Motivational Incongruence and Well-Being at the Workplace

Yeah I have expereined this very thing at work right now, but the great thing about being a human is you can change and adapt at the face of adversity. In my case it was either get fired&#x2F;quit spend a month or two getting a new job and hear it from my wife or suck it up and be the person myorganization wants me to be -- it wasn&#x27;t that hard at the end of the day because I get paid handsomly, get to sit in an air conditioned room with a comfortable chair (they even got a standing desk for me)great benefits, get to put food on the table, have clean water to drink, you know.. something 90% of the rest of the world will never get to experience.<p>My answer to these situations is to humble yourself. Now of course I am not saying the other option is &quot;wrong&quot; especially if it is just as easy for you to find an accommodating workplace but at the end of the day you are paid to do a job, not have all your feelings babysitted. If you find your workplace is stressing you out, go talk to a therapist (or close friend who understands you, spouse, etc) and see if you can identify ways to overcome it. If not, then maybe consider the switch.<p>I know this will get downvoted here because it sounds very &quot;conservative pull up your bootstraps&quot;-esque

I quit a job when I felt burnout developing. The cause? Pair programming. I just cannot that close to someone for the majority of the workday without feeling constant low-level stress and annoyance, and I can&#x27;t focus and think about problems in that setting.<p>When you have to sit in your car for 15 minutes every morning just to summon the resolve to get out and go into the office, something&#x27;s wrong with your work environment.

I&#x27;m not sure how much this advice will be heeded.<p>In a lot of places in tech, there seems to be a culture where companies are more concerned about maximizing units of work at the expense of more intangible factors.<p>You see this in Agile, Kanban etc methods of work where personal development is completely subjugated to the needs of the project.<p>Insofar as a guiding principle behind the work does exist, that too tends to be subsumed under &#x27;The Project&#x27;: &#x27;We&#x27;re excited about building the future of work!&#x27;<p>In more than one company I&#x27;ve worked with, even drawing attention to an article like this would be seen as raising your head above the parapet. It&#x27;s completely the wrong attitude.<p>Until we start measuring employee performance in new ways and asking different questions of managers, we&#x27;ll continue to see burnout being viewed as an &#x27;acceptable cost&#x27;.

I wrote a blog entry about something similar -- but trying to take it back one level and understand why do certain managers go to the trouble of hiring people only to plug them into physical environments that are demonstrably toxic for human beings (not merely introverts v. extraverts, but for almost any human in general).<p>Sadly, I think it&#x27;s just age-old politics. You&#x27;re hired for the political effects it has on your boss -- including looking like a l33t h4x0r in your violently-collaborative open plan office doing Agile. Kills productivity and morale, but managers &amp; executives aren&#x27;t compensated for actually producing anything, so it doesn&#x27;t matter. And HR&#x27;ll always spin some other story about turnover because the one thing they have to avoid at all costs is actually providing a healthy workplace.<p>[0] &lt; <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;suitdummy.blogspot.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;05&#x2F;why-hire-underemployment-autonomy-and.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;suitdummy.blogspot.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;05&#x2F;why-hire-underemployme...</a> &gt;

The title is sensationalist. They found correlational evidence to link their measures of &quot;motivational incongruence&quot; with burnout and physical symptoms. It was NOT causal.<p>They also did not test or control for anything. No tests of stress, social support or anything else that could mediate these effects.<p>Their measure of implicit motivation is also a little rough: they had raters count the number of, for example, affiliation sentences used to describe a picture of a trapeze artist. More sentences equals an unconscious need for affiliation.<p>In the end, they found that if either of two motivational orientations (power and affiliation) are not being met, we are a little more likely to report symptoms of burnout. Interesting, but very preliminary. And it could be totally subsumed by other personality or stress variables.

