Bibliometric Analysis of International Scientific Production on the Management of Happiness and Well-Being in Organizations

Abstract

The interest of the scientific community and, consequently, the scientific production of topics on happiness and well-being at work, or the management of happiness in organizations, has been increasing over the years. The main objective of this bibliometric analysis is to determine the evolution of the concepts referred to in published scientific works. Bibliometric methods and techniques are used to analyze the themes and the most relevant trends, the number of papers and their citations, and the main institutions, and to highlight areas where the most research has been done on these issues. In addition to the review of the scientific literature, 312 studies are analyzed and net-mapped. The most outstanding results are the increase in the number of papers and citations during the health pandemic caused by COVID-19; the importance given to the transversality of well-being programs in corporations; and the greater frequency of research on the benefits of promoting the improvement of quality of life for work performance and its social impact.

1. Introduction

Health is defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity (World Health Organization 2020). Well-being is a concept closely related to health. It is a growing area of research, and it can be defined as the balancing point between an individual’s resource pool and their challenges faced (Dodge et al. 2012). Furthermore, subjective well-being, which includes people’s appraisals and evaluation of their own lives, is associated positively with good health and longevity, better social relationships, creativity, sense of happiness, life satisfaction, and work performance (Diener et al. 2018). Subjective well-being has become a key issue for international organizations, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). This organization, aware of the importance of subjective well-being, has found large gaps in gender, age, and education when analyzing most well-being outcomes, concluding that advances in current well-being have not always been matched by improvements in the resources that sustain well-being over time, with warning signs emerging across natural, human, economic, and social capital (van Zanden et al. 2020).

COVID-19 has had a considerable impact on people’s lives, affecting subjective well-being (Zacher and Rudolph 2021). This pandemic has changed our lives completely, bringing social distancing, isolation, telework and, above all, affecting well-being and causing negative consequences to mental and physical health triggered by increased physical inactivity and sedentarism (Núñez-Sánchez et al. 2021).

Work, whether face-to-face or online, is one of the environments with the greatest impact on people’s health, and companies should not limit themselves exclusively to complying with the laws in this area. Employee health and well-being are the result of a balance of physical, mental, and social components, as well as health habits related to physical fitness and the enjoyment of energy and vitality (Basińska-Zych and Springer 2021). If work is rewarding, involving good relationships with colleagues and opportunities to feel a sense of achievement, it can be a key factor in psychological well-being, and this is linked to good physical heath (Robertson and Cooper 2011).

The International Labour Organization (ILO) stated in 2003 that “the purpose of occupational health is to achieve the promotion and maintenance of the highest degree of physical, mental and social well-being of employees in all work; to prevent any harm to health caused by the conditions of their work; to protect them in their employment against risks resulting from agents injurious to their health; to place and keep the worker in a job suited to his physiological and psychological aptitudes. In short, to adapt work to man and each man to his activity” (International Labour Organization 2003, p. 14). In this sense, it was added that well-being in the workplace refers to all aspects of working life, from the quality and safety of the physical environment to the way that workers feel about their work, their work environment, the climate at work, and the organization of work, aiming to ensure that workers are safe, healthy, satisfied, and engaged at work.

The World Health Organization and Burton (2010) refer to the work environment as a healthy place, where everyone works together to achieve a joint vision of health and well-being for employees and the community, providing all members with physical, psychological, social, and organizational conditions, allowing managers and employees to have more and more control over their own health, and to improve it and be more positive and happier.

The health of the workforce referred to is an essential element that contributes to the long-term success of a company and, therefore, is considered a strategic element in corporate human resource management (Sparling 2010), with employee well-being being a critical factor in achieving organizational success (Page and Vella-Brodrick 2009).

Worldwide, there is a growing interest in concepts such as employee well-being and engagement, due to their direct relationship with profitability; more satisfied customers who, in turn, consume more, show lower employee turnover, lower absenteeism, and happier employees (Robertson and Cooper 2011). Due to the above, companies have been promoting the health of their employees following the recommendations of the European Network for Workplace Health Promotion (2018), which defines workplace health promotion as the combined effort of employers, employees, and society to improve the health and well-being of people at work.

