Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice

Vol. 1, No. 2, September 2008, 176
185

Increasing job satisfaction: coaching with evidence-based interventions

Kathryn Britton*

Theano Coaching, LLC, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA

(Received 13 November 2007; accepted 2 June 2008)

Positive psychology offers a number of tools that coaches can use with groups and
individuals to raise job satisfaction and engagement. This article describes ways to apply
five empirically validated positive interventions: searching for the positive core;
intentionally increasing positive emotion; establishing conditions for flow; handling
negatives more resiliently; and celebrating positives more effectively. Explanation of each
intervention includes its theoretical background, practical ways to adapt it to specific
workplace settings, and illustrations from real experience.
Keywords: job satisfaction; positive interventions at work; resilience; positive emotion;
flow; Active Constructive Responding

Positive psychology unites disparate lines of theory and research about what makes life
most worth living (Peterson & Park, 2003), including what makes work satisfying and
engaging. Psychologists test theories using empirical methods, such as laboratory research,
longitudinal studies, and analyses of vast data collections (Cameron, Dutton, & Quinn,
2003; Snyder & Lopez, 2005).
Positive psychology has yielded a number of ‘positive interventions’, or intentional
actions to increase human well-being, and has collected empirical evidence of their
effectiveness. Coaches can augment their practices with interventions validated by research
and in turn, augment positive psychology with nuances based on practical knowledge of
specific domains. Coaches work with diverse people on a wide range of goals, but often in
settings where controlled studies cannot be established. Both fields can benefit from a close
working relationship.
This paper describes the practical application of five broadly applicable and extensively
validated positive interventions. It demonstrates by example how to match interventions to
the needs of an organisation, how to present them in ways that stimulate interest, and how
to collaborate with members of the organisation to adapt interventions to their needs.
While the treatment of each intervention is necessarily brief, references include deeper
explanations, theoretical underpinnings, and more extensive examples.
The practical experience described in this paper occurred in the group coaching of
several teams within a large multinational information technology corporation. Most of
the teams, ranging in size from 10 to more than 100 people, had low job satisfaction ratings
that managers wanted to improve. Participants included software engineers, computer
programmers, project managers, and support staff located in three sites in the USA. They
reported feeling frustrated, overworked, and worried about job security. They were very

*Email: kathryn@theano-coaching.com

ISSN 1752-1882 print/ISSN 1752-1890 online

# 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17521880802328152
http://www.informaworld.com
 Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice 177

interested in exploring positive psychology ideas, quick to see the relevance of positive
interventions to their own situations, and resourceful in finding ways to adapt the
interventions to their specific needs.

Setting the stage by generating interest

Before introducing positive interventions to prospective participants, I generated optimism
and curiosity by showing them both the power they have over their own job satisfaction
and the importance of their well-being to business outcomes.
Managers were intrigued to learn that there are well-established correlations between
employee well-being and the bottom line. From over a million employee interviews and
associated company data, Gallup researchers have identified twelve questions related to
working conditions, such as ‘At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best
every day?’ Answers to these questions are predictors of employee motivation and are
positively related to employee retention, customer satisfaction, productivity, and profit
(Harter, Schmidt, & Keyes, 2003, p. 215; Wagner & Harter, 2006). Other researchers have
found similar relationships between subjective well-being and career success (Boehm &
Lyubomirsky, 2008). Tsai, Chen, and Liu (2007) tested a model for the linkage between
employee positive emotions and job performance. Dutton (2003) links job performance to
high-quality connections at work. Managers responded to this information with skeptical
openness. Several already had an informal understanding of the business value of employee
well-being but had been discouraged by the limited effectiveness of earlier efforts to
improve the workplace climate.
Discussions with the general working population often started with negative litanies
about work. Jobs are going overseas. Schedules are unreasonably intense. The appraisal
system is discouraging. Once they could see that taking action did not require them to deny
the things that worried and angered them, they became intrigued to find ways to make
work more fun, satisfying, and engaging.

Selecting positive interventions

There are many positive interventions available, including some described in books for the
general public (Ben-Shahar, 2007; Lyubomirsky, 2008; Seligman, 2002) and others
specifically created for organisational settings (Cameron, Dutton, & Quinn, 2003). My
goal was to select a small number of interventions that would represent broad coverage of
what is known about human well-being; contribute directly to organisational needs; and
require only small investments of time by most of the participants.
I considered only interventions that had already been extensively validated. I looked for
ones that address at least one of the three orientations to well-being proposed by Seligman
(2002) and validated by Peterson, Park, and Seligman (2005):
1. positive emotional experience including satisfaction about the past, enjoyment in the
present, and optimism about the future;
2. deep engagement in challenging and worthwhile activities; and
3. meaning gained by working toward a higher purpose.

Then I considered whether they contributed to outcomes valued by this organisation.

