By Richard Smoley
Some articles about employee satisfaction have the headline “It’s Not about the Money.”
Nonsense. Of course, it is.
If it weren’t about the money, many workers would be sitting at home renewing their acquaintance with Breaking Bad.
But it isn’t only about the money. Employees want to feel valued, even admired.
Some of them have had the chance in recent years, as some occupations became heroized. The most obvious example was front-line health workers during the pandemic. And yes, they were heroic.
But they weren’t alone.
“During the COVID-19 pandemic, radically shifting public narratives suddenly transformed grocery delivery work, previously uncelebrated, into highly moralized ‘heroic’ pursuits,” observe a team of business scholars led by Leslie D. Cameron of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Heroes from above but not (always) from within? Gig workers’ reactions to the sudden public moralization of their work – ScienceDirect
The research consisted of interviews of 75 Instacart employees, bolstered by supplementary data such as newspaper articles.
Like many studies, this one doesn’t exactly vindicate your faith in human nature.
The researchers observed, “Those who were not economically dependent on the work and who began working to help others readily accepted the hero narrative, seeing their act of working as already morally credentialled, thus doing only minimal extra-role behavior” (emphasis added).
So “those who facilely adopted the hero label” could be saying in effect, “Hey! I’m already doing you a favor by being here. Don’t expect any more.”
On the other hand, “those who were economically dependent on the work and who had professionalized experiences in service work saw their relationship to their work as tinged with financial need and, wrestling with the hero narrative, sought out the moral credentials of serving clients, thus doing more extra-role helping behavior.
“Those who wrestled with the hero narrative sought to earn those moral credentials, and they were more likely to embrace extra-role helping and remain committed to moralized aspects of the work.”
One unclear area is exactly who and who wasn’t economically dependent on the work. The study didn’t say. I have to assume that those who weren’t dependent included those who were delivering for Instacart as a side job, or whose spouses were earning the bulk of the household income.
The study, somewhat predictably, suggested that gig workers, with larger amounts of autonomy and fewer emotional links to employers, have to figure out their identities for themselves, “the burden of interpretation increasingly falling on individuals (rather than on organizations or collectives).”
Other workers “reacted adversely to narratives—moralized or not—about their work as misaligned with their identities . . . , seeing them as emotionally manipulative . . . or as ‘empty and misleading.’”
This spontaneously evokes a memory in me of the last time I saw the 1999 cult classic, Office Space.
In any case, here are the conclusions I take away.
It is essential that employees feel validated and made to understand that their contributions are valuable ones. But singling out members of an occupation as “heroic” may not add much to their performance—or, probably, to their genuine self-esteem.
