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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: 1) by Francis on Thursday September 22 2016, @03:41PM
It does, however, there is a limit to that. People aren't going to buy more and more leisure goods just because they're no longer filling time at work. At some point you have enough of those things that you haven't got the time to use what you have.
It happens more quickly than you might think. I've got a motorcycle and some photography gear. Those along with my computer are more than enough to fill all the hours I might care to fill. And that's fairly typical of most people, most people have a relatively limited set of interests and as such they tend to hit the point where they have what they need and want fairly quickly. I doubt if you asked most people seriously, that more than a fraction of what they own is comprised of things they use on a regular basis. I know just about everything I could possibly want would fit in the back of a relatively small truck.