a new ethic for work

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A NEW ETHIC FOR WORK?

THE WORTH ETHIOBarry Z. Posner W. Alan Randolph and Max S. Wortman Jr.

The American business community is faced witha numher of very serious problems. Not only arecompanies encountering double-digit inflation, en-ergy shortages, and recession, hut their managersare confronted with understanding today's workforce which, despite high levels of unemployment,has hecome alienated from the tedium of the workplace. Symptomatic of this are high rates of workerahsenteeism, tardiness, and turnover, industrialsabotage, worker apathy, and decreasing rates ofindustrial efficiency and productivity.

To solve these problems managers need to under-stand the fundamental changes which have takenplace in workers' attitudes and values, as well asthe role of work in today's society. T h e old-fashioned work ethic notion is no longer an adequ ate ex-planation of worker motivation. Indeed, the work

ethic as a way of descrihing society's view of workis on the verge of losing its meaning and utility.

It is our hypothesis that the meaning of work hasevolved through what appears to he a cyclicalprocess: heg innin g with little differentiation between working and not-working, moving through aperiod of rather marked distinctions hetween thetwo activities, and now evolving again toward anage where it will be difficult to distinguish hetween work and non-work. ^ Th is evolution has madethe usefulness of the work ethic concept question-

able and has brought us to the threshold of a poten-tially new understanding of the role of work in oursociety. This new understanding of work is con-ceptualized as the W orth E thic and is a key tomaking sense of the prohlems facing today's man-agers.

1 By work activities, we mean efforts to produce goods orservices for business, government, and not-for-profit organiza-tions.

By non-work activities, we mean things like: leisure,recreation, travel, education, hobbies, and participation incitizen-oriented groups and voluntary associations.

In this paper we hegin by defining two key con-cepts—the work ethic and the worth ethic. Thenwe briefly review the evolution of the role of workin society from primitive times to the present. Nextwe consider the psychological functions of workand review some recent empirical research whichsupports the worth ethic concept. Finally, we dis-cuss the future implications of the worth ethic andoffer some suggestions which managers may finduseful in solving their most pressing problems.

The Work thic and the Role of W ork

The work ethic has provided a powerful statementto tie together the prevailing socio-economic systemsof the times. In its most general sense, the workethic has held that work in and of itself wasvaluahle, and that through work, the individualwould be a better person and be a success in life.The work ethic has heen presented as a way to stayout of trouble, while huilding character and virtue.The payoff has heen in terms of a hetter standardof living, especially for each succeeding generation.

There may, however, he some readers who douhtthat such a thing as the work ethic ever existed,especially at lower socioeconomic levels. In fact,there is little factual data that blue collar workershave ever consciously acknowledged a work ethic.Yet, while the work ethic may not have won over

the minds of workers, it certainly had an impact.'''For those who set national policy and estahlishedentreprenurial directions for the country did so (andcontinue to do so) upon the assumption of a workethic principle among the working class. Indeed,today many impo rtant national issues—such as socialwelfare programs, economic recovery plans, andwage-price controls—hinge on assumptions surroun d-ing the role of work in our society.

- Sebastian de Grazia, Of Time Work and Leisure;New York; The 20th Century Fund, Inc., 1962, p. 164.

Human Resource Management Fall 1975 15



The significance of the work ethic has relied substantially on being able to differentiate work fromother time-consuming activities. However, techno-logical and cultural advances are bringing about a

society where the distinctions betwee n work and non-work are breaking down. In this situation,the work etbic becomes a meaningless notion forevaluating the use of one's time. We contend thatthe worth ethic may soon take the place of the workethic in determining the role of work.

W h a t s the Worth Ethic

The worth ethic holds that people have worth byvirtue of being buman beings and not by virtue ofsome activity such as work, education, travel, orany other activity in wbicb one migbt engage. Itbreaks down tbe traditional distinctions betweentime engaged in typical work activities and timeengaged in non-work activities. The wortb ethichas as its rationale and purpose the creation anddevelopment of bealtby and mature individuals, asopposed to the immature person wbo is passive,dependent, apathetic, destructive, and rebellious.