Considering the concept “Happiness at work”, both terms: Happiness and work seemed to be completely exclusive and dissociated concepts (Kamel et al. 2017), with the binomial being underestimated (Fisher 2010). However, there are studies that suggest that happiness at work could be defined as a mindset—applied to an individual, a team, or an organization—allowing action to maximize performance (Pryce-Jones and Lutterbie 2010). Around the concept of happiness, different constructs have been developed whose promotion also entails a greater potential at work, including work engagement (Bakker and Leiter 2010), job satisfaction (Judge et al. 2001), positive emotions (Vacharkulksemsuk and Fredrickson 2013), and enjoyment of work (Bakker 2009), among others.

High levels of well-being are associated with high levels of motivation and production, leading, in turn, to high rates of organizational performance (Taris 2006; Bakker and Leiter 2010). Consequently, a happy worker delivers high levels of performance, has six times more energy, intends to stay twice as long in their organization, and doubles their level of production (Pryce-Jones and Lutterbie 2010). Promoting and preserving employee mental health should therefore lead to improvements in performance and employee turnover (Kamel et al. 2017).

On this basis, the strategic challenge for organizations is to integrate elements such as satisfaction, happiness, or general well-being of employees into their management. Work contributes substantially to well-being and happiness (Warr 2007; Fisher 2010). This is because productivity increases proportionally with employee satisfaction, also providing other benefits such as greater speed in making important decisions, as well as more positive responses to adverse situations, greater creativity and proactivity, greater tranquility and solidarity within the group, fewer illnesses and accidents at work, and a healthier social life (Kamel et al. 2017). The whole list of positive aspects takes on special relevance in times such as the COVID-19 pandemic, which has been so directly related in the scientific literature to the psychosocial health of workers (de las Heras-Pedrosa et al. 2022).

COVID-19 has affected organizations and employees in all sectors around the world in an unprecedented way (Raghavan et al. 2021), with workers suffering dramatic effects (Kniffin et al. 2021) with negative consequences on their mental health and well-being (Yıldırım et al. 2021). These negative consequences have prompted companies that want to continue to care for the mental and psychosocial well-being of their employees in this difficult period to adapt their comprehensive corporate wellness programs to the situation (Sánchez-Núñez et al. 2020a).

In Spain, in the business environment, the management of happiness at work is a relatively new concept. Ravina Ripoll et al. (2019) highlight the absence of happiness management in the strategic management of organizations. As a benchmark of an innovative company in caring for the well-being of its employees and their happiness, it is worth highlighting Mahou San Miguel as a pioneer in comprehensive corporate well-being programs and in the creation of the “Happiness Area” in 2018, coinciding with the celebration of World Happiness Day. This area represents a strategic division, responsible for promoting positive initiatives and emotions among its professionals and an internationally recognized wellness program.

In the academic field, the review of studies that address the business management of happiness and well-being shows interest in the subjective aspects of the employees (Easterlin 2003); the absence in the scientific community of the use of the concepts of happiness and well-being in the business environment; the scarcity of published works on “Happiness Management” as a key tool for the happiness of workers (Ravina Ripoll et al. 2019); and the growing trend in the academic world of the concept of organizational happiness, among other aspects. The scientific field keeps expanding and maturing by providing answers to both new and old research questions (Dominko and Verbič 2019).

In the light of the above, the objectives of this study were as follows:

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To determine the volume of studies published on the management of happiness and well-being in organizations in the Web of Science (WoS) database, as well as their evolution over time.

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To identify and analyze the most relevant topics in scientific publications and, therefore, to conduct an X-ray of the current panorama and research trends.

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To identify the most prolific publications and regions in this field.

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To provide a representation of international scientific collaboration relationships.

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To determine whether the COVID-19 pandemic and its influence on the psychosocial health of workers has been analyzed by the scientific community.

