Mental health issues are becoming more prevalent in western societies, emphasising the imperative to research antecedents and consequences of well-being. Within companies, higher levels of well-being can promote productivity performance; therefore, an important question is how to increase employees’ well-being. Drawing on research documenting the positive relationship between dance and mental health, we expect that workers who practice dance as a form of physical exercise are endowed with higher cognitive skills and higher levels of well-being, compared to those who do not engage in dance-related activities.
Therefore, we hypothesize that dancers are more productive in the workplace. Using survey data from three countries:
Accounting for respondents’ perceptions of their country’s normative environment, we find that dancers experience higher levels of wellbeing and are more productive than non-dancers. Dancing also has an additional direct effect on productivity, not mediated by wellbeing.
Dr Michela Vecchi is Associate Professor of Economics at MDX Business School. She is the Research Leader for the Department of Economics, Research Fellow at the Centre for Enterprise and Economic Development Research (CEEDR), Visiting fellow at National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR), and Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), and a contractor for the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
Michela has over 20 years' research experience and has worked on a variety of topics within the productivity and labour economics spectrum. She has published on highly ranked economic journals, such as Labour Economic, Economica, Research Policy, Review of Income and Wealth. Her current main areas of research are skill mismatch and productivity, human capital, productivity and technical change, ageing, dance and cognitive abilities.
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