Flow: Flourishing at Work

After framing Csikszentmihalyi’s conception of flow as a feature of the most intense human activities, the authors explain the positive impact it has on both the person (gratification) and on results, i.e., the quality of their work. They then take on an organizations’ greatest challenge: that is, how to create a collaborative environment in which people find a state of concentration that leads them perform better. The aim is not to achieve a momentary psychological state of being, but rather to work and collaborate better, resulting in improved general welfare. Moreover, this improvement is mutually beneficial to the individual’s self-fulfillment and to the improvement of social life. There is a common ground between the Aristotelian treatment of pleasure, seen as a side effect of advantageous action, and the classical distinction between pleasure and gratification, with advances from contemporary psychology. Moreover, these findings lay the groundwork for developing a theory of action that transcends intellectual aspects in order to better understand the kind of action in which the agent tends to identify with his action.