2. Materials and Methods

The bibliometric study was based on scientific publications related to happiness management, happiness at work, happiness or corporate well-being, and happiness economics. Web of Science (WoS) was used as the database. The WoS, owned by Clarivate Analytics, is a collection of databases of bibliographic references and citations of periodicals that collect information from 1900 to the present. According to Martínez et al. (2015) and Sánchez-Núñez et al. (2020b), the WoS database contains the most precise and reliable research information, and contains a large number of analysis tools to process it.

The bibliometric search is summarized in

Table 1. Results of the WoS search for bibliometric analysis.

Search Date	Search Fields	Registers	Comments
3 February 22	TS = (“Happiness management” OR “Happ* at work” OR “Happ* organisations” OR “Corporate happiness” OR “Corporate well-being” OR “Corporate wellbeing” OR “Corporate wellness” OR “Happiness economics”)	312, WoS Core Collection	Happiness management is considered, as well as the concepts “corporate”, “wellness” (with different spelling), “wellness”, and “economics”, as a significant number of documents refer to these concepts.

, and the flowchart of the bibliographic search and selection process is shown in Figure 1. The criteria for selecting the search terms were conditioned by the systematic review of the previous literature, incorporating the most recurrent concepts in the publications analyzed, the samples of records found, and their specificity, to carry out an in-depth analysis.

Based on the guidelines that Chen (2017) describes for bibliometric analysis, along with scientometric and visual tools and indicators, the design and resources used in the methodological development of this work were proposed. In this case, a scientific mapping analysis was carried out for the computational and manual analysis of the information obtained from the research papers collected in WoS on the management of happiness in the organizational environment. Thus, following the approach of Sánchez-Núñez et al. (2020a) and de las Heras-Pedrosa et al. (2022), the current scientific panorama is described in terms of scientific production on this subject, research trends, and possible areas of scientific application. We analyzed the evolution over time of the number of publications and the typology of scientific production, the most prolific authors, the entities and countries where most production is focused, the most relevant sources of funding, and the networks established between these agents.

Global results were obtained from the WoS database, such as those referring to the citation reports or to the authors with the largest number of publications on the subject. The VOSviewer software (van Eck and Waltman 2010) was used to extract the data on bibliometric networks to show the results on co-authorship, co-citation, citation networks, and co-occurrence of keywords between authors, countries, and institutions.

3. Results

The computational analysis of the scientific mapping shows records from 1977 to 2021. The temporal evolution of the publications and citations (Figure 2) reflects an exponential growth over time of the concepts of happiness and well-being in organizations, with interruptions and setbacks in both the number of scientific papers disseminated and the number of references to them in the scientific literature.

The last decade highlights the increase in the number of articles published on the management of happiness and well-being in corporations in 2020—the year in which the global pandemic caused by COVID-19 spread—as well as a slight decrease in scientific production in the year 2021. In terms of citations, the rate started to be relevant from the first decade of the 21st century onwards.

3.1. Citation Report

In the citation report (

Table 2. Citation report.

Citation Report
Publications	312
Times cited	2976
Citation average per item	9.54
h-Index	23

), nearly 3000 citations were obtained from the total of 312 publications analyzed. However, this figure differs greatly according to the period analyzed, increasing in the last decade. The average number of citations per article is over nine, indicating that the subject is of interest to the scientific community. The h-index—based on the ranking of the papers with the highest number of citations—is 23, meaning that 23 articles have been mentioned in bibliographic references at least 23 times.

3.2. Keyword Analysis

With the VOSviewer tool, the terms analyzed were obtained in groups or clusters and represented in the form of bibliometric networks. The visualization of the set of nodes offered by the software allows the analysis of the prevalence in the papers and the interrelation between the terms.