The worth etbic maintains tbat work should and

can:—facilitate self-growth and development—enhance the use of unique skills and ideas

—encourage creativity and learning—provide opportunities to interact with others

—allow the individual opportunity to influencetbe policies, goals, and procedures of tbe worksetting

—be non-exploitative

—contribute to the quality of the society

The worth ethic states that a person's work shouldprovide opportunities for personal growth andachievement. What this concept suggest is an ethicof greater individual accountability for tbe use ofone's time, energy, and resources. It means beingindependent, active, and responsible. Moreover, bythe worth ethic, value will adhere only to workwhich the individual defines for himself or berselfas meaningful. And meaningful work will be tboseactivities wbich contribute to an individual's sens

of dignity and self-fulfillment as a human being. Inother words, one does not work merely because ofsocietal expectations, familial responsibilities, orreligious beliefs, but because one bas worth as ahuman being and can make a significant contribution to the society as a whole through work.

Evolution of the Role of Work

The role of work as indicated by the worth ethic hasdeveloped via an evolutionary process. Over timwork has played significantly different roles in vari

ous cultures and civilizations. From its initial role inprimitive cultures when it was viewed as being

lo w

high

FIGURE 1Major Themes Surrounding the Meaning of Work

MAN ASPHYSICAL ENERGY

as an atonementand means

of charitv

MAN ASGUIDER OF TOOLS

necessary asremedy for

temptation

MAN ASORGANIZER

as right andduty and means

o salvation

MAN ASMENTAL ENERGY

questioned^activity

. as as play

Primitive AncientCivilization

EarlyChristianity

MedievalChristianity

Reformation IndustrialRevolution

20th Present Future

16 A New Ethic for Work The Worth EthicTIME



as natu ral as play to its future role wh en it may beviewed again as being as natu ral as play, it hasprogressed through may different stages (see figure1). The following nine states indicate the evolutionof the role of work in different societies.

• Primitive cultures seemed to make no distinctionsbetween work and free time. In fact, their languagesoften used the same words for work and playbecause the majority of their time was spent in pro-viding for basic needs.

• Ancient civilizations like the Egyptians, Greeks,Romans, and Incas all believed work to be a curse.Th ey though t of work as manu al labor which was tobe performed by slaves. Otherwise, a citizen's timeshould be spent in scientific, liberal arts, or sportingpursuits. As a result, a distinction between workand non-work activities began to emerge.

• Early Christianity placed a positive value onwork as a way of attaining riches to share with thepoor and as a way to avoid idleness which wouldlead to evil thou ghts. St. Pau l preach ed: Th eman who will not work shall not eat. '' The earlyChristians directed their energies toward organizingthe Church and classified this work as an instru-

ment of purification and atonement.• Medieval Christianity in the form of the Catho-lic Church preached that work was good becauseit was painful, humiliating, and a remedy for temp-tations of the Resh. Th is notion fu rther reinforcedthe early Church's concept of work as an atone-ment for sin.

Work became the natural right and duty of allas long as it fit into a plan organized by God— acalling. To this end, St. Thom as Aquinas drewup a hierarchy of professions which said that work

was a necessity of nature. However, work still hadto have a moral goal, such as charity, because theChurch would not allow it to become an end initself.

• The Reformation and the religious revolutionof the sixteenth century gave work a value in andof itself. Simultaneously, a decline of the differen-

tiation between work and non-work began. Luthermaintained that work was the universal base ofsociety. He made no distinctions between religiouswork and other types of work as long as both weredone in obedience to God. As the Calvinists pointedout, work was not only punishment for originalsin, but more importantly, was a God-given oppor-tunity for people to be creative and establish anew life.

• The Industrial Revolution brought with it a neweconomic order and an almost insatiable demandfor workers. Th e num ber of legitimate callings,now termed occupations, increased dramatically.

