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from the more-or-less-getting-more-done-with-less-people dept.
Having underemployed workers can lead to two outcomes that benefit an organization—creativity and commitment to the organization—according to a new study by management experts at Rice University, Chinese University of Hong Kong at Shenzhen and Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Statistics have shown that a significant proportion of workers worldwide are underemployed or working at jobs that are below their capacity. Researchers have estimated that underemployment ranges from 17 percent to two-thirds of the workforce in Asia, Europe and North America, according to the study.
"Our results have important implications for managers," said study co-author Jing Zhou, the Houston Endowment Professor of Management at Rice's Jones Graduate School of Business. "Managers should not assume that employees will always respond negatively to their perception of being underemployed. Our results suggest that managers need to be vigilant in detecting perceptions of underemployment among employees.
"When managers notice that their employees feel underemployed, they should support employees' efforts to proactively change the boundaries or formal descriptions of their work tasks, such as changing the sequencing of the tasks, increasing the number of tasks that they do or enlarging the scope of the tasks," she said. "Because the perception of underemployment may be experienced by many employees, managers should provide support to sustain positive outcomes in these situations."
Not getting enough hours to qualify for benefits is a good thing?
(Score: 2) by julian on Wednesday September 21 2016, @11:11PM
There isn't a fixed amount of work to be done.
It's not fixed, it's shrinking!
More precisely, the amount of work suitable for the average person is shrinking as technology takes over jobs previously done by humans. No, the displaced fry cook will not become a programmer no matter how much money or time you invest in her training. She isn't going to start any businesses either.
If you want a picture of how bad this gets imagine Uber in 50-100 years. Automated mines that employ no one produce raw materials that are fed into automated factories that employ no one which produce self-driving cars that employ no one which sit idle because no one has any money because the mine, the factory, and Uber automated their job away. Apply to every other business in the economy.
The only market-based solution to this is soylent green or some other less subtle form of genocide.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday September 22 2016, @12:00AM
More precisely, the amount of work suitable for the average person is shrinking as technology takes over jobs previously done by humans.
It's never worked that way in the past and I don't think it's working that way at the present either. Instead, the work the average person does has increased in value.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mhajicek on Thursday September 22 2016, @01:07AM
The work that the average working person does is increasing in value, but fewer people are working. Workforce participation is at an all time low.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday September 22 2016, @01:25AM
(Score: 1) by Francis on Thursday September 22 2016, @03:44PM
And you think that the people who are in the developing world are going to be in the developing world forever?
Here's a hint from somebody that's been to the developing world. They're developing. There's a tremendous amount of waste and corruption right now that's holding things back, but as they get things squared away, they're progressing to where we are now. We have more than enough resources for them to live a decent life without working full time as well.
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Thursday September 22 2016, @04:37PM
Here's a hint from somebody that's been to the developing world. They're developing. There's a tremendous amount of waste and corruption right now that's holding things back, but as they get things squared away, they're progressing to where we are now. We have more than enough resources for them to live a decent life without working full time as well.
Then don't work full time. I'm not holding you back.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by julian on Thursday September 22 2016, @02:36AM
And the prime counting function never underestimates the number of primes below a given number...until you get to somewhere around 1.39×10^19 and it doesn't. The Internet didn't exist for billions of years...until it did. Something being true in the past is no guarantee it will always be true, that would be preposterous thinking. Sometimes it takes really big values of something to find a counter-example. Sometimes events are incredibly rare and don't happen very often. Some problems are exquisitely hard to solve and require the right mind to come on the scene at the right time.
Work increasing in value means nothing if, at some point in the future, the opportunity to do any work at all drops to zero for some large fraction of the population because labor saving technology has been sufficiently developed. When only capital matters, people with only their labor to sell don't get to participate in the economy. There are plausible scenarios where this could happen, and they're looking more--not less--likely as time goes by. You're placing your bet on an outcome that is receding in probability. You're wagering against human ingenuity.
Thankfully I also think human ingenuity will save us, but only if we can divorce puritan ethics from economic thinking. A tall order.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday September 22 2016, @01:02PM
Thankfully I also think human ingenuity will save us, but only if we can divorce puritan ethics from economic thinking. A tall order.
I think we have to ask who is the puritan here?
(Score: 1) by charon on Friday September 23 2016, @11:57PM
Beyond which, in the not-too-distant future where robots and weak AIs do most of the useful jobs, anyone lucky enough to have a job at all would be merely a bot wrangler. The capital will be juggling only two questions: How many bots can a single person supervise effectively? How few actual humans can the corporation get away with employing while catching an acceptable percentage of errors?