The Joy of Work?

Jobs, Happiness, and You

Peter Warr, Guy Clapperton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136836640
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Are you happy at work? Or do you just grin and bear it? We spend an average of 25% of our lives at work, so it's important to make the best of it.

The Joy of Work? looks at happiness and unhappiness from a fresh perspective. It draws on up-to-date research from around the world to present the causes and consequences of low job satisfaction and gives helpful suggestions and strategies for how to get more enjoyment from work. The book includes many interesting case studies about individual work situations, and features simple self-completion questionnaires and procedures to help increase your happiness. Practical suggestions cover how to improve a job without moving out of it, advice about changing jobs, as well as how to alter typical styles of thinking which affect your attitudes.

This book is unique. The subject is of major significance to virtually all adults - people in jobs and those who are hoping to get one. It is particularly distinctive in combining two areas that are usually looked at separately – self-help approaches to making yourself happy and issues within organizations that affect well-being.

The Joy of Work? has been written in a relaxed and readable style by an exceptional combination of authors: a highly-acclaimed professor of psychology and a widely published business journalist. Bringing together research from business and psychology – including positive psychology – this practical book will make a big difference to your happiness at work – and therefore to your whole life.

1
Work and happiness: An unlikely mix?

Some jobs are awful through and through, and some are simply great. But most are in-between—a mixture of the good and the bad. Working^1* involves doing things you don’t want to do as well as (in most cases) doing what you enjoy. So it’s not surprising that people view it in contrasting ways.

You can see the two different outlooks in society across the ages. The Bible, in the Book of Genesis, saw it as punishment for original sin: only “in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” Medieval work almost always involved hard physical slog and all the potential for pain and damage that involved, and later on Adam Smith (1723–1790) argued that repetitive work made people “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to become.”

Joking about the nastiness of work, Alfred Polgar (1873–1955) suggested it’s “what you do so that some time you won’t have to do it any more.” Nowadays, articles in newspapers and magazines (not to mention all those blogs) focus on the horrors of a job rather than exploring its benefits, and television plays and “soaps” rely on the workplace and other workers to create obstacles to a story’s successful outcome.

And then there’s the impact of Dennis the Menace and others of his kind. Dennis is the cover character of Britain’s

* Throughout the book, reference Notes are listed at the end of a chapter.

best-selling children’s weekly, the Beano, and also a successful cartoon character with a popular namesake in the USA. He has his own annual book and has held the Beano cover position for more than three decades appearing every week since 1951. Generations of young people have empathized with his activities. Dennis’s view of work is clear—it’s bad!

He is basically a workshy child, who’d prefer to be out fighting against authority rather than doing anything constructive, although the American version tends more to cuteness than anarchy. The UK version has an enemy called Walter who suffers terribly at Dennis’s hands. Walter is a Softy, partly because he likes school. Instead, Dennis makes it clear that he hates work of any kind. He’s great fun, but is also a role model telling us early in life that work and discipline are bad.

This anti-work outlook is not restricted to Dennis the Menace, of course. For example, there’s also been Bart Simpson: avoiding school, with no real aptitude for work, and worshipping his equally idle father, Homer. Neither will willingly put in an honest day’s toil, and that’s why they’re “cool.” The Simpsons have huge numbers of followers all over the globe. Just William, Horrid Henry, Minnie the Minx and other popular books and comic strips are full of these downbeats—they’re massively popular and they’re massively anti-work. All of them convey a powerful message early in life.

There are also more mature examples. The British poet Philip Larkin (1922–1985) asked in the first line of his poem Toads:

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?

Got the picture? A generally negative image of work is emphasized around us. From childhood to adult years we are encouraged to see it as bad.