In the case of the keyword analysis, the concept most frequently used by authors in their works on the management of happiness and well-being in organizations is “Happiness at work”, which appears to have the strongest relationship with the other terms. The keyword “happiness” leads another of the clusters, with the strongest relationship between terms, as along with “subjective well-being”, followed by others highlighted by their appearance in the scientific literature and their strength of interrelation—“job satisfaction”, “happiness economics”, “well-being”, “happiness management”, and “well-being at work” lead other major clusters (Figure 3).

Table A1. Co-occurrence clusters of authors’ keywords.

Clusters	Terms
1	Advertising; branded content; childhood; communication; educommunication; fashion brands; food; happiness management; health; Instagram; luxury brands; marriage; media; mobile devices; pass code; policy; residency training; social; social marketing; social media; surgery residents; surgical education; sustainable development; television.
2	Adverse effects; cognitive ergonomics; contemplative science; dimensions of welfare; factors influencing subjective well-being; informal worker; informal workers of India; media hype; meditation; mental health; mental health research; mindfulness; misinformation; neuroimaging; physical inactivity; psychological well-being; psychotherapy; ripple effect; small and medium enterprises; some; spirituality; telework; well-being of informal workers; workers’ health
3	Affective organizational; complexity theory; cross-selling; dimensions of work; engagement; engaging leadership; exhaustion; frontline; furniture industry; hospitality management; hotel and catering management; human resource management; job insecurity; monetary and non-monetary rewards; new ventures; peer to peer motivation; performance; robotization; service-skill use; total rewards; trust; vitamin model of work well-being; work engagement.
4	Academic satisfaction; change management; chief happiness officers; corporate communication; Greece; happiness director; innovation; internal communication; internal marketing; internal tools; morale; organization; organizational climate; organizational commitment; organizational communication; person-organization fit; public relations; Spain; strategic communication; welfare director; well-being director; white-collar employees; work happiness.
5	Cortisol; disutility of work; ecological momentary assessment; ethnography; health professionals; healthcare professional; heterodox economics; job and life satisfaction; job equality; meaning and purpose in life and at work; momentary workplace perceptions; neonatal intensive care; physician assistant; pleasure principle and meaning construction; significance of work; social relationships; socioeconomic status; stress; United States; well-being in life; work.
6	Adaptation level theory; affective events theory; COVID-19 stress; day reconstruction method; DEMATEL approach; diary studies; employee engagement; employee happiness; enablers of employee happiness; flow; followership; happy organization; Indian employees; Indian organizations; it sector; job characteristics theory; multiple hierarchical regression analysis; organizational virtuousness; positive affect; within-person fluctuations.
7	Bibliometrics; constitutional approach; consumption; emotional exhaustion; eudaimonic; experience; freedom; happiness; happy-productive worker hypothesis, hedonic; job performance; Karl Polanyi; novelty; organizational performance; paternalism; perception; satisfaction; Scitovsky; self-regulating market system; well-being work-related stress.
8	Asset allocation; cleaning; cost-effectiveness analysis; Dhammapada; economic thinking diffuse; economics; environment awareness; environment protection; expectation; health insurance, inequality; interpersonal preference; Latin America; life expectancy; public health insurance; quality of life; residents; uncertainty of economic policies; workplace quality.
9	Company investment in employee health; corporate well-being; employee health; employee well-being; employer-sponsored health benefits; health promotion; health relationship management services; health risk factors; illness and injury prevention; lifestyle; marketing; meta-analysis; patient health data; self-reported health improvement; structure of well-being; subjective and objective well-being; tailoring; well-being at work.
10	Agent-based modeling; banking crises; banking regulation; Brexit; decision tree; imbalanced data; inn; machine learning; multilayer perception; naïve Bayes classifier; neural networks; oversampling technique; prediction model; support-vector machine; undersampling technique.
11	Business; company development; education; ethics; feelings at work; financial; freedom from company; human; individual conversations; innovation at work; management; modeling; organizational; organizational change; PLS-SEM; productivity; Turkey; work-related affective feelings.
12	Affective forecasting; behaviors; brand orientation; capability approach; common good; evolutionary psychology; human development; labor market outcomes; moral psychology; norms; personality traits; physical exercise; responsibility; SEM; sustainable production; utility; values.
13	Disaster; experienced utility; Fukushima; government debt; Great East Japan Earthquake; health economics; Japan; life satisfaction; March 11; optimal level of debt; pensions; preferences; retirement home; social expenditure; social welfare; wages; welfare.
14	Ambulance; case study; defense force; emergency responder; fire service; first responder; high performance; high-performance organizations; high-performance partnerships; military; New Zealand; partnerships; police; secondary trauma; Takaful industry.
