Motivational Incongruence and Well-Being at the Workplace
journal.frontiersin.org
Motivational Incongruence and Well-Being at the Workplace
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Re: Motivational Incongruence and Well-Being at the Workplace
#2I 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't focus and think about problems in that setting.
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's wrong with your work environment.
Re: Motivational Incongruence and Well-Being at the Workplace
#3I 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't focus and think about problems in that setting. 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's wrong with your work envi…
I also left a job due to pair programming. That company pair programmed 100% of the time. It concerns me that might become a norm. I wrote a blog post on why I think that's a bad idea: http://www.mattgreer.org/articles/pair-programming-is-not-a-...
Re: Motivational Incongruence and Well-Being at the Workplace
#4The title is sensationalist. They found correlational evidence to link their measures of "motivational incongruence" with burnout and physical symptoms. It was NOT causal.
They also did not test or control for anything. No tests of stress, social support or anything else that could mediate these effects.
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.
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.
Re: Motivational Incongruence and Well-Being at the Workplace
#5I 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't focus and think about problems in that setting. 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's wrong with your work envi…
I also left a job due to pair programming. That company pair programmed 100% of the time. It concerns me that might become a norm. I wrote a blog post on why I think that's a bad idea: http://www.mattgreer.org/articles/pair-programming-is-not-a-...
Thanks for writing this. I particularly like the suggested desk arrangement -- although I'm not sure I can see it catching on given that pairing is often coupled with long tables in open-plan offices.
Once upon a time, I thought programming was an introvert-friendly career. That seems to be changing fast.
Re: Motivational Incongruence and Well-Being at the Workplace
#6I'm not sure how much this advice will be heeded.
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.
You see this in Agile, Kanban etc methods of work where personal development is completely subjugated to the needs of the project.
Insofar as a guiding principle behind the work does exist, that too tends to be subsumed under 'The Project': 'We're excited about building the future of work!'
In more than one company I've worked with, even drawing attention to an article like this would be seen as raising your head above the parapet. It's completely the wrong attitude.
Until we start measuring employee performance in new ways and asking different questions of managers, we'll continue to see burnout being viewed as an 'acceptable cost'.
Re: Motivational Incongruence and Well-Being at the Workplace
#7I 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't focus and think about problems in that setting. 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's wrong with your work envi…
I had a similar experience that made me quit my last job, but for me it was being in an open plan office. I just found that I felt constantly under someones gaze, and I couldn't look around without looking someone in the eye. It was a low level stress like yours, and was really uncomfortable when trying to work through problems. For example I find closing my eyes helps me visualise a process in my head, but then someone sat nearby would see that and use it as a cue to talk to me 'oh are you stuck on something?.. yada yada yada'.
Re: Motivational Incongruence and Well-Being at the Workplace
#8I 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.
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 "reward channels".
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's basically suboptimal reward, when considering rewards in all their complexity.
Here is a more complete inventory of basic needs (reward channels):
Re: Motivational Incongruence and Well-Being at the Workplace
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also left a job due to pair programming. That company pair programmed 100% of the time. It concerns me that might become a norm. I wrote a blog post on why I think that's a bad idea: http://www.mattgreer.org/articles/pair-programming-is-not-a-...
Thanks for writing this. I particularly like the suggested desk arrangement -- although I'm not sure I can see it catching on given that pairing is often coupled with long tables in open-plan offices. Once upon a time, I thought programming was an introvert-friendly career. That seems to be changing fast.
I guess they want to get rid of the deep-thinking reflective introverts.
Re: Motivational Incongruence and Well-Being at the Workplace
#10Has the concept of "unconscious needs" 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.