More To That

The Riddle of the Well-Paying, Pointless Job

This baffling paradox is the leading cause for today’s restless workplace

Illustrations: More To That

Work without pay is not a job, but work without motivation can certainly be one.

This distinction between money and motivation is glaring, yet most employers structure their organizations as if the two things are synonymous. Each step up the corporate ladder comes with an associated increase in pay, and our motives for working have led to a chicken-or-egg situation.

So what comes first: The desire for more money, or the desire to do better work?

We like to believe that the desire for self-improvement is innate, and that natural selection has sculpted us in a manner where betterment is the goal with everything we touch. Sadly, it doesn’t appear to be that way.

The desire to improve ourselves is not spread across the entirety of our lives. It’s mainly contained to a few areas that we want to actively pursue, sometimes to the detriment of other important areas in life. You can be an awesome employee in your company, but be an indifferent father once you get home. On the flip side, you can be a phenomenal father, but be an indifferent employee once you get in the office.

It’s the latter scenario that economists and psychologists have addressed over and over again over the last five decades or so. How can we transform an indifferent employee into a motivated one?

In 1976, economists Michael Jensen and William Meckling published a paper that seemed to definitively answer this question. In it, they concluded that executive pay must be directly tied to company performance — if the company did well, so would its leaders. This would result in an alignment of incentives since the interests of the executives would match up with the interests of company shareholders.