Finally I selected a set that were mutually reinforcing, relatively easy to explain, and
required only modest behavior changes since participants were working under intense time
178 K. Britton

pressure and were therefore reluctant to invest more than a few hours working directly with
me. In general it is helpful to have some interventions that show beneficial changes with
low implementation costs to reinforce optimism that things can get better.
The outcomes highly valued in this organisation included:
1. increasing energy and vitality so that people could get more done with less overtime;
2. faster recovery from negative events such as sales fluctuations and unexpected plan
changes;
3. increased innovation and ability to find solutions to knotty technical problems;
4. increased teamwork and collaboration among large groups spread across multiple
sites and working in different time zones; and
5. skills growth and career development.

Table 1 shows the mapping between the selected interventions and both the orientations to
well-being and the work place outcomes. To implement a similar selection process, I
suggest first updating the valued outcomes to fit the needs of your organisation, then
reflecting on the relative importance of the three orientations, and finally considering what
you can do within your time and expense constraints. The positive interventions in this
paper emphasise positive emotional experience over meaning. With more time, I would add
an intervention to help people articulate the meaning of their work because meaning has
such a strong impact on human well-being (Seligman, 2002). I would also pay direct
attention to identifying and exercising individual strengths (Linley, 2008), which we
addressed only indirectly in two of the interventions.
Each of the selected interventions is described below in terms of its theoretical
background, information sources, suggestions for putting in practice, and examples from
my experience. I found that people were very willing to hold brainstorming meetings to
adapt the interventions to their environments. I include possible brainstorming prompts
below, as well as examples of brainstorming results from the meetings I held.

Finding the positive core

Finding the positive core comes from Appreciative Inquiry, an organisation development
approach to transformational change (Cooperrider & Whitney, 2005). ‘The positive core’ is
‘the best of what has been and what is’ (p. 16). Organisations often launch change processes
by focusing on what is wrong, which tends to narrow vision, induce exhaustion, and

Table 1. Positive intervention selection criteria.

Orientation to
Positive intervention well-being Workplace goals

Find positive core Positive emotion, Increase energy and teamwork

Meaning
Intentionally create more positive Positive emotion Increase teamwork, innovation, and
emotion. resilience
Increase conditions that enable flow. Engagement Increase energy, innovation, and skills.
Deal effectively with negative Positive emotion Increase resilience.
situations.
Celebrate positive situations Positive emotion Increase energy and skills
effectively.
 Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice 179

fragment people into separate self-protective groups (Barrett & Fry, 2005). In contrast,
inquiring about strengths and past successes produces themes and stories that inspire and
energise people.
To explore a group’s positive core, you can interview people individually or in
roundtables, or you can have them interview each other in pairs. I used the following
questions based on work by Cooperrider and Whitney (1999, p. 8):
1. Without being modest, tell me what it is that you most value about your
organisation and yourself at work.
2. Describe a time in your organisation that you consider a highpoint experience, a
time when you were most engaged and felt alive and vibrant.
3. What are the core factors that give life to your organisation at its best? What are the
things that you would not want to change?
4. What do you want more of in your community? What dreams do you have for its
greater health and vitality?

Interviews can be positive interventions in and of themselves, since they help people realise
what is already working for them. You can also look for common themes in your notes and
present them to the group for validation. Table 2 gives an example of positive core themes
that I derived from verbatim comments. Teams can use the themes as useful reminders of
strengths and dreams, for example in kickoff meetings for new projects.

Intentionally increase positive emotion

According to Fredrickson’s ‘broaden and build theory’ (1998, 2001), positive emotions
such as joy, interest, contentment, pride, gratitude, and humor broaden behavioral
repertoires and build durable resources such as resilience and social connectedness. This
intervention involves finding intentional actions to increase the routine experience of
positive emotions.

Table 2. Positive core themes.

Theme Sample comments

Strong sense of teamwork Loyalty and willingness to help in times of crunch

All pitch in and help
no back-stabbing
People working so close, so cooperative, not giving up till problem solved
Remote sites acting as Balance different cultures to get the best of all
one team Geographic range helps us provide top notch customer service

Strong sense of shared What we do matters to the larger world

and valued purpose We have influence.

Leadership with proper Constructive focus on what’s right and what’s needed to make it happen,
focus not on how to fix broken things.
Well-planned deliverables
good use of our time
Exploration and taking Imagination bounded by pragmatism and business
risk High energy, space to think, outlandish comments valued
180 K. Britton

I recommend finding a way to describe the importance of positive emotion that makes
sense to your particular group. Here’s an example that worked well for software developers:
Imagine a design meeting involving multiple constituencies with conflicting goals. If the most
powerful group prevails, the other groups will put no energy into making the solution work
and may spend energy undermining it. How do you find a solution that all can accept?
Since positive emotion makes people more open-minded and creative, spending time to
establish shared positive emotion at the beginning of the meeting can increase the probability
of finding an acceptable middle ground.