The accumulation of the fruits of one's work wasa measure of a person's piety as well as a mark ofhis/her cleverness, skill and creativity.

• Twentieth century America seemed to furtherseparate the concept of work from religious doctrineand accorded work a special status in life. Workbecame the self-expression of people.* The impor-tance of work was dramatized during the develop-ment of the Labor Movement, and with the arrivalof the Great Depression, having a job became amajor obsession. In a 1971 Labor Day address.

President N ixon stated: I would like you to joinme in exploring one of the basic elements that givescharacter to a people . . . most simply and directlyit is called the 'work ethic' As the name implies,the work ethic holds that labor is good in itself

that a man or woman at work not only makes acontribution to his fellow man but becomes a betterperson by virtue of the act of working. ^

• Today the meaning of work has become increas-ingly hazy and ambiguous. For example, the OxfordEnglish Dictionary has nine pages of definitions onthe word work. Presently, we seem to work ateverythin g w e do —even relaxing. M oreover, thedifferentiation of work from non-work activities islargely quixotic. For many people, work as definedby the work ethic has become a questionable activitydue to technological and cultural changes; forexample, changing definitions of success, lesseningfears of economic insecurity, diminishing sexual

Joint Committee on the New Translation of the Bible,The New English Bible: The New Testament, 2nd ed.,Cambridge, MA and Oxford, England; Cambridge Univer-sity Press and Oxford University Press, 1970, p. 355.

* Adriano Tilgher, Homo F aher: Work Through theAges; (1930), trans., Dorothy Canfleld Fisher, Chicago,Illinois; Henry Regnery Company, 1958, p. 134.

New York Times, September 7, 1971 , p. 14.

Hum an Resource Ma nagement, Fall, 1975 17



division of jobs, increasing educational competen-cies, and growing doubts about the ideals of effi-

ciency.

The Function of Work Today

As a result of the new worth ethic, workers, par-ticularly women and youth, are placing muchgreater demands upon work. They are taking theirlives and means of making a living more, not less,seriously than workers did before them. Their ex-pectation is that work is an integral part of one'stotal life. Hence, work should be of greater signifi-cance to the individual and of greater value to

society than m erely a necessary evil.Work has played and continues to play a crucialpsychological function in the development of anindividual's sense of esteem and self-identity. Be-cause working for a living is one of the basic activi-ties of a person's life, it is not unusual for mostpeople to describe themselves in relation to thework organization or work groups to which theybelong. Hence, being a success or failure at workhas easily been transformed into a measure of beinga valuable or worthless human being. The worthethic challenges this role of work as a bestower of

human value and dignity.

It is not likely that the workplace will continue tobe the exclusive focus for personal evaluation andfeedback. Non-work activities as well wall providethe individual with a sense of personal competencyin exercising judgment and achieving results. Bothwork and non-work can say to the worker thathe/she has something to offer which is valued byothers and by society. Workers are becoming in-creasingly articulate and aware of their needs andinherent worth as human beings. They want jobs

which recognize this, too.

Recent Studies of Wo rker ttitudes

The worth ethic concept is supported by a numberof recent empirical investigations of worker atti-tudes. Study after study point out that workersare seeking activities which confirm their dignityand worth.

• The Survey of Working Conditions conductedby the University of Michigan Survey Researc

Center asked a representative sample of workerat all occupational levels to rank various aspecof their work. They placed highest values on sucaspects as:'

(1) Interesting work(2) Enough help and equipment to get the jodone(3) Enough information to get the job done(4) Enough authority to get the job done

(5) Good pay(6) Opportunity to develop special abilities(7) Job security(8) Seeing the results of one's work

• A national attitude study of college students bDaniel Yankelovich revealed that today's youth aexpecting a great deal of intrinsic reward fromwork. Students ranked the opportunity to make contribution, job challenge, and the chance find self-expression as the highest items inflencing their career choices.*

• A social-psychological study of the work orient

tions of welfare recipients by Leonard Goodwof the Brookings Institution unambiguously suported the conclusion that work has the sammeaning among the poor and welfare recipienthat it has for the middle-class and employed idividuals.°

