It's often said that money doesn't bring happiness. But the truth could be more complicated, according to researchers at University of Toronto and Stanford University who have discovered that people paid by the hour are far more likely to be happy than those earning a monthly salary.

It seems that the reason being paid by the hour has more of an impact on employees' wellbeing is that they give pay more attention to what they're earning than those who earn a salary.

"Income was uncorrelated with happiness for salaried employees, whereas it was significantly associated with happiness for people paid by the hour," the research published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin concluded.

"Hourly payment doesn't make you happier per se," said Sanford DeVoe, co-author of the paper. "Hourly payment makes you happier if you earn a lot of money per hour, but it makes you less happy if you very little per hour.

"The key thing is that it makes how much you earn a bigger aspect of how you define your happiness."

It hardly needs restating that securing an internship is a great way of gaining experience and often leads to a full-time position. So here's some advice. If you land a temporary role with a major-league financial institution, don't use it as an opportunity to dabble in a little illegal insider trading.

British student Matthew Uberoi must wish he had heeded this advice after he was jailed for a year for passing information about forthcoming merger and takeover deals to his father, who made nearly £110,000 from three stock market deals. Neel Uberoi, a 62 year-old dentist, was also jailed for his part in the scheme.

Matthew, who was just 21 at the time, was on a six-month placement with Hoare Govett, the brokers of Dutch bank ABN Amro, who were advising on the deals being announced.

Bizarrely, the younger Uberoi apparently used coded messages about Chinese food to send his father tips on forthcoming deals.

We suspect that a career in finance no longer beckons for him (but had this happened a few years ago, who knows?)

Bob Sutton, author of the indispensible book The No Asshole Rule, has a pretty unequivocal attitude towards the sort of appauling bosses who poison so many workplaces.

Asshole bosses, he believes, poison the work environment, decrease productivity, push qualified employees to quit and are therefore are detrimental to businesses, regardless of any individual effectiveness they might display. His solution is simple: they have to go.

That's great in theory, but as Sutton discusses in this thought-provoking post, it is not always possible. Indeed others argue that if you're unfortunate enough to work for an impossible boss, is your only option to suffer in silence until you can escape.

What makes this particular post so interesting is the lengthy list of comments and the huge variety of approaches that they discuss. We'd all applaud the sentiment that "you never, EVER surrender your dignity to anyone, for any reason," but as others point out, the reality – particularly in a recession –can leave many with no other choice but to suffer in silence.

An economic miracle or a disaster waiting to happen? As far as Goldman Sachs – and their chief economist, Jim O'Neill - is concerned, China is set to overtake the U.S. to become the world's biggest economy by 2027.

Writing in the London Evening Standard, O'Neill says: "When we first suggested back in 2003 that China could possibly challenge the US to be the world's number one by 2041, many thought it was a pipedream, and had virtually no chance. In fact, it is possible a lot sooner, and indeed, we now think it could happen within 20 years — in fact 2027 to be precise, so 18 years."

But there are plenty of sceptics who would take issue with O'Neil, believing that China's economic miracle is based on smoke and mirrors and is on the brink of collapse. As billionaire hedge fund investor, Jim Chanos, put it:

"You have to keep in mind that the last command economy that really saw this kind of growth was the old Soviet Union and what happened was the misallocation of resources into inefficient plants, dams that burst, nuclear plants that had accidents and so on and so forth, as well as the fairly large defense budget. China's heading the same way."

Chanos may be a famed short-seller, but it's hard to dismiss one of the few people who saw through the Enron charade in 2001 and consistently argued that the company's figures were fiction.

But a melt-down of the Chinese economy has the potential to be far more damaging than the Enron scandal. As a report by Pivot Capital Management earlier this year argued: "We believe the coming slowdown in China has the potential to be a similar watershed event for world markets as the reversal of the U.S. subprime and housing boom."

Hold on. 2010 could be every bit as rough a ride as this year.

