Almost all people would like to be happy. Argyle (2001:1) believed that for most people, happiness is the main, if not only, “ultimate objective in life”. Frey & Stutzer (2000a:148) stated that happiness can be understood as “lasting, complete and justified satisfaction with life as a whole”.  Argyle (2001) refers to three aspects which can be used to define happiness. Happiness can be understood as (1) a state of joy or other positive emotion, (2) as being satisfied with one’s life, or (3) the absence of depression, anxiety or other negative emotions.

         Accordingly, the study on principals’ happiness is of utmost importance, as the effective functioning of the educational system partially depends on it. Recent signals, however, report feelings of dissatisfaction, overload and workload among school principals (Devos & Vanderheyden, 2002; Vandenberghe et al., 2003). Principals are a part of a larger interpersonal system. Their people oriented job characterized by the art of working with teachers, gaining public approval, coping with rules and regulations imposed by governments, are situational and environmental conditions that affect their status of happiness. In McGrath’s model (1976) two subsystems are distinguished, which help to explain the emergence of occupational happiness due to situational conditions. One of these subsystems involves the physical environment which provides the context within which the worker carries out his or her duties. This system can produce several sources of negative and positive happiness such as level of autonomy, skill variety, work load, task difficulty and task ambiguity. The second subsystem, social-interpersonal subsystem, defines the social framework within which the focal person interacts with superiors, subordinates and peers, and is characterized by role ambiguity, role conflict, role overload and support as potential antecedents of happiness. In sum, it is expected that school principals who get easily impatient or are very competitive focused will experience more negative happiness, whereas those who are achievement oriented will experience higher positive well-being.

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