
Motivational Incongruence and Well-Being at the Workplace - rjdevereux
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01153/full
======
treehau5_
Yeah I have expereined this very thing at work right now, but the great thing
about being a human is you can change and adapt at the face of adversity. In
my case it was either get fired/quit spend a month or two getting a new job
and hear it from my wife or suck it up and be the person myorganization wants
me to be -- it wasn't that hard at the end of the day because I get paid
handsomly, get to sit in an air conditioned room with a comfortable chair
(they even got a standing desk for me)great benefits, get to put food on the
table, have clean water to drink, you know.. something 90% of the rest of the
world will never get to experience.

My answer to these situations is to humble yourself. Now of course I am not
saying the other option is "wrong" especially if it is just as easy for you to
find an accommodating workplace but at the end of the day you are paid to do a
job, not have all your feelings babysitted. If you find your workplace is
stressing you out, go talk to a therapist (or close friend who understands
you, spouse, etc) and see if you can identify ways to overcome it. If not,
then maybe consider the switch.

I know this will get downvoted here because it sounds very "conservative pull
up your bootstraps"-esque

~~~
joyeuse6701
Tolerance is largely relative I think. You could have a crank that spits out
pennies so long as you crank it. Invariably we will tire of turning the crank
because it's monotonous uninspiring unfulfilling work. The argument could be
made that someone somewhere does not have the opportunity to so easily spin a
crank for money so we ought to be grateful, but the mind's adaptability is a
double edged sword. You exalt the mind for it's adaptability, but it's the
very same adaptability that accustoms us to our environment, and leads us to
be ungrateful for the conditions we live in.

~~~
JackFr
Inspiring fulfilling work is a luxury not everyone can afford, and it is a
conceit of the modern world that meaning and fulfillment in your life should
come from your employment.

~~~
amelius
> Inspiring fulfilling work is a luxury not everyone can afford, and it is a
> conceit of the modern world that meaning and fulfillment in your life should
> come from your employment.

But you could also argue that the modern world is _creating_ unfulfilling
work. Not only the "bullshit jobs" (see [1]), but also highly repetitive work.

In ancient/prehistoric times, work was more diverse (and perhaps hence more
inspiring) for a lot of people, I suppose.

[1] [http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/](http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/)

~~~
niels_olson
> work was ... more inspiring

work which is important but not urgent is inspiring. The more complex the
society, the more opportunity for such work. Read history: it wasn't that long
ago that most of Europe envied those who could afford mud huts.

------
ams6110
I quit a job when I felt burnout developing. The cause? Pair programming. I
just cannot that close to someone for the majority of the workday without
feeling constant low-level stress and annoyance, and I can't focus and think
about problems in that setting.

When you have to sit in your car for 15 minutes every morning just to summon
the resolve to get out and go into the office, something's wrong with your
work environment.

~~~
city41
I also left a job due to pair programming. That company pair programmed 100%
of the time. It concerns me that might become a norm. I wrote a blog post on
why I think that's a bad idea: [http://www.mattgreer.org/articles/pair-
programming-is-not-a-...](http://www.mattgreer.org/articles/pair-programming-
is-not-a-panacea/)

~~~
s_kilk
I wonder if these kinds of teams are lead by extroverts, who appreciate having
a captive audience for their peopley, extroverted shenaniagns.

Having a stable of people who are contractually obligated to put up with their
outgoing personalities.

~~~
crmd
It's not nice to belittle individuals whose brains work differently than your
own.

~~~
brokenmachine
That's true, but the problem is that those outgoing types interfere with the
introverts brains from working when they interrupt them constantly.

I would like more segregation! Enjoy your riotous atmosphere over there (far
away) please!

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kristianc
I'm not sure how much this advice will be heeded.

In a lot of places in tech, there seems to be a culture where companies are
more concerned about maximizing units of work at the expense of more
intangible factors.

You see this in Agile, Kanban etc methods of work where personal development
is completely subjugated to the needs of the project.

Insofar as a guiding principle behind the work does exist, that too tends to
be subsumed under 'The Project': 'We're excited about building the future of
work!'

In more than one company I've worked with, even drawing attention to an
article like this would be seen as raising your head above the parapet. It's
completely the wrong attitude.

Until we start measuring employee performance in new ways and asking different
questions of managers, we'll continue to see burnout being viewed as an
'acceptable cost'.

~~~
erkkie
I agree with your general sentiment and have my share of seeing ridiculous
ceremonies of current-workflow-fad-of-the-year being enforced on people,
kanban is a great system for managing deliverables in an ad-hoc environment.

It's a false premise (and unfortunately all too common, both self-inflicted by
developers themselves and by managers) to think that tracking and managing
work pipeline == maximizing output at the expense of the worker.

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p4wnc6
I wrote a blog entry about something similar -- but trying to take it back one
level and understand why do certain managers go to the trouble of hiring
people only to plug them into physical environments that are demonstrably
toxic for human beings (not merely introverts v. extraverts, but for almost
any human in general).

Sadly, I think it's just age-old politics. You're hired for the political
effects it has on your boss -- including looking like a l33t h4x0r in your
violently-collaborative open plan office doing Agile. Kills productivity and
morale, but managers & executives aren't compensated for actually producing
anything, so it doesn't matter. And HR'll always spin some other story about
turnover because the one thing they have to avoid at all costs is actually
providing a healthy workplace.

[0] < [http://suitdummy.blogspot.com/2015/05/why-hire-
underemployme...](http://suitdummy.blogspot.com/2015/05/why-hire-
underemployment-autonomy-and.html) >

~~~
davidgerard
Pretty much nobody in a business is there for the purpose of making a profit.
_You might think that was the point,_ but a moment's thought will make it
obvious that literally everyone except the few actual shareholders is there
for their own reasons. So it devolves into small-ape-tribe politics,
dominance, etc. (And nerds are _in no way_ immune to this.) This is the same
reason telecommuting is so hard to get firmly in place: bugger the business
advantages, the manager doesn't have the sense of control.