However, another view has also long been argued. Martin Luther (1436–1546) claimed that “the human being is created to work as the bird is created to fly,” and John Calvin (1509–1564) thought work for its own sake would offer its own rewards. His views were particularly important in forming the Protestant work ethic, which was based on both religious and worldly benefits—hard work is good because it helps you to get to Heaven as well as perhaps making you wealthy. Look also at George Berkeley (1658– 1753), who considered “there can be no such thing as a happy life without labour,” or Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) who said “work is good; it truly is a motive for life.” Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) was another great fan: “there is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in work.”

Early Puritans emphasized a different kind of value; work prevented idleness which exposed people to all sorts of opportunities for sin. Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) gave us another theme; he liked to stay late in his office because that meant he didn’t have to go home to quarrel with his wife.

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) didn’t only talk about love and sex; he saw work as one of the main pillars of a healthy life. Noel Coward (1899–1973) even suggested that work was “much more fun than fun.” You probably think that Henry Ford (1863–1947) went over the top when he claimed that “work is our sanity, our self-respect, our salvation. So far from being a curse, work is the greatest blessing.” Nevertheless, recent surveys have shown that the majority of workers—70% plus—say they’re satisfied with what they do. And let’s not forget that Philip Larkin wrote a sequel to the poem we quoted earlier—Toads Revisited—in which he acknowledged that in middle age he rather liked the old toad of work.

You probably don’t often stop to think about it, but work is widely valued as a central part of life.

You’re born, and before too long you have to start spending most of your time working to sustain yourself. Along with love and your physical being, work is key to your existential circumstances. Who am I? What do I want? What is my place in the world and my status in it? Am I useful? Am I fulfilled?… Work defines, to a large degree, your external identity as part of the social matrix.

But it also looms very large in your inner sense of how you’re traveling through life.²

So work is both a bad thing and a good thing. However, as children and adults we have been encouraged by popular culture to emphasize the negative and to play down the idea that jobs can contribute to our happiness.

This book recognizes the harm that jobs can cause—the tiredness, anxiety, back pain, reduced family time, and so on—but builds on the positive potential that exists in nearly every one. Most of us can’t avoid working—it takes up around a third of our life—so let’s enjoy it as much as we can. Writing in The Times on 10 January 2009, Janice Turner was troubled by the anti-job prejudice she saw among young girls. Her message was clear: “Work is good, it can even be noble. It can make us forget ourselves. That is what we should tell our daughters. It can be hard, thankless, scary, joyless at times. But you will feel useful, purposeful, part of the world.”

In these pages we’ll look into the principal features of jobs, and explore the way those might be changed. The chapters will be based on research by psychologists from all over the world, shedding light on issues facing all of us but rarely escaping from the pages of academic journals. We’ll also talk to people—quote actual examples of what they have done about their jobs. However, the book doesn’t only identify the causes of happiness or unhappiness in jobs; we’ll set out some courses of action. There are inevitably limits, but it’s usually possible to do something to increase your work happiness. It’s certainly worth looking at the possibilities.

Key concepts

Let’s run through some of the notions we’ll be dealing with. “Work” is in general a question of doing something you “have to” do, and it’s likely to require exertion and be arduous, burdensome, or “hard work” for at least part of the time. In this book we’re usually referring to paid work. For most people that involves being a full-time employee of someone else, but it can be self-employment or part-time employment. And you can also “work” in other ways which don’t involve payment, such as housework, voluntary work and do-it-yourself work; many of the book’s themes also apply there, although those activities are not the primary concern here.

The other notion we’ll be discussing is “happiness.” Most of us recognize this when we feel it, but finding a precise definition is like nailing down soot. For centuries, philosophers have struggled to analyze what it means, and general agreement has proven all but impossible. For now, let’s just say that it’s a state of feeling good, and that unhappiness is feeling bad. That will be made more definite in Chapter 3. Our terms will be mostly psychological, but we’ll be relating those to people’s day-to-day experience. We’ll identify different kinds of happiness and unhappiness, as well as their likely causes.