We talked explicitly about the conditions that affect the emotions that people experience
during the day. We also talked about how negative emotions are more salient than positive
ones. For example, people tend to focus on what is going wrong at the moment and not
take time to acknowledge what goes right. To combat the overshadowing nature of
problems, leaders decided they could share their broader view of group progress to help
others see beyond their own setbacks.
There is always a danger that a focus on positive emotion will be interpreted as
disallowing negative feedback. So it is important to help people see that they can be honest
about what is not right. Without appropriate negative feedback, people do not get the
information they need to improve and may begin to doubt the sincerity of positive feedback.
We therefore discussed what makes negative feedback effective. According to Fredrickson
and Losada (2005), it is specific to a situation, includes suggestions, and is not personal.
Possible brainstorming prompts include:
“ What actions can we take to increase the level of positive emotion in our day-to-day
work lives?
“ How can we make sure negative feedback is still given when needed?
“ How can we make negative feedback more effective?

Ideas that emerged from brainstorming included starting meetings by celebrating things
that are going well, creating more opportunities to laugh together, and broadly sharing
appreciation from customers. There was great interest in Rath’s (2006) statement that
people with a best friend at work are seven times more likely to be engaged in their jobs.

Enable flow
Flow is the state of being so intensely involved in a challenging activity that one loses self-
consciousness and may lose track of time. Frequent experiences of flow at work lead to
higher productivity, innovation, and employee development (Csikszentmihalyi, 1993,
2004). I found that most people have experienced flow and miss it when it is not happening.
While flow cannot be achieved on command, there are qualities of activities that make the
experience more likely. According to Csikszentmihalyi (1993), these include:
1. Clear goals with easily discernable expectations and rules;
2. A high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention for sufficient periods of
time;
3. Direct and immediate feedback on successes and failures in the course of the activity,
so that behavior can be adjusted as needed;
4. Balance between ability level and challenge making the activity neither too easy nor
too difficult;
5. A sense of personal control over the activity.
 Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice 181

After discussing the importance of the balance between ability and challenge, I found
people very interested in Csikszentmihalyi’s flow channel diagram in Figure 1 as a visual
aid in job coaching discussions between employees and supervisors. While people generally
understood the need for this balance, most did not realise how often adjustments are
required because challenges and skills are dynamic and change at different rates. Points A2
and A3, boredom and anxiety, tend to be where people disengage from their jobs and start
looking elsewhere for satisfaction. A supervisor can point to the flow channel picture and
ask, ‘Where are you right now? If bored, let’s acknowledge increased skills and discuss
ways to increase challenge. If anxious, let’s find ways to boost skills, such as finding an
appropriate temporary mentor, finding a partner with appropriate strengths, breaking the
task into manageable pieces, or finding a role model.’
We also talked about the importance of understanding and exercising personal
strengths as a means of increasing the probability of flow (Linley, 2008; Seligman, 2002).
A possible brainstorming prompt is:
. What actions can we take as a group to increase the frequency of flow experiences?

One group brainstormed about finding time for concentration because they felt their days
were so fragmented by meetings that they had little time for focused attention. They
generated numerous ideas for improving meeting practices.
Wesson and Boniwell (2007) describe additional ways to increase the likelihood of flow.

Deal effectively with negative factors

People wish many things about work were different. For example, some people yearn for
the job security of earlier decades. When people focus on factors they cannot change, they
start to believe they can do nothing to make things better. To combat such discourage-
ment, I found it helpful to teach resilience skills (Reivich & Shatté, 2003; Schneider, 2001;
Seligman, 1998), particularly reframing, or selecting interpretations of events that lead to
creative responses and optimism rather than helplessness and anger. Reframing requires
imagination and lends itself well to group brainstorming. Here are steps that people can
use for reframing:

Figure 1. Flow channel. Reprinted with permission from Csikszentmihalyi (1993, p. 70).
182 K. Britton

1. Watch for times when you are complaining about things you cannot change;
2. Summarise your instinctive negative reaction briefly;
3. Brainstorm alternative reactions that could also be true and that leave you in a more
positive position. Perhaps start with really absurd interpretations that make people
laugh, creating a positive emotion that broadens the scope of ideas considered;
4. Notice how you take back control of your own state of mind.

The example below shows the results of reframing by a group that had been venting about
annual reviews:
Instinctive reaction: Reviews are way too tough, make it too competitive; working extremely
hard and not getting what you believe you deserve is demoralising.
Reframed reaction: Focus on what’s really important to you and put the rating in perspective.
Only you know what makes you happy. Prioritise your career and life based on that.
Actionable items:
1. Work with manager to define a job that you actually WANT to do and ENJOY
doing based on your strengths and skill set;
2. Ask for time for education and/or opportunities to work with other groups;
3. If position and money are your motivation and you don’t mind the sacrifices it will
take, work with your manager to focus your career path to get where you want to
go.

