David J Paul Project Management Professional, Management Professor, Author and Small Business Manager
One of the first ‘ah-hah’ moments for me came after a bad day at work. Things were not going well at the company. We had been ‘merged’ with another firm, and the particular area I worked in was being ‘downsized’ for people from my company and we were one by one being ‘transferred’, ‘fired’, or ‘let go’. In one case, a fellow was brought in and offered a position in another part of the company for a 15% reduction in salary while the equivalent folks from the ‘new’ company were being granted $50K to $100K ‘bonuses’ so they could buy homes in the new area.
I parked the car in the garage, noted that I needed to change the oil, and came in through the laundry room. My two daughters (age 3 and 10) were at the dinner table, and my wife was busy setting things straight. I was not in a good mood. I really felt ‘uncared for’ at work. I ‘asked’ in a rough tone about dinner, the mail, and whether the kids’ had washed their hands. Mom wasn’t in such a good mood either and let us all know it as she sat down. As soon as she sat down, the older daughter reached over and pinched the younger one at the same time the little kitten came in under the dining room table. Whereupon the younger one actually kicked the cat!! My Ah HAH, of course, was that I had brought this into the house. It was my fault, and between laughing at the situation and apologizing for it, we carried on. It doesn’t always happen that way, though, if you are not caring for your people at work. It could happen like the way these researchers have found.
Ilies, Wilson, and Wagner (2009) report the extent to which job satisfaction (measured at work during the day) has a spillover effect into marital or household attitude as measured during the evening. Just like it did with me. Initial results in this study confirm that people feel cared about more deeply when there is an appropriate regard at work for the elements of the homelife that are important to the employee and that intersect with the work life. Read that paragraph again. The extent to which you recognize an individual’s important home life can strongly impact their performance at work. Now that you know that, if you don’t do that at work, you are taking performance away from your company.
Furthermore, a high level of feeling cared for results in higher levels of job involvement, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, productivity, performance and intrinsic motivation. It is negatively related to intentions to quit. People who feel cared for at work don’t quit on you. That result is found in both US and international studies.
International Aspects of Job Satisfaction and Caring
Some studies find that culture plays an important role in how employees feel cared for at work. Managers in Denmark (Bass and Eldridge, 1979) found that societal concerns were emphasized as ways people feel cared for. American, British, and German managers strongly valued a profit motive. Kannungo and Wright (1983) showed differences in autonomy and individual achievement between British and French managers. The French valued competent supervision, sound company policies, fringe benefits, security and comfortable working conditions. It turns out that autonomy is more important to western societies. Dowling and Nagel (1986) contrasted Australian and American business majors and found that extrinsic values (which includes feeling cared for as well as salary) were favored in Australia while Americans stressed self-fulfillment, responsibility and other intrinsic factors (including having interesting work).
Work that Matters: Dowling and Nagel also reported on the results of the Meaning of Working project (MOW) which was conducted in 1981 through 1983 from random samples in Belgium, Germany, Israel Japan, Netherlands and USA. These results could be interpreted as work that matters. In this book, we talk about work that matters as work that matters to the individual, not the way that psychologists sometimes refer to work that matters, as in the work, itself matters to a larger universal audience. For example, Mother Teresa’s work mattered (to the psychologists and to Mother Teresa). Merely having a job at a hardware store can matter greatly to me, but not, in general, to the larger society or to the larger group of academic psychologists.
Respondents rank ordered eleven items in the following order as showing or having meaning to them at work:
A—A lot of opportunity to learn new things
B—Good Interpersonal relations (supervisors, co-workers)
C—Good opportunity for upgrading or promotion
D—Convenient work hours.
E—A lot of Variety
F—Interesting work (work that you really like)
G—Good job security
H—A good match between your job requirements and your abilities and experience
I—Good pay
J—Good physical working conditions (such as light, temperature, cleanliness, low noise level
K—A lot of autonomy (you decide how to do your work)
It is apparent that the paramount work goal is “Interesting work”. Note that goals do not, by themselves, create motivation, but followed by good pay and good interpersonal relations they can provide a good work environment. (The value of good interpersonal relations was second among managers, third among employees, and fourth among supervisors).
So, if you value the health of kittens, you’ll take a little extra effort on a daily and on a strategic basis to make sure your valuable employees are feeling cared for at work. Blessings.
The Cameron Group, Inc. 