Takers of initiative at work had better check with their bosses

Consider a breakfast of bacon and eggs,” begins a metaphor for workplace motivation I first heard in the late aughts. “The chicken was involved. The pig was committed.”

For years, employers have extolled the benefits of deep employee commitment that goes far beyond mere involvement. The post-Great Recession economic expansion of the US seemed to accelerate the trend. But what happens to this model of employee motivation when times get leaner? We might be seeing it now.

Since the pandemic, tensions have flared between employees and executives, with middle managers caught in the crossfire. We see employees resisting orders they don’t like; advocating for new corporate policies; and pushing companies to take political stands they support. And we see CEOs pushing back, or quietly hoping that if they can just avoid a leadership gaffe that goes viral, everyone will soon move on and get back to work.

What’s driving the employee rebellion in the US? A purely economic view suggests it’s the shifting labour market: When jobs are hard to fill, employees can make more demands. Political polarization across society also could be stirring things up at work. If everything is political now, work must be, too.

Those explanations aren’t wrong, but they are incomplete. They overlook the decades-long shift in how employees are managed and motivated: by being encouraged to think like co-owners of the business and derive satisfaction from having an impact or making a “dent in the universe.”

But it turns out that this is a double-edged sword. When employees feel like owners, they take more initiative—and also have opinions on how the place should be run. That has made life complicated for bosses, some of whom are frustrated about having so many decisions questioned.

Today, employee motivation is largely seen as an individual project, according to Maja Korica, a professor at Warwick Business School in the UK. Under this model, a boss is no longer in charge of inspiring you; and your commitment to work should be driven by personal fulfilment, not something as gauche as money.

Salary of course plays a role in employee satisfaction, but it’s what organizational scholars call a “hygiene factor”—table stakes. What matters more are the intangible things employees get from work, like meaning, mentoring and learning, says Jennifer Moss, a workplace culture strategist and author of The Burnout Epidemic. And people have taken to heart the counsel to bring their whole selves to work, to act like an entrepreneur. A cynic could point out that there’s an obvious cost savings to companies that embrace this attitude: Executives can get away with paying their workers less and demanding more from them—more work on evenings and weekends, say, with more productivity squeezed from each waking hour. An employee’s devotion to such an important cause shouldn’t waver just because the calendar says it’s Saturday.

Despite potential for overwork, plenty of employees have found this arrangement appealing; it feels good to fulfil your talents and potential. The “do this because we pay you” attitude is belittling; it especially rankles the expectations of educated professionals who have been told all their lives to “do what you love” and “find your passion” —and then were hired ostensibly to exercise their judgement and autonomy. Both employers and employees are now rethinking the terms of this unspoken deal, which is why we’re seeing tensions erupt.

Perhaps by now the scales have fallen from everyone’s eyes on startups that promise to save the world. But many still count on their employers to at least not make the world worse. And the most engaged employees still expect some degree of learning, meaning, mentoring and autonomy.

To the extent that younger workers tend to have especially high standards for their employers—that they expect bosses to walk their talk—doesn’t mean they’re spoilt or snowflakes. It reflects the fact that they have spent whole careers working under this model. Expecting them to be motivated by “do it because we pay you” or “our job is to create shareholder value” is a little bit like asking a TV audience accustomed to full-colour 4K to be satisfied with cathode-ray black-and-white.

The tension between self-actualized employees and frustrated bosses isn’t likely to go away. Instead of pushing back or hoping it will evaporate, executives should accept it and figure out how to manage it. Because they probably don’t find the alternative—paying employees a lot more and allowing workers to be merely involved instead of supremely committed—very appetizing. 

Sarah Green Carmichael is a Bloomberg Opinion editor.