15	Age; compensation; corporate governance; economic improvement; emotion management; entrepreneurship; firm; gender; income acquisition; industry 4.0; job characteristics; musculoskeletal system; occupational hazards; pathologist; personal values; physician; visual disorders.
16	Alcohol; brief medical interventions; catamnesis; company prevention of addiction; employees; interaction effect; models of care; nursing; organizational behavior; predictors; questionnaires; reliability; self-driven personality; validity; worker motivation; working conditions.
17	Affect; analysis; behavioral software engineering; big data; developer experience; emotion; factors affecting happiness; fun at work; health and wellness; human aspects; mood; pamphlets; positive organizational behavior; positive work psychology; self-awareness; sentiment.
18	Business ethics and corporative social responsibility; corporate social responsibility; digital currencies; digital economy; entrepreneur culture; environmental respect; happiness and talent economy; history of economic and business thought; labor relations; personnel income; philosophy and economics; singularity; technovation; welfare economy; well-being economics.
19	Agency translators; correlation also research; ergonomics; freelancers; institutional translator; IWP affect questionnaire; literacy translator; professional identity; psychology of translation; sociology of translation; sworn translator; translator; translator psychology; Veenhoven’s framework.
20	2008 crisis; bank employees; European social; fluctuations; happiness styles; macroeconomic; normative economics; racial groups; social trust; South Africa; subjective well-being; survey, welfare analysis.
21	Certificate; COVID-19; creativity; deprivation cost; equity; financial institutions; human resource; humanitarian; ISO; NGO; people management; stakeholders.
22	Colleague support; flow experience; health services, multinational corporations; positive emotions; positive organizational scholarship; positivity; professional nurses; psychological capital; psychological contract breach; psychology-based management; satisfaction with intercultural interactions; thriving.
23	Decision support; emotional intelligence; job satisfaction; job search; knowledge worker; measurement; moderated mediation; narrative analysis; pay fairness; sentiment analysis; work life balance; working poverty.
24	Changing world of work; employee assistance programs; knowledge intensive; occupational health and safety; positive attitudes; quality of life at work; review; salutogenesis; scale development; scale reduction; social values; workplace health; workplace health management.
25	Altruism; attitudes; economy of happiness; flourishing; happiness at work; leadership; organizational citizenship; organizational learning; positive and healthy organizations; positive psychology; quantitative; work and change.
26	Conditions of happiness; economic policy; equivalence scales; factors and conditions of happiness; factors of happiness; happiness economics; happiness evaluation; motivational environment; negative consumption externalities; Pareto efficiency; young people; young people evaluation of happiness.
27	Academic publishing; academic roles; coping; Czech Republic; dementia; managerial education; mind control; orientations to happiness; professionalism; work environment; work satisfaction; work stress.
28	Absorptive capacity; affect at work; employees in SMEs; follower characteristics; fulfillment at work; happiness at work; high-involvement work practices; inspirational leadership; participative decision making; SMEs in Thailand; workplace fun.
29	Competency; concept development; conceptual review; construct development; construct mixology; culture of innovation; employee strengths at work; humanizing organizations; labor productivity; problematization; strengths.
30	Australia; climate change; EU; green deal; heating; planning; reduction of polluting energies; social science; societal impacts; well-being economy.
31	China; city integration; home loan; home ownership; housing property rights; hukou; migrants; rental house; sense of happiness; urbanization.
32	Assessment of public administration efficiency; economic freedom; externalities; institutions; methods of assessing the level of happiness; non-economic driving forces of economic growth; revealed preferences; stated preferences; subjective life satisfaction; well-being.
33	Demography; Easterlin paradox; income-happiness relationship; interpersonal relationships; material prosperity; neoclassical paradigm; relational goods; revealed subjective satisfaction; sustainability.
34	Companies; fears at digital era; Herzberg; hospitality; motivation; motivation theories; robotization of jobs; sustainable workforce; women.
35	Burnout; burnout prevention; chief wellness officer; joy at work; physician community; physician culture; physician job satisfaction; physician well-being; teams.
36	Advance care; advanced practice nurses; discipline; meaning; narrative inquiry; parental education; pro-social preferences; Thailand.
37	Annotated review; colleague; dual-character concept; empirical studies; experimental philosophy; metrics; software engineering; thick concept.
38	Community networks; knowledge management; knowledge sharing; organizational culture; organizational trust; social aspects; social capital; virtual communities.
39	Happiness at school; kindergarten teacher; primary school teacher; self-esteem; subjective happiness; teachers’ happiness; teachers’ health.
40	Confirmatory factor analysis; exploratory factor analysis; scale validation; structural equations; validation study.
41	Affective commitment; affective well-being; authentic leadership.
42	Autonomy; happiness business; support.
43	Citizenship; employee attitudes; learning.
44	Diversity; diversity management.

