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The 'happy-productive worker thesis' has long intrigued organisational researchers and practitioners. Despite mixed empirical evidence from decades of research, there is support in the literature for this thesis. An account is provided on a variation on the enduring debate of the happiness-productivity theme, to support an emerging 'happy-performing managers proposition' . An empirical study is presented to establish the dimensions of managers' job happiness (operationalised as affective wellbeing and intrinsic job satisfaction) associated with contextual and task performance. The emphasis was on investigating an aspect of human behaviour with the potential to enhance managerial performance. These findings inform the broader debate on what determines the job performance of managers.Keywords: affective well-being, contextual and task performance, happy-productive worker, intrinsic job satisfaction, job-relatedIn the new millennium happiness in the workplace is well and truly back in vogue. There has been a veritable explosion of research into happiness, optimism and positive character traits (Bagnall 2004;Lyubomirsky, King and Diener 2005). In the twenty-first century, effective managers' performance is even more central to the success of organisations (Argyle 2001;Barsade, Brief and Spataro 2003;Bruni 2005;Layard 2005). So what is driving this surge of interest into employees' and managers' job happiness and performance?

Using the framework of Communication Accommodation Theory, this study investigated the extent to which job applicants objectively and subjectively altered their accents to converge to or diverge from the speech style of the interviewer. Forty-eight male and 48 female job applicants participated in two interviews for a casual research assistant position. In one interview, the interviewer had a broad Australian English accent, and in the other one, the interviewer had a cultivated accent. Applicants showed broader accents with broad-accented interviewers than with cultivated-accented interviewers. Applicants did not converge to the cultivated-accented interviewers, however, and male job applicants were more likely than were females to diverge from the cultivated-accented interviewers. There were also discrepancies between objectively rated changes to applicants' accents and their subjective judgments about the extent of accent accommodation.

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