The word’s root comes from Middle English—“hap” which means chance or luck. Think about “happenstance” and “haplessness” and you’ll see we still have the original meaning buried in other words. The modern definition owes less to luck than to the deliberate efforts of the happy individual, and a lot of it comes from factors within the person rather than merely from outside.

By the end of the book you should be clear why some people are happier or unhappier at work than others. For a start, job title might provide a clue. Several studies indicate that people in certain kinds of job are in general happier or less happy than others. In one British investigation, gardeners, hairdressers and care assistants were among the most satisfied, while bus drivers, postal workers and assembly line workers were among the least. Another study found that the happiest workers included chefs and members of the clergy, while architects and secretaries were the least happy in their jobs. Research in the USA has revealed that managers and administrators are among the most satisfied, whereas the lowest-scorers include machine operators and laborers.

These sorts of study are a start, but a job title on its own doesn’t tell us much by way of explanation. There has to be more to it than that, particularly since people with the same title can have different experiences. For example, job satisfaction depends partly on your age (it’s lowest on average between 35 and 45). And the content of two jobs with the same title can vary considerably, depending for instance on the size of the company and the nature of the business. Even if we could be certain that job title alone had some sort of connection with people’s happiness at work, it wouldn’t be all that useful as information about the sources of their good or bad feelings.

To make sense of job title patterns, you have to look deeper. What is it about different job titles and the activities that go with them which makes people happy or unhappy? It’s here that the research becomes particularly interesting and applicable to all of us. If you can identify the components that go into a job to make someone happy, then perhaps you can fit some into your own job. Or perhaps you might be able to reflect on your position in those terms and reassess your state of mind while you’re at work.

Levels of short-term happiness and long-term happiness can coincide, but they don’t always. Happiness can be associated with a single event but it’s also a continuing state of mind. During the course of the book we’ll be considering these various forms of happiness, looking at what stimulates them, and suggesting how they might perhaps be increased. And of course we’ll also be covering the bad feelings—unhappiness in its several forms.

Why does it matter?

There are many reasons for taking these issues seriously, whether you’re an employer wanting a more fulfilled and productive workforce or an employee wishing for a more fulfilling life. Quite simply, happiness is a principal objective in life. People will always seek it, for themselves and for their family, friends, colleagues, staff and others. That is enough of a reason to write books about it.

Indeed, there have been many such books. They range from academic volumes by philosophers, historians and psychologists (even by economists in recent years) to suggestions about how to reduce your own distress. Happiness and unhappiness are popular topics for television programs and magazine articles, usually dealing with a particular lifestyle issue likely to interest their audience or readership. Themes might cover “How married people can stay happy,” “Be happy during the credit crunch,” or “Eat your way to happiness.”

But where do you find books and articles about being happy in your job? Those are few and far between, even though almost everyone spends a large proportion of their time at work. No one doubts that happiness is important and deserves discussion in nonwork situations, but popular media often give the impression that happiness issues disappear once you set foot in the workplace. That is nonsense. People want to be happy in their jobs, just as else-where, and many are not happy there. Many of the same issues deserve attention in both work and nonwork settings.

Another way in which happiness is an important topic comes from the effect it has on behavior and social relationships. Let’s start in the workplace. Happy people will generally contribute more to an organization than their less happy counterparts. Research investigations by psychologists in many countries have revealed a general association between positive job feelings and performance in a job. More satisfied employees are likely to achieve more work goals. They will also be absent less often and remain with their organization for a longer time; if you don’t enjoy your job, you’re probably interested in finding another one. (And, to be mercenary for a moment, the cost to an employer of replacing a good worker can run into thousands of pounds or dollars; losing a lot of good workers because they’re unhappy costs a lot of thousands.)

There’s more. Satisfied workers have been shown to be more cooperative and supportive of colleagues, to provide stronger support to others in difficult times, and to be generally more willing to “go the extra mile” for their colleagues. Psychologists refer to that as “organizational citizenship behavior” and the evidence is clear: less satisfied employees are less ...