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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, Insightful) by khallow on Thursday September 22 2016, @04:29PM
With the productivity gains of the last century in particular, there's no need to have everybody working 40 hour work weeks with no sick leave or vacation time. The work that you're advocating for is mostly busy work. At some point, productivity will reach a point where the only way to have full employment will be to either pay people to move boxes from one side of the warehouse and back over and over again or cut people's hours down to something that reflects the time necessary to do the work.
If it's all "busy work", then you don't have productivity gains by definition. I find this cognitive dissonance intriguing where the more useless we make people's labor somehow the more useful work they do! Maybe we should reconsider who is the "dumbass" here?
And of course, you gloss over my quite relevant observation that devaluing human labor is just going to shift the wealth of society even further to the people whose wealth is not dependent on labor, namely, those mega-wealthy.
And BTW, food, shelter, clothing, transportation and medical care is most of what most people actually want. Everything else is more or less entertainment and leisure time. There's absolutely no reason why we can't provide people with that with a 20 hour work week. It would just require the rich to only be very wealthy rather than mega-wealthy.
If only we didn't have behavior of real people to sully your worldview!