I must admit that I’m a TGIM—Thank God It’s Monday—kind of guy. Sure, the weekends are nice, and I get to do things I don’t have time for during the week. But I wake up early Monday ready to go.
I like the routine of work, and I enjoy interacting with my workmates. And because I’m in education, the knowledge that I’m making a real difference in the lives of young people gives me great satisfaction.
Yes, I really enjoy my job. I guess I’m just odd that way. After all, we all know that most people hate their jobs and would quit in a heartbeat if only they could.
At least, that’s what we’ve been told. The trope of the unhappy employee who finally gets the chance to tell their boss what they really think as they proclaim, “I quit!” is common in movies and on TV. And certainly, we all know people who are disillusioned with their jobs. I once had a colleague who greeted me each morning with a number—that is, the number of days left until he could retire.
If you enjoy your job, like I do, you probably feel yourself in the minority. This is especially true if you listen to many voices in the media. For instance, there was a lot of reporting on the “Great Resignation” when society reopened after COVID-19. According to many media analyses, people were quitting their jobs in record numbers because they’d had enough mistreatment from their employers and weren’t going to take any more.
While this story fits the trope of the unhappy worker, Canadian sociologists Paul Glavin and Scott Schieman argue in an article they recently published in the journal Social Psychology Quarterly that this isn’t the right explanation for the Great Resignation.
Instead of quitting their miserable jobs and leaving the workforce, people were leaving jobs they were reasonably satisfied with for even better opportunities. That is, it wasn’t so much the Great Resignation as it was the Great Career Advancement. But good news doesn’t garner as many clicks or sell as many ads as bad news, so many media outlets pushed the story of the disgruntled workforce instead.
As evidence to support their contention that the Great Resignation was actually a collective move upward, Glavin and Schieman examined survey data on job satisfaction in the United States for the last two decades. In every year between 2002 and 2022, more than 80% of surveyed American workers said they were either “very satisfied” or “somewhat satisfied” with their job, and no more than 10% were “not too satisfied” or “not at all satisfied.” From these data, it doesn’t seem that job satisfaction took a dive after COVID-19, as many media outlets would have you believe.
Indeed, it appears that the vast majority of Americans actually like their work. However, those same people who said they were satisfied with their own job also believed that most people were dissatisfied with theirs. So why the disconnect? Glavin and Schieman blame it to a large extend on the media, which pushes the myth of the unhappy worker, but they think that other social influences are at play as well.
First, it’s quite common for the general population to hold beliefs about the attitudes of others that are not true. Psychologists even have a name for it—we call it pluralistic ignorance. It’s pluralistic in the sense that it involves many people, and it’s ignorant in the sense that it’s a false belief.
Pluralistic ignorance can lead us to believe that our views are more unique than they really are. For instance, surveys show that most people are concerned about climate change and support measures to curb it. At the same time, they also believe that most people aren’t as concerned about the climate as they are. Thus, we as a society make little progress on this issue not because we individually lack the will but rather because we collectively believe that others do.
There’s no question that media outlets have a great influence on the way we think about things and may distort the way we perceive the world around us. In other blog posts, I warn my readers not to believe what they see on TV or social media. Their purpose is to entertain, not to educate, so you need to take everything you hear or read with a grain of salt.
Another way that we gain information about the world around us, especially our social world, is through our interactions with others. Most day-to-day conversations are “gossip,” in the sense that they relay information about other people and their likes, dislikes, and behaviors. So, if we chat frequently with our coworkers, shouldn’t we get the sense that they enjoy their jobs, just like we do?
This question led Glavin and Schieman to speculate that people who interact frequently with their coworkers would be less likely to buy into the myth of the unhappy worker than those who had fewer social interactions in the office. This is exactly what the data showed.
Those respondents who had frequent interactions with their coworkers were less likely to believe that most workers were unsatisfied with their jobs than were those who only had infrequent coworker interactions. Furthermore, those who worked from home, even when they were quite happy with their own job, were much more likely to believe that most other people were unhappy with theirs. This finding demonstrates the great extent to which our perceptions of the world are shaped by social influences.
On further thought, perhaps it should come as no surprise that most people are satisfied with their jobs, since our occupation is an important part of our sense of self. Whether the job is interesting or not, high paying or not, we need to tell ourselves that what we are doing is meaningful and is making some kind of contribution to society. In the end, perhaps it’s not the job that makes us satisfied, but rather we like whatever job we have because it’s such an integral part of who we are.
