Millennials and job satisfaction

Knowledge of the factors which are known to make people happy at work, I think, is a really important topic for career practitioners. There are a couple of great meta-analyses which give a good overview of the personality characteristics and the work factors which have been shown to be associated with higher levels of job satisfaction. But some of these references are 5 – 10 years old and I haven’t found anything very much more recent which paints such a comprehensive a picture of the current set up. I was talking about this at a conference on Friday and some of the delegates were asking about the Millennials and wondered if the factors which they wanted from the work place might be different. I thought this was a great question so have had a bit of a dig around the literature. 

One question is whether this group of workers is actually any different. Millennials are defined as those born between 1980 and 1995 (also known as Gen Y). Kowske, Rasch and Wiley (2010) found that this generation does indeed have different work habits and this seems to make for some culture clashes in the work place. On the one hand, this group are so tech-savvy. They are used to communicating via instant messaging and social media and this kind of communication is responsive and immediate (Cekada, 2012). As well as fast responses, this group of workers demand more feedback from employers and tend to change job more often than their predecessors.  Other studies (Hershatter and Epstein, 2010) have shown that this group of workers have actually led quite protected lives so need extra guidance and support to know how to negotiate and behave in the work place. 

In terms of job satisfaction, there are a lot of similarities in the literature between the factors which are important to Millennials and those found in all-age cohorts. Hays (2014) found no difference in the overall levels of job satisfaction across the ages and the work factors of autonomy, opportunity to grow and develop, and having meaningful work come up regularly in both sets of literature (eg Campione, 2014; Lee, Mullins and Cho, 2016; Roelen et al., 2008; Ruys, 2014,) and Hays (2014) identified the need to ‘feel connected’ with someone which is akin to the associations with ‘colleagues’ found elsewhere. Lee et al. (2016) looked at what Millennials want in a leader and found that a transformational leader is more popular than an authoritative or laissez faire leader. This sounds as though it is similar to previous findings which show that an attentive manager is the style of manager most strongly linked with job satisfaction, followed by an authoritative one, and finally one who pays little attention.

Pay is an interesting one. Lee et al., (2016) and Ruys (2013), both found that Millenials wanted ‘adequate pay’. An all-age meta-analysis of the impact of pay (Judge et al. 2010) a very weak correlation between pay and satisfaction, but it’s hard to know if this is a generational difference, or if the questions are asked differently (perhaps everyone wants ‘adequate’ pay, but increased pay over and above a certain threshold adds little to overall job satisfaction?) 

I found some contradictory evidence for the impact of hours worked. Campione, 2014, who examined data from 1000 Millennials in the US found working more than 50 hours per week was positively correlated with job satisfaction, whereas Ruys (2014) found that work life balance was important. Campione also found that being able to work flexibly was important, and this could provide an explanation to these apparently contradictory piece of evidence – perhaps Millennials like roles where they work hard, as long as they can control when and where they work. 

Campione also found that working for a smaller organisation, and having an older line manager (highly positively correlated) and a regular schedule, pay and sick leave  were weakly correlated with job satisfaction (Campione, 2014).

Overall, I was left thinking that we shouldn’t be making too much of the differences. For the most part, the important things in work are consistent. We all want nice colleagues, an attentive line manage who trusts us to get on with our own work, to feel we are doing something which makes a difference and to feel that we are growing and developing within our work. 

References

Campione, W. A. (2014). The Influence of Supervisor Race, Gender, Age, and Cohort on Millennials' Job Satisfaction. The Journal of Business Diversity, 14(1), 18.

Cekada, T. L. (2012). Training a multigenerational workforce. Professional Safety, 57(3), 40-44.

Hays, D. W. (2014). Examining Differences between Millennial and All Employee Levels of Job Satisfaction and Importance and Satisfaction with the Immediate Supervisor Relationship. International Journal of Managerial Studies and Research, 2(8).