You may not have noticed, but another casualty of the recession has been the utterly pointless workplace survey. When times were good, not a week would pass without a press release from an eager PR agency plugging things like "the twelve most bizarre excuses for being late for work"*

Sadly, not any more – or at least, so rarely that we actually take notice when we see one. So thanks is due to Careerbuilder.com for revealing the most memorable requests or recommendations people have received in their office suggestion box, including:

• Allow people to change clothes in their cubicles.
• Add a tanning bed to the break room.
• Put beer in the vending machine.
• Jail time should be covered under family medical leave.
• Institute bikini Fridays.
• Only require work during daylight hours because employee is scared of the dark.
• Request a special smoking area for medical marijuana.
• Request that the HR person wear nicer shoes.
• More time off to pursue side business as a clown.
• Replace a desk with a futon so employee could lay down and work.
• Request that the lactation room with gliding chair be used for naps, so everyone can use it.
• Install a swimming pool for employees to use.
• Have the team meeting held in Hawaii.

Some of these, if truth be told, are not so silly after all: sleep pods were all the rage a few years back, but whether they have survived the recession is another question.

* Meanwhile, a reminder that the prize for the dumbess excuse for skipping work was won by a South African man whose attempt to use a stolen doctor's note to take time off work backfired after it was noticed that he was highly unlikely to be pregnant as the note (stolen from his girlfriend), claimed...

When the economy bounces back, will jobs start to grow again, too? We all hope that the answer will be "yes", but there's a real fear, as articulated in this piece from the New York Times, that this recession marks the point at which the business cycle in some developed economies (notably the U.S.) no longer replenishes the jobs it has destroyed, raising the alarming prospect of a long-term shortage of work.

As for why this might occur, take this example, as cited here.

Or consider American icon General Motors. GM's sales in China are rocking. In the first nine months, the company sold 1.3 million cars in China, including more than 181,000 in September. By contrast, GM in the United States in the first nine months sold 1.5 million cars in the United States, down 36.4 percent from the year before. And in September, GM sold just 156,673 cars in the United States. That growth in China is good for GM's shareholders and for some of its executives. But since most of the cars sold in China are produced there, with parts produced by suppliers in China, rising sales in the Middle Kingdom won't translate into jobs for unionized workers in the Middle West.

That might not bother GM's shareholders or executives in the short term. But they might care to muse on what sort of economy – and society - they wish to see in a decade or so. Because a society without meaningful work for millions of people won't be a healthy one.

Job cuts, endemic uncertainty, too much change too quickly – it's little wonder that so many people feel pretty alienated from their organisations at the moment. So here's some very sound advice from consultants Watson Wyatt about the steps you can take to reconnect employees.

1. Create an organisation structure and job architecture that is clear, effective and efficient so that everyone understands their role and how they contribute to organisation success.

2. Articulate and be honest about your employment deal, even in today's tough high unemployment market. This is key to effective attraction, retention and engagement of key talent.

3. Review executive compensation to achieve the optimum balance on alignment with shareholders and driving value in the business, including risk effectiveness, performance and retention.

4. Review sales compensation regularly to ensure that the plans are aligned with new business priorities and drive optimum performance at optimum cost.

5. Review how performance is managed to ensure it accurately reflects the new corporate reality and is motivating your key talent.

6. Identify the talent you have to ensure you continue to retain those that will contribute most to your business in the long term.

7. Ensure you reward for exceptional performance and not the norm. Make this a reality now and it will ensure you are able to manage whatever the economic situation.

8. Ensure you have excellent management information and let the systems take the strain. Base decisions on facts and analysis, not emotion and rhetoric.

9. Ensure you understand where critical roles and skills sit. In times of retrenchment businesses may have looked to keep good people rather than those in key roles that will drive future performance.

10. Continue to keep leadership visible and communication open. Let staff know where the business is heading, what they need to do and how they will be rewarded.

The European Court of Justice is going to win few friends among employers following an extraordinary ruling that means employees who are ill during their holiday can demand extra holiday from their employers to make up for it.

The court, ruling on a case brought by a Spanish council worker who was injured shortly before taking his annual holiday but was not allowed to move his holiday by his employer, stated that statutory holiday can be "reallocated" if it was spoilt by sickness.

"If the worker does not wish to take annual leave during a period of sick leave, annual leave must be granted to him for a different period", the ruling states.

Under the terms of the judgement, employees would even be allowed to carry any annual leave marred by illness over into the next holiday year.

The potential for abuse here is obvious. An employee could simply increase their amount of holiday by claiming they had been sick.

