Read the article Why We Are So Unhappy With Work

Based on your personal experience, do you agree with Adam Smith that people are basically lazy and only work because they have to in order to survive?  Or do you agree with the author of this article (and Herzberg and Hackman and Oldham) that people are motivated to work for other reasons?

Give reasons for your choice.  Feel free to use your personal experiences if you would like to.

 

here is the article 

Why We're So Unhappy With Work — And How to Fix It

Sep 5, 2015  By Barry Schwartz

Labor Day, 2015, offers Americans something to celebrate for the first time in years. All around the country, movements are growing to raise the minimum wage significantly. The current target is $15/hour, more than twice the federal minimum, and legislation to create such a minimum is being passed in city after city. As this effort to move full-time workers above the poverty line gathers steam, there is reason to believe that in the not-to-distant future, all employees will be guaranteed a living wage. For decades, historic gains in worker productivity have been going to those who occupy executive suites and attend shareholders' meetings. Now, there is hope that this regressive trend will change.

That said, though there is no doubt that people need wages and wouldn't work without them, there is more to a good job than a decent wage. Improving compensation for work has been an uphill battle, to be sure. But in mounting those efforts, reformers have paid scant attention to an equally important aspect of work—the character of the jobs that people actually do.

How satisfied are we with our jobs? The Gallup Organization regularly polls workers around the world to find out. Its survey in 2013 found that almost 90 percent of workers were either "unengaged" or "actively disengaged" from their jobs. Think about that: Nine out of 10 workers spend half their waking lives doing things they don't want to do in places they don't want to be.

Why? One possibility is that it's just human nature to abhor work. This was the view of Adam Smith, the father of industrial capitalism, who felt that people were naturally lazy and would work only for pay. "It is the inherent interest of every man," he wrote in 1776 in The Wealth of Nations, "to live as much at his ease as he can."

This idea has been quite influential. About a century later, it helped shape the scientific management movement associated with F.W. Taylor. By subjecting factory production to minute scrutiny, the movement aimed to create efficient systems of manufacture that minimized the need for skill and close attention — things that lazy, pay-driven workers could not be expected to have.

Today, in factories, offices and other modern workplaces, the details may be different but the overall situation is the same: Work is structured on the assumption that we do it just for the money. In call centers, workers are closely monitored to make sure that the duration of each call is minimal. Office workers find their keystrokes being overseen, to make sure there is no deviation from the tasks at hand. Even doctors are expected to adhere to rapid-fire office visits. "Don't ask your patient 'so how was your daughter's wedding,'" one efficiency expert advised. "Instead say 'I'm sure the wedding was wonderful.'" This to keep the irrelevant chitchat to a minimum.

I think that this efficiency and wage-driven approach to work is entirely backwards. It is making us unsatisfied with our jobs — and it is also making us worse at them. For our sakes, and for the sakes of those who employ us, things need to change.

To start with, I don't think that most people recognize themselves in Adam Smith's description of wage-driven idlers. Of course, we care about our wages, and we wouldn't work without them. But we care about more than money. We want work that is challenging and engaging. We want work that enables us to exercise some discretion and control over what we do, and that provides us opportunities to learn and grow. We want to work with colleagues we respect and with supervisors who respect us. And we want work that is meaningful — that makes a difference to other people. Such work ennobles us in at least some small way.

We want these things so much that we may be willing to take home a thinner pay envelope to get them. Lawyers leave white-shoe firms to work with the underclass and underserved. Doctors abandon cushy practices to work in clinics that serve the inner city. Moreover, we regard these desirable aspects of work as more than mere personal preference. When we say of someone that "he's in it for the money," we are doing more than offering a description. We're passing judgment.

You might object that these examples are of professionals — people who have the financial security to care about more than just their paychecks, and the privilege of working in stimulating fields in which it is possible to find meaning and personal satisfaction. What about the janitor? The phone solicitor? The hairdresser? The supermarket clerk?

I submit that they, too, are looking for something more than wages. About 15 years ago, for example, the organizational-behavior researchers Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane E. Dutton studied hospital custodians in a major academic hospital in the Midwest. Though their official list of job duties never even mentioned other human beings, many of the custodians viewed their work as including doing whatever they could to comfort patients and their families and to assist the professional staff members with patient care. They would sing to patients, joke with them, calm them down so that medical residents could insert IVs. They would delay vacuuming waiting areas so that exhausted family members who were napping could get a little respite.

They received no financial compensation for these "extra" activities. But according to the custodians, this aspect of the job was what got them out of bed every morning. "I enjoy entertaining the patients," said one. "That's what I enjoy the most. Making the patients laugh."

Similarly, a few years ago the management professor Adam Grant studied a group of college students who worked as phone solicitors, calling alumni to ask for contributions to their university. As an experiment, Mr. Grant arranged for a recent graduate who had attended the university on a scholarship funded by such solicitation efforts to meet the students. He gave a five-minute talk about how the scholarship had affected his life and how grateful he was for their solicitation efforts. Grant found that the students' productivity more than doubled afterward. Again, there was no added compensation for the harder work — just a deeper sense of purpose.

Journalist Mike Rose found hairdressers for whom the technical skills involved in cutting, coloring, and styling hair took a back seat to the interactions with clients that helped the clients make good decisions about their haircuts and feel good about the results. The employees at the Market Basket supermarket chain risked their jobs (in a down economy) to go out on strike in support of their CEO who had lost his position in a family battle. They took this risk because they so valued the CEO's commitment to the mission of the supermarket to serve the community and his commitment to honor employees as respected partners in that mission. And when Ray Anderson, CEO of the enormously successful carpet manufacturer Interface, decided to reduce the company's huge environmental footprint, almost certainly at significant costs to the bottom line, he discovered that as the footprint went down, profits went up—largely because employees were so inspired by the new company mission that they worked smarter and harder than they ever had before.

These are just a few examples from a literature of cases demonstrating that when given the chance to make their work meaningful and engaging, employees jump at it, even if it means that they have to work harder. Such cases should serve to remind us there is a human cost to deskilling and routinizing work. Too often, instead of being able to take pride in what they do, and derive satisfaction from doing it well, workers have little to show for their efforts aside from their pay.