Hershatter, A., & Epstein, M. (2010). Millennials and the world of work: an organization and management perspective. Journal of Business & Psychology, 25(2), 211- 223. doi:10.1007/s10869-

Judge, T.A., Piccolo, R.F., Podsakoff, N.P., Shaw, J.C. and Rich, B.L. (2010) The relationship between pay and job satisfaction: A meta-analysis of the literature Journal of Vocational Behavior 77, 157 – 167

Kowske, B., Rasch, R., & Wiley, J. (2010). Millennials’ (lack of) attitude problem: an empirical examination of generational effects on work attitudes. Journal of Business & Psychology, 25(2), 265279

Lee, C. C., Mullins, K., & Cho, Y. S. (2016). FACTORS AFFECTING JOB SATISFACTION AND RETENTION OF MILLENNIALS. Academy of Organizational Culture, Communications and Conflict, 6.

Roelen, C.A.M, Koopmans, P.C. and Groothoff, J.W. (2008) Which work factors determine job satisfaction Work, 30 433 - 439

Ruys, J. (2013). Leadership behaviors and workplace factors millennial workers find important for job satisfaction and retention (Doctoral dissertation, UNIVERSITY OF LA VERNE).

When Ha ha leads to Aha!: the role of humour in group learning

I have been reading a bit about the role of humour in group learning, and it seems that there is a fair bit of evidence that funny tutors and amusing lectures have a positive impact on the students and their learning.


Humour can help students to feel more relaxed, reducing anxiety, decreasing stress, and improving self-esteem and motivation (Berk, 1998). It creates a positive emotional and social environment which means that students are less likely to be thinking about themselves and more likely to be able to concentrate on the topic (Glenn, 2002) and humour has been described as something which can reduce the 'psychological distance' - either between the lecturer and the students or between the students (Kahn, 1989). I was talking in my last blog post about how important it is to create a connection between the students and the lecturer, and humour seems to be one effective way to do this.

It even has an impact on your body which can help, improving your breathing and circulation, lowering your blood pressure and your pulse, and releasing quantities of oxygen and happy hormones into your blood stream.
 
This has all been shown to have a clear impact on learning, with students who have funny tutors turning up to lectures more often, learning more (Civikly, 1986; Garner, 2006), remembering more (Hill, 1988) being more interested in the topic (Dodge and Rossett, 1982) and being more likely to exhibit creative thinking (Ziv, 1988). 

Taken together, that's quite impressive. Some researchers have gone so far as to suggest that it's such a powerful teaching tool that humour should be used by all teachers, most of the time (Bruner, 2002).

There seems to be some evidence (Rhem, 1998) that for it to be most effective in an academic setting, the humour needs to be specific, targeted and appropriate to the subject matter, and there is some research which has highlighted that funny tutors use quite a lot of self-depricating humour, turning the joke on themselves. Humour is used in a slightly different way in adult learning. With adult students, positive humour is often initiated by students as well as tutors, and the tutors' jokes are intended to show that they identify with their students, showing them as people rather than them as lecturers (Salisbury and Murcott, 1992).

Now, this all needs to come with a bit of a warning. The studies in general have simply asked people to rate how funny a session or tutor was on a scale, but of course what constitutes 'funny' is subjective, and context and culture specific. I don't think the authors are suggesting that we all start our lectures with a series of 'Did you hear the one about...' type jokes, and humour can have the effect of alientating and offending. 

As someone who teaches, and someone who teaches career coaches to teach, I find this all really interesting, but I'm not sure what I should do with it. Should I be teaching my students to be funnier? Is 'being funny' something which you can learn? Or is it just too easy to get it wrong and therefore too risky to try? One of the papers I've listed below (Decker, 2007) argues for teaching to be more 'playful'. I wonder if this is a concept which works better for me than trying to be funny?

References

Berk, R. A., & Nanda, J. P. (1998). Effects of jocular instructional methods on attitudes, anxiety, and achievement in statistics courses. Humor, 11, 383-410.

Bruner, R. F. (2002). Transforming thought: the role of humor in teaching. Available at SSRN 298761
Decker, E. (2007). Q. What’s funny about teaching? A. Not enough! Arguing for a comic pedagogy. Educational Insights, 11(3), 2-12.