But as Owen Warnock, a partner at London law firm Eversheds, told People Management magazine, the ruling is unlikely to open the floodgates to a stream of "super sickies":

"Until the European or UK courts say otherwise, our view is that employers are entitled to require workers to produce convincing evidence of their illness while on holiday and that it would have rendered them unfit for work before allowing workers to 'reallocate' holidays," he said.

Companies looking for a novel way to boost employee morale and engagement are looking to their backyards for inspiration. As the Wall Street Journal reported last week, a corporate vegetable garden is the latest tool in battle to win hearts and minds.

Employer-sponsored gardens can be a cheap and easy way to boost workers' morale, relate better to certain customers and expand a company's health and wellness program.

...For a small employer, a garden can encourage camaraderie among co-workers and become "a valuable asset the organization is offering," said Paul Teslak, a professor of organizational behavior and human resource management at the University of Maryland's Smith School of Business. It requires relatively few resources, can help in recruiting and differentiate a small business from its competitors, he said.

Nice idea. And it certainly beats most of the other "team building" contrivances that have come and gone over the past few years.

The Working Week podcast hits a milestone this week as we post the 100th edition of Wayne Turmel's consistently excellent look at the world of work in all its guises. And for the 100th show, we tackle the issue that is the most common subject of questions sent to our advice clinic and features prominently in questions and comments made on the site. That issue is the perennial scourge of bullying bosses.

This week, Wayne is joined by Robert Mueller, a lawyer and author of A Survivor's Guide: How to Transcend the Illusion of the Interpersonal

Just how big a problem is bullying? What sort of behaviors bullying? What sort of people are bullies. And – critically – how do you beat a bully?

One of Robert's more controversial assertions is that bullying can't be tackled through psychological means - it need to be viewed and tackled as a business issue. He also asserts that context is all-important. For example, what might be acceptable or normal on a construction site could be completely unacceptable in an office environment – and visa-versa.

Personal confrontations with bullies are almost never productive, he argues, nor is trying to talk to management or – still less - HR. That's because management will most likely interpret any confrontation an employee might have with a boss as being a confrontation with them, and without well-documented proof of a pattern of behavior, they will likely view the employee as the problem.

Since you'll never defeat a bully on their own ground, what can you do? Robert argues you need a sound, methodical strategy. You need to document, document, document. Collect data. Approach your bullying problem like a work project. Be methodical in how you behave, perform, document, and strategize.

Jot down just the key details. Put them on an incident report form or file them on cards. Note the time, date, place, people, key quotes and behavior of concern. All bullies create patterns in what they do, Robert says. And bullying is not about what happened on a particular day. It's a campaign conducted over time.

Document even the smallest incidents, since these often become the most important signs of a pattern of bullying that might not otherwise be apparent. That means every instance of teasing, sarcasm, criticism, a public glare or silent treatment. Don't let yourself get isolated. Every day, pick out someone you haven't talked to for a while. Have a brief but focused, attentive conversation that focuses on them. Bullies work hard to alienate targets from their coworkers. Don't let that happen to you.

To earn the support of others, support them first. A bully will try to isolate you, but they are limited by the fact that they are unable to connect with others. That's what makes them a bully. But you can offer real support to others, whether work-related or no. That's how to build influence and – at the same time- start to erode the bully's powerbase.

Another of Robert's tips is to look for other work but not necessarily to take another job. Nothing fosters strength and good humor in a negative environment better than the freedom to leave it. Similarly, try to build self-esteem and a positive attitude. Pay attention to how your appearance. Have a comfy chair in your office for coworkers. Make your personal space an oasis of calm and taste.

During a bullying situation, excuse yourself. Don't beat a hasty retreat, and don't leave the building. Tell your abuser that you're late for an appointment with HR, for example. Or casually excuse yourself to the restroom. Never enter the restroom if you are being pursued by a bully.

But that's not to say you shouldn't try distracting your abuser. Pick up something physical - as long at it's not a threatening item - such as a critical file that needs the bully's attention or a note with an important phone number that needs to be called.

Finally, remember to protect your personal information. Tell bullies as little as possible about your life, family, friends, hobbies, interests, religion, and so on. Information about you gives them power. But equally, gathering information about them will give you the tools you need to defend yourself and prove your case.

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Listen to it using the player here, or head on over to the Podcast page to download it or sign up for the Working Week RSS feed.