I came to the same conclusion based on an analogy. Humans learn behavior by reinforcement learning, just like AI agents. Reinforcement learning is maximizing rewards by picking the right actions, given the current situation and internal state.<p>Now, humans have a number of inborn reward systems, such as connection (belonging, community, empathy), physical well being (food, sleep), play, autonomy, meaning (competence, efficiency), creativity. So the human reward is the sum of the individual &quot;reward channels&quot;.<p>When focused on solving a single problem, there is a tendency to optimize only for part of this multi-part reward function, to the detriment of others. This is the cause of burnout. It&#x27;s basically suboptimal reward, when considering rewards in all their complexity.<p>Here is a more complete inventory of basic needs (reward channels):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnvc.org&#x2F;Training&#x2F;needs-inventory" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnvc.org&#x2F;Training&#x2F;needs-inventory</a>

I&#x27;ve never understood why companies don&#x27;t have a mix of environments so that each person can choose what works best for them. Allow options for an open floor plan area, a closed floor plan area, and remote work. My PhD advisor didn&#x27;t care if I worked in my office, from home, or from the top of a volcano as long as I got the research done that he wanted each week (turns out I tend to work best in coffee shops).

Can someone re-word the abstract in layman&#x27;s terms? I had to google what &quot;motivational incongruence&quot; was.<p>My partial interpretation attempt:<p>Employees who did not feel like they fit into the culture of the workplace (affiliation motive) led to high job burnout. And people who didn&#x27;t satisfy their need to have an impact on others, and gain respect and reputation (power motive), predicted increased physical symptoms.

Has the concept of &quot;unconscious needs&quot; been scientifically characterized and validated? The term seems to be used with some frequency in the literature, but mostly mentioned in passing and not as a central component of the phenomenon being studied.

1. I know it is tough collecting data, but a sample size of 97? It seems like there are a number of larger organizations that would be interested in participating in such a study if kept anonymous, and I really start to wonder about conclusions based on such small sample sizes, especially if it was only done at a single company or in a single geographic region.<p>Culture between companies and between geographic regions can be <i>really</i> different. For example, if you performed this study in Mumbai in a company where all of those involved in the study were die-hard workers that didn&#x27;t believe in burnout, that would have seriously skewed the results and they still might have looked good statistically.<p>2. While it&#x27;s evident to many that have been working several years or more that people tend to get promoted even when they&#x27;d be happier in lower non-managerial positions, and that promotion can end in unhappiness or burnout, what wasn&#x27;t mentioned in the study is whether you really <i>want</i> power-hungry people in management positions just because it would be a better fit for their motivations.<p>I had some piss-poor managers that loved power and for them it was a good personality fit.<p>It might be better in many situations to have someone that doesn&#x27;t want the power, is knowledgeable of the job of those they are managing, is well-respected, and is a great leader to lead for some years and burnout or leave than it would be to have a power-hungry imbecile with no respect from their team leading for many years because they are a good personality fit.<p>That said, I think that if you can find someone that is both a good personality fit and a great fit as a leader of the team, then that&#x27;s better than promoting someone that will burnout, but only as long as it is just information used for decision between candidates and not a determining factor.

&quot;Individual needs and environment supplies were assessed in an online survey of full time employees (n = 97), using a picture story exercise measuring implicit motives and a scale listing affiliation and power related job characteristics&quot;<p>Is 97 respondents to an online survey enough to be statistically significant?

It&#x27;s kind of funny, but when you talk to a lot of fellow worker drones, who lack the kind of free will required to accurately describe their own motivations for holding down a job, most will continuously describe burnout as being at fault and getting fired during a moment when they failed the company.<p>Like:<p><pre><code> Oh boo hoo, I suffered burnout this one time because I was so incompetant. Good on my boss for firing me when I deserved it! </code></pre> Most worker drones with attitudes like this usually cannot or will not describe their core motivations for maintaining employment (power motives, according to the article) as &quot;needing to pay rent&quot; or something similarly compulsory. Maybe it&#x27;s just too awful too think in such bleak terms.<p>But this article points to an interesting symmetry of blame: the workers beats themselves up, and the employers express absurd, overbearing demands, or some combination of the two. Worst case scenarios being the blind leading the blind.<p>You rarely see articles that provide a cold look at employer&#x2F;employee relationships, and explore scenarios where emotional investment is optional on both sides of the table.

We updated the link from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedaily.com&#x2F;releases&#x2F;2016&#x2F;08&#x2F;160811171643.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedaily.com&#x2F;releases&#x2F;2016&#x2F;08&#x2F;160811171643.h...</a>, which points to a Eureka article which points to this.

I think its quite obvious that burnout comes from overdoing youreself, hardly an unconscious feeling.