Dodge, B. J., & Rossett, A. (1982). Heuristics for humor in instruction. Performance & Instruction, 21(4), 11-32.
Garner, R. L. (2006). Humor in pedagogy: How ha-ha can lead to aha!. College Teaching, 54(1), 177-180.
Glenn, R. (2002). Brain research: Practical applications for the classroom. Teaching for Excellence, 21(6), 1-2.
Kahn, W. A. (1989). Toward a sense of organizational humor: Implications for organizational diagnosis and change. The Journal of applied behavioral science, 25(1), 45-63.
Salisbury, J., & Murcott, A. (1992). Pleasing the students: teachers' orientaton to classroom life in adult education. The Sociological Review, 40(3), 561-575.
Thomas, A. B., & Al-Maskati, H. (1997). I suppose you think that's funny! The role of humour in corporate learning events. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 8(4), 519-538.
Ziv, A. (1988). Teaching and learning with humor: Experiment and replication. The Journal of Experimental Education, 57(1), 4-15.

What makes great teaching?

In preparation for my module on facilitating groups next term, I have been doing a bit of digging around to try and find out what makes a great lecturer. I think the basics of how to train are fairly well documented, but I'm trying to go a bit further and identify the factors that distinguish between a good and a great session.

This paper presents the findings of a qualitative study which asked a bunch of award-winning academics to talk about their sessions. The authors identified five themes:

1. First and foremost, the academics talked about connections. The connections described were either between the students and the teacher, or between the student and the topic. The relationship between the teacher and students was helped by lots of interaction and something they call audience-performer effect which is what happens when the teacher actually changes their behaviour in response to the students' reactions. Connections between the student and the topic were the result of the teacher's efforts to make the topic relevant to the students.
2. The second theme was excitement and interest. The teachers were aware of the students' interest either in what they were saying or in an activity the students were asked to do. Teachers often used anecdotes and humour to get the students engaged.
3. The third common theme was the flow of the session, which was illustrated by clear links between topics, activities and sessions. The academics also talked about the pace of the session and being aware of the energy in the room.
4. The fourth one was to do with clarity. The academics interviewed felt that it was crucial that the students really understood the messages, and seemed very aware of the students' levels of understaning.
5. Finally, the academics talked about the relationship between control and spontaneity in the sessions, keeping to a clear structure when needed, but also being able to go off on a tangent when it serves to keep the students engaged.

I really enjoyed reading this paper as it seemed to strike a chord with my experiences as a student.

Pollio, H. R., & Lee Humphreys, W. (1996). What award-winning lecturers say about their teaching: It's all about connection. College Teaching, 44(3), 101-106.

Girls, boys and computer science

I'm really interested in how we make career decisions. It's clearlu hugely complex, and I don't think we really understand how it works, and what factors are the most influential.

I've come across this paper by Rommes and colleagues who did a really interesting study on adolescent girls in The Netherlands. The authors were exploring something called self to prototype matching theory. This theory suggests that we make our career decisions (in part) by comparing our selves to a prototype of a typical person who might do a particular job. The best match is the one we plump for.

Matching theories are very out of fashion in the world of career reseach these days, for a range of reasons, but mostly because all the evidence seems to suggest that we just don't make career decisions that way. But I think this one is different. 

Traditional matching theories advise us to systematically compare our career interests, values and skills to the kinds of things we might expect to do in a particular job. Self to prototype matching involves an assessment of the type of person they imagine to work in that role, rather than the job itself. According to this idea, decisions are made on all kinds of features of the prototype including their appearance and their interests.

The traditional matching approach would suggest that someone who was interested in computers would choose a job where they could work with computers. The self to prototype matching approach, in contrast, might lead to someone who was interested in computers to decide against a job with computers because they didn’t want to be seen as the kind of person who works with computers

So, this paper explored this exact thing, and their findings indicate that the girls in their study chose not to pursue a career in computer science because they thought that girls working in computer science were not sexually attractive to boys.

What was particularly curious about this study was that how the girls said they made their decisions didn't seem to tally with how they actually made their decisions. 

The two reasons cited by the girls were 1) they had no interest in computers and 2) they were more keen on people than things. This particular group of girls were all really enjoying the computer module which they had chosen to do, and had a really clear idea that computer scientists work in teams and deal with clients. But for some reason they reported, and seemed to believe that they were making sound career choices on the basis of their career interests.