When a group understands reframing, one person can interrupt venting and challenge the
rest to think about other ways to interpret the situation.

Celebrate good events effectively

When good things happen, how much joy and energy do people experience? In many work
environments, the answer is precious little. Finding more effective ways to celebrate goal
achievement can lead to greater personal satisfaction and greater trust among team
members (Gable, Reis, Impett, & Asher, 2004).
It is helpful to teach people the value of ‘capitalising’ or intentionally elaborating on
positive events with other trusted people. Retelling a positive event out loud makes it
easier to remember and enhances the good feelings associated with it (Gable et al., 2004).
The way others respond is also important. Gable et al. describe four ways to respond as
shown in Figure 2. A response can be either active or passive and either constructive or
destructive. Only active and constructive responding yields benefits to the relationship.

Active Constructive = Active Destructive =

Drawing the person out Quashing the event

“That’s great news! Tell me more.” “More stress! I don’t envy you.”
Passive Constructive = Passive Destructive =

Giving quiet and flat support Ignoring the event

“That’s nice.” “Listen to what happened to me.”

Figure 2. Four ways to respond to good news. Based on Gable et al. (2004).
 Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice 183

For a short video clip that explains active and constructive responding, see Seligman
(2008).
People may need to learn how to give more effective praise. Praise that focuses on
specific behavior, such as ‘You worked hard last week to get so much done!’ or ‘You
thought of a terrific way to help that person,’ is much more effective than global
assessments, such as ‘You are so smart!’ or ‘You are so kind!’ Carol Dweck (2006) has
shown that specific praise is more motivating, increases confidence more, and is more
likely to lead to mastery behavior, while generalisations promote avoidance of challenge
and fear of failure. People can practice giving effective praise by observing themselves for
a period of time, detecting any global assessments, and rephrasing them in more specific
terms.
Possible brainstorming prompts include:
“ What can we do to get more out of positive events?
“ How can we give more effective positive feedback?

One group decided to end meetings with round robin reviews of successes, giving everyone
a chance to celebrate out loud. Another group established a large project map for people to
mark their own progress and observe the progress of others.

Conclusion
Employee well-being and engagement are related to business outcomes such as higher
customer loyalty, profit, productivity, and employee retention (Harter, Schmidt, & Keyes,

Table 3. Positive intervention summary.

Positive intervention Theory Example actions

Search for the Appreciative Inquiry Ask questions about the best of
positive core what is.
Look for themes and collect
stories.
Intentionally create Positive emotion broadens Start and end meetings
more positive emotion. behavior and builds resources. positively,
Encourage laughter and
friendships.
Increase conditions Flow is a highly desirable state Set reasonable goals
that enable flow. that enhances job satisfaction. Conserve time to concentrate
Establish means of frequent
feedback
Deal effectively with Realistic optimism and Limit venting.
negative situations. resilience are beneficial and Acknowledge negative things.
can be learned. Practice reframing.
Celebrate positive events Reviewing positive events out Celebrate positive events in
and situations effectively. loud makes them more salient; words.
Specific praise is better than Help others relive good events.
generalisations. Show approval with specific
praise.
184 K. Britton

2004). Empirically validated positive interventions can lead to greater employee well-being,
help organisations flourish, and thus contribute directly to the bottom line.
Many workers exhibit learned helplessness (Peterson, Maier & Seligman, 1995)
concerning their jobs, believing they have no control and whatever they do is futile.
They remain passive in harmful situations even when they have the power to change things
for the better.
Coaches can remind people that they are not helpless. Even though there are
distressing aspects of any job that cannot be changed, individuals still have the ability to
choose where they put their focus, remember strengths, interpret things positively, and
choose responses that energise them rather than deplete them. The interventions
described in this paper are summarised in Table 3. They are based on universal
principles of human well-being. They are not specific to this business environment, nor
even specific to business. They could work equally well in schools or hospitals. Coaches
can help groups understand how these principles apply to them and how to implement
such interventions in ways that are practical and effective in their particular work
environments.
Changing habits requires conscious practice until new behaviors become established.
To achieve lasting change, ongoing coaching may be required to remind people repeatedly
of the choices they can make.

Notes on contributors

Kathryn Britton is a professional coach for Theano Coaching LLC

(http://theano-coaching.com). Her interest in job satisfaction comes
from 30 years experience as a software engineer and lessons learned
during the Master of Applied Positive Psychology program at the
University of Pennsylvania. She is an associate editor and monthly
contributor for the online publication, Positive Psychology News
Daily at http://pos-psych.com

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