by Nicola Rowe

Created on: November 13, 2008   Last Updated: December 25, 2008

Having Pollyanna in the next cubicle would get on the best-intentioned employee's nerves after a while. But it makes sense for the boss to have hired her: according to psychologist and author Martin Seligman, optimists make better employees than their pessimist colleagues. A common-sense platitude? Not quite. Seligman, who made his name researching learned helplessness before turning to positive psychology, has submitted his theories to rigorous proof. He's even gone beyond the private sector, testing his theory with the US armed forces, where he verified empirically that pessimists are more likely to drop out of basic training than optimists.

So what makes an optimist? It's all about attribution about what you think the causes of the things that happen to you are. For Seligman, optimists believe that the cause of good things - a promotion, or a good grade on a test lie within their own sphere of influence. So an optimist will say "I got a good grade because I studied hard." A pessimist will see things exactly the other way around, attributing good things to causes outside their control. "The test was easy," a pessimist might say. Or: "I fluked".
When it comes to negative events, things reverse. Optimists attribute negative events to causes outside their control, whereas pessimists see themselves at fault. "I failed the test because I'm stupid," a pessimist might say. It's an interesting theory, but why is it important? Optimists are resilient, and that's important in business. They make better salespeople not because their dispositions are sunnier, but because they bounce back from rejection more quickly than pessimists.
Optimists don't become discouraged, and they don't quit. The implication for business? If you screen candidates with an assessment centre, add a test for optimism to the battery of tests you already conduct. While industrial psychologists have co-opted his results, Seligman himself is a clinical psychologist. If you want to know whether you're an optimist or a pessimist, you can test yourself at the website set up by Penn U's Positive Psychology Center. Turn out a pessimist? Not to worry. As the title of Seligman's seminal book Learned Optimism implies, optimism is a world-view that can be learned. If you want to increase your resilience and learn to see the world more positively, the book provides you with simple techniques to help you learn to reframe the way you see the world and your own behaviour.

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