• Stanley Seashore and Thad J. Barnowe havreported (using data from the Survey of WorkingConditions that the symptoms popularly associatewith Blue-colar workers are neither a consequenof collar color, nor of sex, age, income status, or a

combination of these traits; but are associated withe individuals' conditions of life at work. Thobserved that the potent factors which impinge othe worker's worth ethic were those that concehis self-respect, a chance to perform well in hwork, a chance for personal achievement and grow

Daniel Yankelovich, Turbulence in the WorkingWorld: Angry Workers, Happy Grads, sychology Today,Vol. 8, No. 7, December 1974, pp. 81-87.

Special Task Force to the Secretary of He alth, E duction and Welfare, Work in America; Cambridge, MA; MIPress; 1972; p. 13.

Ibid, p. 45.° Leonard Goodwin, Do the oor Want to Work?; Wash

ington, D.C.; The Brookings Institution, 1972.

18 A New Ethic for Work? The W orth Ethic



in competence, and a chance to contribute some-thing personal and unique to his work. ^°

W ha t these research findings seem to dem onstrateis that people's interests in their work extend farbeyond concerns about salary, working conditions,and security. Indeed, as the American workerreaches the point where materially there is notmuch more to get out of a job, he/she will bemotivated to look for something else in work. Asthe worth ethic suggests, this some thing elsefrom the work-place will probably come from agreater degree of responsibility, achievement, feed-

back, participation, and a higher measure of self

respect and sense of worthfulness.

Using the W orth thic to Understond Workers

With the advent of the worth ethic, the role ofwork will have come full circle—the distinctionbetween work and play will become unimportant,as it was for primitive man. Although the workethic has served a purpose in the past, it is be-coming increasingly less useful as a device for organ-izing one's life, for evaluating the use of time, orfor developing broad domestic policies.

Inherent in the work ethic concept is the paradoxof working as the only legitimate way of passingtime and the desire for the abundance of materialgoods which take time for their use and enjoyment.Glearly, the work ethic encourages people to organ-ize their lives around their work and promises themrewards for satisfactory performance (e.g., an in-creased standard of living). But at the same time,by working longer hours, they have less time toenjoy the fruits of their labors. To many, the choiceof either extreme is unsatisfactory. Some type of

balance between work and non-work must beachieved.

Through the worth ethic concept, an improvedunderstanding of the nature of work and thelegitimization of non-work is possible. W e m ayindeed be returning to an era when work is asnatural as play' and both have legitimacy. Theworth ethic provides that people have worth as

hu m an beings regardless of the work or non-work activities in which they may be engaged.

In terms of work, the worth ethic will providemanagers and workers with a clearer understandingof why people work, wh at drives and needs peoplehave in work and non-work activities, and howpeople interact with each other in these activities.In having a clearer definition of work under thisconcept, people at all levels in an organizationwould no longer have guilt feelings about takingtime off from th eir jobs for some non-w orkactivity. Furthermore, organizations would be more

likely to understand the necessity for the use ofparticipative management concepts and new meth-ods of motivating employees on the job.

In terms of non-work, the worth ethic stressesthe need for all types of workers to appreciate otherlegitimate uses of time which allow an individualto realize one's potential capacities. Such otheruses of time are not only recreational, but avoca-tional as well. Far too few citizens are engagedin the activities of their communities because theyare tied too closely to their jobs. Yet many of thedecisions made by gov ern m en ts, non-for-profitorganizations, and pressure groups are those whichultimately affect a business.

Utilizing a similar concept of non-work, the editorsof The Dynamics of Change concluded:

One scans the horizon of two decades aheadand sees the almost inevitable collision of greatforces . . . one of the results of that collision willalmost certainly be a society in which some otherethic than the sanctity of work will have to he

In its most ideal sense, the worth ethic breaks downthe value distinctions between work and non-work.It vigorously asserts that each human being hasinherent worth regardless of the activities in whichone engages or the labels that come to be used indescribing those activities. It encourages a balancebetween work and non-work activities. It legitimizesthe worth of non-work and places a new perspectiveon the role of work in our society.

