**1. Introduction**

Wellbeing at work can be conceptualized from two distinct perspectives based on different philosophical traditions: the hedonic view of pleasure and experience of positive affect [1] and the eudaimonic view of wellbeing as personal growth and a sense of meaning [2]. Therefore, wellbeing can be understood as having both pleasurable (or hedonic) and meaningful (or eudaimonic) components [3–6]. However, the majority of the research has studied wellbeing from the hedonic perspective, conceptualizing wellbeing as judgments and evaluations of satisfaction with some of life's facets (e.g., job satisfaction).

According to the happy-productive worker thesis, "happy" workers should have better performance than "less happy" ones [7,8], and the quality of task performance can be influenced by the coexisting affective states [9]. This thesis has produced a series of studies [10,11] and meta-analytic research, often providing ambiguous and inconclusive results [8,12].

On the one hand, some research shows that wellbeing can predict performance. For example, studies show that when people are more satisfied with their jobs, they show higher performance [13,14]. In addition, higher positive affect has been shown to predict performance quality [15]. Furthermore, when people are more satisfied with their jobs, they show higher productivity [16] over time. People who feel better than usual at work have been found to make more effort on their tasks [17,18] and achieve a higher level of task performance [19]. In this direction, feeling active and enthusiastic in the morning has been shown to increase levels of creativity during the day [20]. Finally, positive affect has been shown to predict performance quality [21]. All these results support the HPWT, which posits that workers with higher levels of wellbeing also tend to show better performance at work, compared to workers with lower levels of wellbeing.

On the other hand, empirical studies and meta-analyses have found the relationships between performance and job satisfaction to be spurious [22] or weak [23]. Some scholars view the connections between happiness and job performance as questionable [7], suggesting an apparently low and non-significant satisfaction–performance relationship [24]. This can be reflected by the fact that most studies that consider job satisfaction and job performance treat them as separate variables that are not directly related to each other [24]. For example, Greenberger, Strasser, Cummings, and Dunham [25] studied the causal relationship between personal control and job satisfaction, and between personal control and job performance, but they did not assume or investigate the relationship between job satisfaction and job performance [24]. There is a need to address this ambiguity in the research, and for this reason we consider it necessary to revisit and expand the happy-productive worker thesis.
