Examining the Barriers to Happiness for the Professors of the Fars Section of the Islamic Azad University with a Combined Approach

Acquiring the experience of happiness in the workplace faces obstacles that do not allow the necessary conditions for happiness. Work, often, cannot provide clear goals, proper feedback and sense of control over work and flexible scheduling. However, few studies have focused on obstacles to happiness in the workplace, while unhappy environments expose employees to extreme stress and burnout. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to investigate the obstacles to happiness in the university environment. The statistical population are the professors of Islamic Azad University, Fars Branch and 603 people in the qualitative section and 320 people in the quantitative section were selected by random sampling method and participated in the research. The research is exploratory in terms of purpose and fundamental from the reader’s point of view. Open-ended questions and researcher-made questionnaires were used in the qualitative and quantitative parts, respectively and Ground Theory was used to assess their validity and SPSS 26 and SMARTPLS questionnaire have been used to analyze quantitative data. Based on research findings, 77 obstacles were identified in the form of six categories of individual, organizational and extra-organizational obstacles.