1 S tanley Seashore and Thad J. Barnowe, Collar ColorDoesn't Count, Psychology Today Vol. 6, No. 3, August1972, 52-F.

'' Don Fabun, ed.. The Dynamics of Change; Engle-wood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966, Sect. V, p. 17.

Human Resource Management Fall 1975 19



Today s M anag er and the W orth Ethic

As we have argued, the quest today for meaningin our work and the integration of work in our

total lives suggest that the work ethic is evolvinginto a new moral value—the worth ethic. Managerscannot ignore this development if they hope toaffect the current economic/productivity morass.

Today's better educated, more secure, and often liberated workers expect that work should morefully utilize the whole person, rather than justparts of his/her skills and abilities. Additionally,they expect to have more control over and to beinvolved with making the decisions which affectthem in th eir jobs. A fair day's work for a fairday's wage takes on a new definition in this light.Managers cannot expect workers to be happy andsatisfied, nor very creative and productive in jobswhich demand a fair day's work plus loss of emo-tional stability and loss of a part of their intellectin return for a fair day's pay. Such work does notacknowledge the worth of human beings.

Some ways in which the manager can operational-ize the concepts embodied in the worth ethic areby increasing the worker's sense of responsibilityand sphere of control, as well as by including themin the planning and monitoring of operations.Motivating forces for today's work force involvechallenging work, recognition, participation, andopportunities for growth and achievement.

Suggestions for increasing worker satisfaction andproductivity include:

(1) Increased control over scheduling, both interms of hours on the job and ordering of thetasks performed on the joS.(2) Increased control over resources, includingresponsibilities for cost concerns.

(3) More direct feedback regarding individualperformance; e.g., reeognition of quality andcreative efforts along with assistance where workis not up to standards.

(4) Opening up the channels of communicationso that workers can direct their inputs to theappropriate places without going through severalintermediate stops.(5) Improving overal communications in organi-zations so that individuals can better understandthe relationship between their jobs and the over-all company performance.

(6) Increased personal accountability and moreffective appraisal systems which incorporate more constructive acceptance of error.(7) Incentive schemes tied to high quality production, both on group and individual bases, anrecognition for creative and innovative efforts.(8) Concerted efforts to effectively match peopland jobs and to provide adequate training whernecessary.

Longer term solutions will require the design onew technologies which not only take into accounefficiency requirements and the physical attributeof human assets, but also incorporate worker's needand attitudes into the design.

In any case, effective solutions will be developevia a cooperative effort between management anworkers. This cooperative aspect is essential, because participation and challenge are current workeneeds which traditional, work-ethic organizationhave failed to recognize and satisfy. The worthethic helps to explain the incongruency betweethe needs of today's workers and the requirementof formal organizations. Thus an appreciation othe worth ethic and its implications will be essential to managers in solving the problems facing today's American business community.

Barry Z . Posner

received a master's degree in Public Administration fromthe Ohio State University and is currently pursuing Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior/Theory at the Universitof Massachusetts, Amherst. His graduate study, researcand consulting activities have been in the areas of humaresource development, small-group dynamics, an d the desigof socio-technical systems.

W . Alan Randolph

is an Assistant Professor of Industrial Administration in thSchool of Business Administration, University of Conecticut. His current research interests include the impaof an organization's technology on its human subsystemand the utilization of organization development to creaefficient interfacing of organizational subsystems. He hserved as an organization development consultant to staagencies and has conducted workshops in leadership anorganization development.

M<ix S. Worfmon, Jr.

is a Professor of Industrial Relations and Management ithe School of Business Administration, University of Masachusetts. He is the author of numerous articles and booin the areas of personnel, manpower management and idustrial relations, and he has served as a consultant to boprivate and public organizations.

20 A New Ethic for Worh 1 The Worth Ethic

a new ethic for work

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