies that help us understand how flow leads to situational outcomes, whether work related or nonwork related. Finally, it is important to explain whether the outcomes that result because of flow are short‐term in nature, or long‐term.

Conclusions

This chapter aimed to summarize several factors related to flow, based on a literature review of studies carried out in the last 10 years. The observed factors can be categorized as facilitators of flow, inhibitors of flow, and outcomes of flow. While most studies focused on facilitators of flow, fewer focused on inhibitors and outcomes. Of the studies that outlined facilitators, most considered personal‐cognitive factors (e.g., self‐efficacy beliefs), personal‐emotional (e.g., positive affect and emotion) and personal‐behavioral (e.g., approach coping) influences, factors involving other people (e.g., the social network), motivational factors (e.g., trait‐intrinsic motivation), and situational factors (e.g., design of work). Factors that inhibit flow were mostly personal, in comparison to situational, such as personal‐emotional (e.g., negative affect) personal‐cognitive influences (e.g., mental exhaustion), and personal‐behavioral factors (e.g., self‐punishment). For outcomes of flow, factors such as personal‐emotional (e.g., well‐being at work), personal‐cognitive (e.g., cognitive involvement), personal‐behavioral (e.g., spontaneity in tasks) were studied. While work‐related situational outcomes (e.g., better service at work) were reported in a few studies, only one study addressed outcomes in nonwork‐related situations (i.e., higher energy levels in situations outside of work).

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Flow at Work

Introduction: What Is Work?

Reconstructing Enjoyable Work

The development of flow

The implications of flow for the workplace

A Short Review of the Literature on Flow and Work for the Past Decade

Findings

Facilitators

Inhibitors

Outcomes

Summary and suggestions

Future Research

Conclusions

References