If you're facing redundancy, you may or may not want to take a leaf out of the French handbook of labour relations and try bossnapping - holding your manager hostage as a protest.

Staff at a 3M factory in Pithiviers, near Orleans, south of Paris, were demanding more money for departing staff and guarantees for those remaining – and they held the industrial director of the group, Luc Rousselet, for more than 24 hours until a deal was reached.

It was a similar story earlier this month when employees at a Sony factory in southwest France held both the CEO and HR director of Sony France until they agreed better terms for workers facing dismissal.

In France, where protest has been elevated into an art form, police rarely if ever intervene in disputes like these.

"It's true that this might seem surprising abroad, but it's less surprising in France, where we're more used to this kind of situation," said a very phlegmatic French Sony spokeswoman.

Try the same thing in the USA, mind you, and the outcome could be ugly. No sense of humour, les Anglo-Saxons...

Have we reached a point at which the total cost of industrial capitalism has outweighed its benefits? As the cost of bailing out the World's financial system reaches trillions of dollars, it is easy to argue that we have.

Even if you don't accept this, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the world needs a new way of doing business, one that redefines the basic purposes and responsibilities of corporations and looks at far more than just the bottom line as a measure of success or failure.

In the first in a series of podcasts, Dawna Jones talks to Jay Bragdon, an investment advisor for high net worth families, author of Profit for Life and an evangelist for a very different way of doing business.

As he explains, two fundamentally different business models of capitalism are operating in the business world today. The industrial model, he argues, is self-destructive and increasingly corrupt. It sees a company solely as a profit-making machine whose growth is driven by nonliving assets. Its effects on nature and society are therefore externalities that divert attention from the simple goal of producing profit.

The other – Living Asset Stewardship (LAS) - is emergent, flourishing and inspirational because it is premised on two fundamental truths. First profit can only arise from life. And second, in a healthy world, profit must serve life.

Living Assets Stewardship encourages companies to care about more than just the bottom line and to prioritize the general health of the people, society, markets and the biosphere in which they operate. This means that companies that adhere to the model care about their employees' health and welfare, values and professional growth, trusting that the company's goals will be met if they are treated right.

But here's the kicker. Companies that follow LAS aren't just more stable, better employers, more reliable vendors, better neighbours and better members of the community, they're also better investments, as the Global Living Asset Management Performance (LAMP) Index demonstrates. So maybe there's something too all this, after all...

Whatever your take, this is though-provoking conversation that might just give you some hope for a better future.

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Here's a brilliant idea for a TV recession reality show from sardonic Financial Times columnist, Lucy Kellaway.

However, I have a better idea for a recession television series: it would also be compulsive viewing but might do good rather than evil. My show, to be called The Begging Bowl, would make the CEOs of failing businesses compete for loans and handouts. They would each give a brief presentation and then be grilled by a panel. (I like to see myself as its Sharon Osbourne – tough yet compassionate). Viewers would then decide whom to bail out and whom to abandon to the receivers.

....awkward questions about pay and perks would routinely be asked of contestants on my show. The CEOs would have to talk about how their companies had got into their current mess and how they proposed to get out of it. Those, like Land of Leather, the UK sofa company that went under last week in spite of having been fairly prudent, might end up saved by popular demand.

As she says, why shouldn't governments put the billions they are already forking out to rescue the banks into a TV pot and let taxpayers decide who gets what. It's our money, after all.

Here's some thought-provoking stuff from our Evolutionary Provocateur Podcaster, Dawna Jones. Here, she develops some ideas that Max McKeown discussed recently, about using the crisis to ramp up innovation. But as Dawna explains, this isn't always an easy thing to do.

An extraordinary story from Singapore.

Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong's pay will fall 19 percent to S$3.04 million ($2 million) next year as the government slashes civil-servant wages in response to the deepening global financial crisis.

Wages of new ministers will fall 18 percent to S$1.57 million next year, and members of parliament will receive S$190,000, a 16 percent reduction, the government said in a statement late yesterday.

Somehow, we doubt that this will catch on elsewhere, where the public sector appears to be miraculously recession-proof.

Amid the chaos and turmoil on the financial markets, here's a real surprise. AIG's just-departed Chief Executive Robert Willumstad, who was replaced as part of the US Treasury's rescue of the insurance giant, has rejected the $22 million severance payment he is entitled to.