details the total number of keywords spread in 44 clusters analyzed.

An in-depth analysis of the co-occurrence of keywords was carried out, dividing the temporal space into lustrums (2005–2010; 2010–2015; 2015–2020) and the last two years (2020 until February 2022). The evolution of dominant terms in the scientific literature and their relationships are visualized in the Figure 4, Figure 5, Figure 6 and Figure 7. Thus, we determined how the subject of study has been treated over time, the socioeconomic circumstances that have influenced it—according to prevalence and disappearance—and even the establishment of new concepts.

Thus, for example, it is not until the period 2010–2015 that the term “happiness at work” is prominently featured—closely related to other terms such as “engagement” and “motivation” at work—gaining importance and becoming the most prevalent and strongly correlated term in recent years, complementing “happiness management”, closely related to the digital economy, entrepreneurship, and personal income, among others.

On the other hand, the concept of “happiness economics”, which was very popular in the 2010–2015 period, has been losing ground over the years, and terms related to positive psychology and subjective well-being have emerged.

During the health pandemic due to the spread of SARS-CoV-2, and its influence on the psychosocial and occupational levels, terms such as COVID-19 have appeared in the most recent period. Concepts related to burnout have also gained strength, but so has the subjective perception of happiness and well-being.

The word cloud shown in Figure 8 visually expresses the most recurrent terms among the keywords analyzed—those directly related to the subject of the study (e.g., happiness at work, well-being, or management), and other concepts that indicate aspects on which the scientific community conducts research (e.g., satisfaction, health, life, change, welfare, personality, motivation, learning, emotional conflict, prevention, subjective, positive, culture, etc.).

3.3. Analysis of Journals and Thematic Areas

Although this subject is not very widespread among scientific journals, those that have reported on research into the management of happiness and well-being in different corporations do stand out. This is the case of books and journals such as: Well-Being: Productivity and Happiness at Work; Happiness, Economics and Politics: Towards a Multi-disciplinary Approach; Civil Happiness: Economics and Human Flourishing in Historical Perspective; Routledge Studies in the History of Economics; Sustainability; Corporate Governance: The International Journal of Business in Society; Journal of Happiness Studies; Clinical Nuclear Medicine; Frontiers in Psychology; Library Journal; RETOS: Revista de Ciencias de la Administración y Economía; International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health; and International Journal of Psychology (Figure 9).

The main subject areas into which the documents analyzed were classified, according to the criteria established by WoS, are shown in Figure 10, with the following fields of interest: business economics (with more than twice as many records as the second area identified), psychology, social sciences, government law, sociology, and public environmental occupational health.

