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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, Interesting) by Francis on Thursday September 22 2016, @02:51AM
If by modest examination, you mean no thought of any sort, then maybe.
Humans don't really do any more work now than in the past, we just get a lot more done with the time. Back in the prehistoric era, you'd expect to spend nearly all day every day looking for food and the necessities of life. If you were doing well, you might be able to knock off a bit early and enjoy the sunset, but without refrigeration technology or a reliable source of food you spent a ton of time just making sure that you got enough to eat.
But, we hit the point where we could cut back on the labor decades ago. First with the 40 hour work week and we'd be down to probably a 20 hour work week or less by now if the rich weren't stealing the proceeds of our labor. At this point the same automation that's being used to depress wages could just as easily be used to allow people to spend less time at work and get more time to enjoy away from work.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday September 22 2016, @04:05AM
Humans don't really do any more work now than in the past, we just get a lot more done with the time.
The word you are looking for is "effort" not "work". We don't exert much more effort than we used to, but we get a lot more work done as a result of that effort due to technology, infrastructure, and organization.
But, we hit the point where we could cut back on the labor decades ago. First with the 40 hour work week and we'd be down to probably a 20 hour work week or less by now if the rich weren't stealing the proceeds of our labor.
There's always some excuse why your unicorn fantasy hasn't yet been realized. Here, the real reason is called Jevons paradox [wikipedia.org].
In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises because of increasing demand.
This is also one of the reasons we still have jobs despite automating so many of our jobs in the past.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Thursday September 22 2016, @03:38PM
That's a load of bullshit right there. I'm not surprised, mediocre minds will resort to word games because they're not able to form a cogent argument.
Whether you want to use the term work or effort, the answer is the same. Humans get more done now than they did back then, hence why we can afford to have a 40 hour work week and could probably cut that down to 20 hours without having people starving or being deprived of things they really needed. Sure, they might have less useless crap, but how many of them even had time to use the things they were buying in the first place.
Do you even know what Jevons paradox is? Because from your post, it's pretty freaking clear that you don't. The paradox is specifically why this hasn't changed. The wealthy have bought enough politicians that the government hasn't stepped in and taken away the incentive to amass huge sums of money. The sums are so large that nobody can even spend all the money that they've accumulated.
No, the reason why we still have jobs is because most of the real jobs have been eliminated and replaced with pointless service sector jobs. The jobs themselves exist mainly in doing things for people that they could or would do for themselves if they weren't required to report to work for so many hours. Honestly, I don't think that most people would have any issue cooking for themselves most meals if they weren't spending 8 hours at work plus an extra hour or 2 commuting each day. When you factor in time for sleeping, that leaves a rather small amount of time to get anything done.
Also, if you cut jobs too far without providing for some sort of activity, you wind up with a bunch of listless people with tons of time and nothing to do with it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday September 22 2016, @04:34PM
Whether you want to use the term work or effort, the answer is the same.
That's quite the bit of stupidity there. Words have meaning and work is not just doing stuff, it's also output, the productivity of the stuff that you do. But given that you think productive work is make-work, it's not surprising that you are as clueless about this as everything you've posted on in this thread.
If a crew digs a ditch with spoons, that's probably about the same amount of man-years of effort as designing and building a rocket engine. That's the difference between effort and work.