The authors suggest that the girls felt the need (either consciously or more likely unconsciously) to find a reason which seemed acceptable within the modern liberal individualistic culture of the The Netherlands. Being explicit about rejecting computer science because they feared it would make them look unattractive to boys would not go down well within their culture, so they came up with something which sounded more credible (not choosing to work with computers because they weren't interested in them) despite this flying in the face of the reality.

For me the two key things here are that career choices are about identity (who do you want to be?) and not just the job itself (what do you want to do?) , and that asking people how they make their decisions is not always a reliable guide for how they actually do.

Rommes, E., Overbeek, G., Scholte, R., Engels, R., & De Kemp, R. (2007). ‘I'M NOT INTERESTED IN COMPUTERS’: Gender-based occupational choices of adolescents. Information, Community and Society, 10(3), 299-319.

What's the future for careers work?

I was asked today to produce a summary of the changes I anticipate in career practice in the next 5 - 10 years for a university in Finland. Here's what I came up with:

Changes in the world of work

The pace of change. The nature of the changes we have seen in the world of work over the last twenty years have been the subject of some debate. Ideas such as the demise of the ‘job for life’ and the rise of the ‘boundaryless career’ have been much discussed but the consensus which has emerged lately seems to indicate that average job tenure has not changed significantly in the last generation, and that bounded careers are as common and desirable in many fields as they ever were. One thing which does seem to have been widely accepted is the notion that change within the workplace is inevitable and the pace of this change is considerably faster than it once was.  This I imagine will continue, and individuals as a consequence will need to develop the skills to manage and take advantage of these changes in order to be employable throughout their working lives. Qualities such as resilience, adaptability and a commitment to lifelong learning therefore need to be fostered and guidance practitioners can and should play a part in encouraging and engendering these attributes.

Older workers. The aging population and challenges with pension provision mean that workers are having to delay their retirement and are working, either through choice or necessity until well into their 60s or 70s. Despite legislation outlawing discrimination on the grounds of age, research and practice indicate that older workers find it more challenging to secure appropriate work and career practitioners in the coming decades should be specifically equipped to support this cohort of potential clients.

Agency of the individual. One change which has been noted in the psychological contract between workers and employers is that the responsibility for career management now seems to rely on the individual more than on the employer. Increasingly we are seeing that individual workers need to take control of their professional training, put themselves forward for the opportunities they want and craft their own jobs to raise their levels of job satisfaction. Career practitioners increasingly will be working with individuals in organisations to help them develop career management skills.

Meaning . An interesting development which we have seen recently and which to my mind looks set to continue is an increased focus on meaning in work. This is related to the blurring of work and non-work identities and links with the new focus on career as identity which I highlight below. Clients are increasingly looking for work which allows them to ‘be themselves’ and through which they can develop a life purpose. A focus on vocation and meaning in work will become more central to career practitioners work in the future.

Developments in career theory

Career as identity The prevailing paradigm of career theory is in constant flux, but the one theme which seems to be emerging most strongly at the moment (to my mind at least) is the notion of identity. This links closely to the emerging value placed on meaning in work which I mentioned above.  Guidance practitioners will no longer be encouraging clients to ask ‘Which jobs are going to suit me best?’ but rather ‘In which environments can I become who I want to be?’. Career theories are emerging which can support guidance counsellors as they help their clients to address these issues of identity. This ties in with an increased understanding of the holistic nature of careers and career choices seen in recent literature.

Individualisation Career research seems to be going away from a ‘one size fits all’ approach and encouraging practitioners to get their clients to define their own terms. A focus on cross cultural practice acknowledges the different experiences of particular client groups, and an emphasis on guidance as a mechanism for promoting social justice highlights the experiences of different sections within our society. An emerging practical emphasis on narrative approaches to guidance provides practitioners with a mechanism for exploring clients’ experiences as individuals and I believe this individualised approach to guidance will prevail in the years to come.