According to Reuters, "Willumstad e-mailed his successor, Edward Liddy, of his decision to forego the severance since he was not able to execute the restructuring plan he had developed".

"I prefer not to receive severance while shareholders and employees have lost considerable value in their AIG shares," Willumstad wrote in the email.

Sage words from Peter Cappelli director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School of Business, writing on HRE online.

Extraordinarily callous and inept management, combined with huge rewards for success and incentives for hiding failure, are some of the typical attitudes exhibited by financial institutions, many of which have been collapsing.

. . . . If there is anything good that comes out of the crushing failures of these investment institutions, it should be to question seriously the notion that rewards for individual performance are a substitute for good employee management.

The sort of aggressive, grow–at-any-cost leadership epitomised by the suddenly vilified Richard Fuld looks likely to be another casualty of this week seismic events on the financial markets? And a good thing too.

Because while Fuld and his ilk were busy owing the seeds of their own destruction, another American banker, Eric Daniels, CEO of LloydsTSB, was steadfastly holding out against pressure to join the herd and turn a UK high street bank into an aggressive, acquisitive, international financial services colossus.

As a result of focussing only on what Daniels insisted was "sustainable growth", LloydsTSB went from being the UK's biggest bank as recently as 1999 to number five in the rankings this year.

Meanwhile, HBOS (the result of the merger between the Halifax building society and Bank of Scotland), appointed a 38-year old with a background in retail, rather than finance, as CEO and set off to reinvent itself as the sort of outfit that wouldn't look out of place on Wall Street.

The trouble was, as Chris Blackhurst explains in the Evening Standard, " many of those at the top had no idea what those below were up to."

As a result of which, a company that proudly offers on its website "links will help you find out more about our history, archives and cultural heritage, stretching back over 300 years" is no more, leaving some 70,000 staff with an uncertain future.

As the Telegraph puts it the tortoise has well and truly beaten the hare. Let's just hope the tortoise doesn't choke on the aftermath.

What's the difference between leadership and management? And what makes an effective business leader? These two perennial questions have generated a staggering volume of discussion over the years, but little that is more pertinent than these two absolutely essential posts on Bob Sutton's blog [specifically here and here].

"To do the right thing", Sutton argues, "a leader needs to understand what it takes to do things right". In other words, they need to have real hands-on experience in the industry along with years of experience doing, managing, and succeeding at the kind of work their people do. Just coming up with grandiose strategies and leaving the detail of how to actually implement them to others (what Henry Mintzberg termed "management by deeming") is a recipe for failure.

I am not much rejecting the distinction between leadership and management, but I am saying that the best leaders do something that might be most properly called a mix of leadership and management (a great example is HP CEO Mark Hurd) , or at least, lead in a way that constantly takes into account the importance of management. And some of the worst senior executives use the distinction between leadership and management as an excuse to avoid learning the details they need to understand the big picture and to select the right strategies.

Of course, this kicked off quite a debate on the whole management/leadership dichotomy, including this comment from Michael Maccoby.

I think we should differentiate leadership which always involves a relationship as contrasted with management which has to do with processes and systems. Yes, leaders should understand management. However, management doesn't always need a manager.

"Management doesn't always need a manager". Now there's some food for thought!

Let's talk about intuition for a moment. It's something that's easy to dismiss as 'flaky' that has little to do with the business world. Yet everyone has had an experience that they could not explain, a bit of serendipity, a hunch. And whether they admit it or not, many successful entrepreneurs rely on it. So if your intuition has not served you well, you're probably just not tuned into it.

If you're curious to find out more about intuition - and, lets face it, what do you have to loose by doing so - have listen to the latest Evolutionary Provocateur podcast here on Management-Issues as Dawna Jones talks to with Dr. Rollin McCraty, research scientist with the Heart Math Institute.

He reveals the results of a study that illuminates the role the heart plays in processing intuitive information and demystifies exactly how that information is conveyed.

At a time when decision-making is increasingly complex, rapid, with either not enough or way too much information, his findings provide a framework for understanding how the gift of highly energy sensitive people and the occurrence of random flashes of 'knowing' create a powerful and reliable tool – that is, if you are aware enough to know what you place your trust in.

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