In the field of business economics, as well as in the field of behavior and mental processes of human beings, in research on perception, motivation, and interpersonal relationships, among other concepts covered by psychology, greater interest has been expressed in the study of how they are managed at the organizational level, and how they influence the happiness and well-being of individuals.

3.4. Analysis of Authorship

Authorship was analyzed from the point of view of the most prolific researchers in terms of scientific dissemination (

Table 3. Ranking of authors with the highest numbers of registers and citations.

Authors	Registers	Citation
Levi, Lennart	19	4
Bruni, Luigino	13	11
Salas-Vallina, Andres	12	180
Ravina-Ripoll, Rafael	9	26
Alegre, Joaquin	7	138
Harolds, Jay A.	5	6
Bednarova-Gibova, Klaudia	4	1
Dutt, Amitava Krishna	4	5
Fernandez, Rafael	4	88
Foncubierta-Rodriguez, Maria-Jose	4	8
Galiano-Coronil, Araceli	4	10
Jimenez-Marin, Gloria	4	10
Radcliff, Benjamin	4	3
Crespo, Ricardo F.	3	21
De Waal, Andre	3	19
Elias Zambrano, Rodrigo	3	10
Sanchez-Bayon, Antonio	3	10

)—with more than three published studies—as well as from the perspective of their interrelation, i.e., the authors’ academic networks, where most scientific production takes place (Figure 11).

Out of the 312 articles analyzed, the 10 with the highest numbers of citations are shown in

Table 4. Articles with the highest numbers of citations.

Authors/Year	Articles	Journals	Citation
Van Dam et al. (2018)	“Mind the Hype: A Critical Evaluation and Perspective Agenda for Research on Mindfulness and Meditation”. 2018 https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691617709589, accessed on 19 May 2022	Perspectives on Psychological Science	453
Fisher (2010)	“Happiness at work”. 2010 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2370.2009.00270.x, accessed on 19 May 2022	International Journal of Management Reviews	322
Robertson and Cooper (2011)	“Well-Being: Productivity and Happiness at Work”. 2011 https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230306738, accessed on 19 May 2022	Well-Being: Productivity and Happiness at Work	126
Taris and Schreurs (2009)	“Well-being and organizational performance: An organizational-level test of the happy-productive worker hypothesis”. 2009 https://doi.org/10.1080/02678370903072555, accessed on 19 May 2022	Work and Stress	118
Veenhoven (2009)	“How do we assess how happy we are? Tenets, implications and tenability of three theories”. 2009 https://doi.org/10.4337/9781849801973.00009, accessed on 19 May 2022	Happiness, Economics and Politics: Towards a Multi-disciplinary Approach	84
Xanthopoulou et al. (2012)	“Everyday working life: Explaining within-person fluctuations in employee well-being”. 2012 https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726712451283, accessed on 19 May 2022	Human Relations	81
Hsiao et al. (2015)	“Applying complexity theory to solve hospitality contrarian case conundrums Illuminating happy-low and unhappy-high performing frontline service employees”. 2015 https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-11-2013-0533, accessed on 19 May 2022	International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management	40
Salas-Vallina et al. (2017)	“On the road to happiness at work (HAW) Transformational leadership and organizational learning capability as drivers of HAW in a healthcare context”. 2017 https://doi.org/10.1108/PR-06-2015-0186, accessed on 19 May 2022	Personnel Review	38
Ashkanasy (2011)	“International Happiness: A Multilevel Perspective”. 2011 https://doi.org/10.5465/AMP.2011.59198446, accessed on 19 May 2022	Academy of Management Perspectives	29
Mellor and Webster (2013)	“Enablers and challenges in implementing a comprehensive workplace health and well-being approach”. 2013 https://doi.org/10.1108/IJWHM-08-2011-0018, accessed on 19 May 2022	International Journal of Workplace Health Management	28

. In this way, information was obtained about those works with the greatest dissemination (subject matter, typology, year of publication, etc.), their authorship, and the publications in which they are included.

