Here is an excerpt from an article written by Dan Bowling for Talent Management magazine. To read the complete article, check out all the resources, and sign up for a free subscription to the TM and/or Chief Learning Officer magazines published by MedfiaTec, please click here.

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Stuff or vision? Money or meaning? These are the questions every leader needs to ponder when trying to motivate employees.

Last week Talent Management kicked off a series of reports exploring whether satisfying employees or engaging them drives the highest level of performance. In several posts our editor Deanna Hartley parsed the similarities and differences between the two after reeling me in with this headline teaser: “Human Psychology Plays Its Part.”

As regular readers of “Psychology at Work” know, a basic knowledge of modern psychology needs to be in the toolkit of every talent manager and human resources executive, particularly when the subject turns to motivation. The good news is that for the last 10 or 15 years a raft of social scientists in a variety of disciplines including psychology have been studying human motivation. Often these studies are lumped under the broad heading of “happiness science,” and can be translated into workplace practices if you – and your leadership – understand their inner workings. Today we will look at terms like satisfaction and engagement as scientists might.

I have been to several academic conferences on these topics of late, and later this month will be filing reports for TM and tweeting (@BowlingDan) from the World Conference of Positive Psychology in Los Angeles. One takeaway from these conferences is that a precise definition of happiness is quite elusive, and when you try to bring employee happiness into the workplace through descriptors such as satisfaction, engagement and involvement, things can get even murkier, because no one has a clue what you are really talking about.

Philosopher Daniel Haybron, a truly nice person (not just for a philosophy professor), offers this in a forthcoming paper, “The Nature and Significance of Happiness”:

“There is no point trying to define ‘happiness’ once and for all: the word has too many meanings for that … (but if pressed) there are three main answers on offer: a favorable attitude toward one’s life (the life satisfaction theory); a favorable emotional condition (the emotional state theory); or pleasure (hedonism).”

Simple enough, right? But trying to translate this into the business world, and adopting practices and policies to encourage employee happiness, is like dumping bull sharks in the kid’s pool. It’s dangerous. As Haybron warns: But they (the three views of happiness) are not at all equivalent, and in fact have radically different kinds of practical import.

Let’s put Haybron’s summary of happiness science into HR language to keep the sharks away. I am going to use each of his definitions, then pair it up with how we talk about at work:

[Here’s the first of three views.]

1. Life (Work) Satisfaction Theory: I make little distinction between life and work in this column, at least when we are talking about happiness. It is impossible to be truly satisfied with your life if you aren’t also satisfied with your job. Therefore, I will use life and work satisfaction interchangeably.

Satisfaction as used by scientists and philosophers is very different from how HR types use it. The latter look at satisfaction as a short-term, hedonistic benefit (see No. 3 below). To happiness experts, satisfaction is a high-order, reflective feeling, the kind that Mother Teresa probably enjoyed even during her worst deprivations. Or the feeling you enjoyed after pulling a series of all-nighters to get a big deal completed, or when a team welcomes you into their midst. You look back, tired and maybe suffering a bit, but feel pretty good about yourself and the meaning of what you are doing. You also feel engaged.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Daniel S. Bowling III is an expert on the science of well-being and work and conducts empirical research on this topic through the University of Pennsylvania. Formerly, he was a partner in a major law firm and later, the global head of human resources at Coca-Cola Enterprises, where he directed all HR activities for more than 80,000 employees worldwide. He currently holds faculty positions at both Duke Law School and UPenn. He also leads a consulting firm, Positive Workplace Solutions, that works with some of the largest institutions in the country showing that well-being enhances not just life satisfaction but productivity and performance, and writes and speaks extensively on these topics. He can be reached at his firm.