------
anbende
The title is sensationalist. They found correlational evidence to link their
measures of "motivational incongruence" with burnout and physical symptoms. It
was NOT causal.

They also did not test or control for anything. No tests of stress, social
support or anything else that could mediate these effects.

Their measure of implicit motivation is also a little rough: they had raters
count the number of, for example, affiliation sentences used to describe a
picture of a trapeze artist. More sentences equals an unconscious need for
affiliation.

In the end, they found that if either of two motivational orientations (power
and affiliation) are not being met, we are a little more likely to report
symptoms of burnout. Interesting, but very preliminary. And it could be
totally subsumed by other personality or stress variables.

~~~
stdbrouw
The red flag for me was polynomial regression on such a relatively small
sample. As you say, it might pan out but it's very preliminary.

------
visarga
I came to the same conclusion based on an analogy. Humans learn behavior by
reinforcement learning, just like AI agents. Reinforcement learning is
maximizing rewards by picking the right actions, given the current situation
and internal state.

Now, humans have a number of inborn reward systems, such as connection
(belonging, community, empathy), physical well being (food, sleep), play,
autonomy, meaning (competence, efficiency), creativity. So the human reward is
the sum of the individual "reward channels".

When focused on solving a single problem, there is a tendency to optimize only
for part of this multi-part reward function, to the detriment of others. This
is the cause of burnout. It's basically suboptimal reward, when considering
rewards in all their complexity.

Here is a more complete inventory of basic needs (reward channels):

[https://www.cnvc.org/Training/needs-
inventory](https://www.cnvc.org/Training/needs-inventory)

------
Xcelerate
I've never understood why companies don't have a mix of environments so that
each person can choose what works best for them. Allow options for an open
floor plan area, a closed floor plan area, and remote work. My PhD advisor
didn't care if I worked in my office, from home, or from the top of a volcano
as long as I got the research done that he wanted each week (turns out I tend
to work best in coffee shops).

~~~
HerpDerpLerp
Money and control (or the perception of control)

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flanbiscuit
Can someone re-word the abstract in layman's terms? I had to google what
"motivational incongruence" was.

My partial interpretation attempt:

Employees who did not feel like they fit into the culture of the workplace
(affiliation motive) led to high job burnout. And people who didn't satisfy
their need to have an impact on others, and gain respect and reputation (power
motive), predicted increased physical symptoms.

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0xcde4c3db
Has the concept of "unconscious needs" been scientifically characterized and
validated? The term seems to be used with some frequency in the literature,
but mostly mentioned in passing and not as a central component of the
phenomenon being studied.

------
DHMO
1\. I know it is tough collecting data, but a sample size of 97? It seems like
there are a number of larger organizations that would be interested in
participating in such a study if kept anonymous, and I really start to wonder
about conclusions based on such small sample sizes, especially if it was only
done at a single company or in a single geographic region.

Culture between companies and between geographic regions can be _really_
different. For example, if you performed this study in Mumbai in a company
where all of those involved in the study were die-hard workers that didn't
believe in burnout, that would have seriously skewed the results and they
still might have looked good statistically.

2\. While it's evident to many that have been working several years or more
that people tend to get promoted even when they'd be happier in lower non-
managerial positions, and that promotion can end in unhappiness or burnout,
what wasn't mentioned in the study is whether you really _want_ power-hungry
people in management positions just because it would be a better fit for their
motivations.

I had some piss-poor managers that loved power and for them it was a good
personality fit.

It might be better in many situations to have someone that doesn't want the
power, is knowledgeable of the job of those they are managing, is well-
respected, and is a great leader to lead for some years and burnout or leave
than it would be to have a power-hungry imbecile with no respect from their
team leading for many years because they are a good personality fit.

That said, I think that if you can find someone that is both a good
personality fit and a great fit as a leader of the team, then that's better
than promoting someone that will burnout, but only as long as it is just
information used for decision between candidates and not a determining factor.

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evolve2k
"Individual needs and environment supplies were assessed in an online survey
of full time employees (n = 97), using a picture story exercise measuring
implicit motives and a scale listing affiliation and power related job
characteristics"

Is 97 respondents to an online survey enough to be statistically significant?

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T0T0R0
It's kind of funny, but when you talk to a lot of fellow worker drones, who
lack the kind of free will required to accurately describe their own
motivations for holding down a job, most will continuously describe burnout as
being at fault and getting fired during a moment when they failed the company.

Like:

    
    
      Oh boo hoo, I suffered burnout
      this one time because I was so 
      incompetant. Good on my boss for
      firing me when I deserved it!
    

Most worker drones with attitudes like this usually cannot or will not
describe their core motivations for maintaining employment (power motives,
according to the article) as "needing to pay rent" or something similarly
compulsory. Maybe it's just too awful too think in such bleak terms.

But this article points to an interesting symmetry of blame: the workers beats
themselves up, and the employers express absurd, overbearing demands, or some
combination of the two. Worst case scenarios being the blind leading the
blind.

You rarely see articles that provide a cold look at employer/employee
relationships, and explore scenarios where emotional investment is optional on
both sides of the table.

------
sctb
We updated the link from
[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160811171643.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160811171643.htm),
which points to a Eureka article which points to this.

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ycombinatorMan
I think its quite obvious that burnout comes from overdoing youreself, hardly
an unconscious feeling.