The analysis of the 10 most cited articles provides information on the topics on which the scientific community has published the most in relation to the business management of happiness and well-being in different organizations.

The article with the title “Mind the Hype: A Critical Evaluation and Prescriptive Agenda for Research on Mindfulness and Meditation” (Van Dam et al. 2018) is the one with the highest number of citations, at 453 (WoS). In this article, the authors focus on research on mindfulness and meditation practices as instruments for promoting corporate well-being. In order to clarify concepts and avoid possible harmful effects of misinformation and malpractice on mindfulness meditation, the authors proposed this paper.

With more than 300 citations, the article “Happiness at work” reviews related aspects such as the definition, causes, and consequences of happiness in the workplace, drawing on insights from the positive psychology literature on happiness in general. Fisher (2010) argues for the correspondence between happiness and relevant consequences for individuals and organizations.

Two other articles have more than 100 citations over the years under review. They discuss guidelines for promoting well-being at work as an agent of employee and employer improvement, along with the relationship between happy workers and performance, among other aspects.

3.5. Analysis of the Main Co-Authorship Relationships—Countries and Numbers of Records

In Figure 12, in addition to the prevalence of articles from the United States, Spain, and the United Kingdom, among others, as the main centers of scientific production in the subject of study, the most important co-authorship relationships between the different geographical areas are shown. From this, it can be determined which areas are interrelated with one another and how intensively, according to the number and thickness of the curved lines depicted.

4. Discussion and Conclusions

This study is not without limitations. Information was extracted from the Web of Science Core Collection database. Although other databases—such as Scopus and Latindex—were not analyzed, given that Clarivate currently includes the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) database in its core collection, there may be a few scientific and academic articles that are not included in Scopus.

In the case of Latindex as well as the KCI Korean Journal Database, Russian Science Citation Index, and SciELO Citation Index, they are considered to be very localized, so we decided not to include them.

The citation analysis carried out, given the short period since the end of the pandemic, did not show many results in recent articles of high-quality journals, so we consider that in future years this analysis could undergo modifications.

The first conclusion to be drawn from this bibliometric analysis is that, to our knowledge, no other study has been carried out with this focus. This is the main contribution of this study, which made it possible to obtain significant data on the most representative and influential authors, journals, and scientific fields.

The business management of employee happiness and well-being is currently a young field of study of growing relevance (Dominko and Verbič 2019), detected by the increase in the volume of publications related to this subject, the diversity of areas involved, and the increase in the number of citations received. In 2020, a peak in the number of papers was reached, coinciding with the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and the pathologies and mental disorders generated in the population. This result coincides with Dominko’s finding that after an economic crisis, the interest of academics in the study of well-being increases. At this crucial moment in history, having faced a global pandemic, the relevance of the transversality of physical and psychosocial well-being programs in organizations has been corroborated (Núñez-Sánchez et al. 2021; Kniffin et al. 2021).

The organizational response that is most widely detected is oriented towards the inclusion of people in charge of managing well-being and happiness in the working environment in corporations, the development of programs with the professional at their core, and strategic business plans that place value on the individual and collective satisfaction of individuals. All of this is transferred to the scientific community, and is reflected in the studies analyzed—even more so when the benefits are quantified and a positive relationship in terms of results is evident.

Despite the growing interest of researchers, the amount of scientific records found could not be considered sufficient, and the case studies are exceptions. One of the factors considered relevant to the lack of publications is the significant dispersion of terms chosen to name similar concepts related to happiness management, as well as the evolution of these terms over the years. Moreover, the subject has been approached from very different scientific disciplines—business management, psychology, positive psychology, human resources, occupational hazards, corporate social responsibility, etc.—without being able to bring the research together under a single scientific umbrella.

Spain’s entry into the field of research on organizational management of happiness and well-being is also noteworthy. Although the studies by Spanish authors are more recent than those by researchers from other countries, with a longer trajectory at the global level, it can be affirmed that in terms of both the numbers of articles published and the citations received, their presence on the scientific scene is outstanding.