Changes in Guidance Practice

Diversification Guidance practitioners in the future will need to practice in diverse ways. First, service provision is likely to diversify. In the UK, each school and each University now has its own model for practice with practitioners working variously with groups, one to ones and via technology, and practitioners specialising as guidance practitioners, counsellors, teachers, trainers, coaches or consultants. Some practitioners are becoming more generalist and others, more specialist.

Our client body is diversifying too. Twenty years ago, most practice in the UK focused on first career choices of school and university leavers. We are now increasingly seeing clients at all stages of their careers, and (as I mentioned above) in future there will be more older workers who may seek support. Empirical evidence too is leading us to consider working with children in primary school (ages 5 upwards).  

The theoretical approaches which guidance practitioners will be using will diversify, as we learn from other disciplines. Approaches such as solution focusing counselling, motivational interviewing and coaching will become more mainstream.

Labour market and occupational information Our traditional role as information broker, providing insights into various aspects of the world of work will become less important as the internet and social media become the information providers of choice. Career practitioners instead will need to work with clients to hone their research skills, ensuring that they can manage, synthesise and analyse the vast quantities of information so easily accessible to them now.

Technology As an adjunct to face to face work, career practitioners are going to need to learn to capitalise on the opportunities available to us through new technologies including social media and online learning.

The Virtue Existential Career Model

I've just come across a new career theory. I find myself quite excited by this as I haven't found anything very new in the last decade or so. 2005 I think was a bit of a bumper year for career theories - Savickas published Career Construction, Ibarra further developed her Identity Theory, Patton and McMahon published a book on Systems Theory and Maniero and Sullivan introduced the Kaleidoscope Model. But I'm not sure that I've come across anything very new since then.

 

So this is a theory from Taiwan, and although it's been around for a few years, most of the papers published which look at this are published in Chinese and this is the first time I've heard of it.

 

The model is grounded philosophically in the Classic of Changes which is an ancient Chinese text. I had a brief look to find out what this was and didn't get terribly far with it, but the theory is interesting and potentially quite valuable even without an understanding of the underpinning philosophy.

 

One of my repeated frustrations with career theories is their tendency to focus on one narrow element or angle. Perhaps this is inevitable, but given how incredibly complex career choices and paths are, it makes the theories less applicable. New theories often seems to be developed in opposition to other theories, rather than building on them, which then leaves the practitioner (and client) with the huge challenge of trying to integrate those which seem to be most relevant in any context.

 

The Virtue Existential Career Model (VEC) brings together two broad paradigms of career theory (modern and post-modern) and also proposes four key elements of career practice.

The authors describe the modern theories as the Yang theories, and suggest that they are focused on using rational strategies to develop career plans which lead to high levels of person-environment fit. The focus for these traditional theories is on choosing and controlling, and the main virtue is striving for self-improvement.

The Yin theories then are the post-modern ones. These focus more on being open-minded and creative, and within this paradigm, career development relies on appreciating and adapting to change. The virtue here is embracing all aspects of humanity.

 

The VEC model incorporates both aspects. The authors agree with current criticisms of PE fit which highlight that matching approaches tend to assume stable individual characteristics and a stable world, but point out that matching can still be a valuable part of career thinking as long as it acknowledges the fluid nature of humanity.

 

The model suggests that career interventions should focus on two essential existential questions: our reason for being and our action for being and this focus on the fusion between experience and meaning is a core aspect of their model.

 

In terms of what this might mean for us in practice, the authors have four goals which will facilitate career development:

1. Having versatile views of reality and using this to construct various career possibilities

2. Appreciating and mastering both rational and intuitive cognitive decision making processes

3. Treasuring serendipity and making good use of curiosity and flexibility

4. Managing inevitable change and uncertainty.

 

This seems like a great framework for career education or employability takes the strengths of traditional career theories but applies them with an understanding of the contextual factors which influence our career paths today.

Liu, S. H., Lu, Y. J., Deng, C. P., Wang, C. H., Keh, F. B., & Tsai, Y. C. (2015). Social Practice of a Career Guidance Project Based on the Wisdom of the Classic of Changes. Journal of Pacific Rim Psychology, 9(02), 50-64.