All of this concern for meaningful work, influence, and interpersonal relationships must be placed within the context of a highly volatile employment market. Employees simply are unwilling to make a long-term commitment to any one organization in our emerging postmodern world. This has been particularly the case during the economic boom years of the late 1990s and early 2000s:[xxix]
“In this prosperous age, changing jobs is as easy—and requires about as much emotional investment—as shedding an old pair of shoes. It can even be entertaining. Recruiters tell tales of quitters who gave the news with singing telegrams, in a coke with a resignation letter inside, and by writing I QUIT in the snow on the boss’ windshield. It’s no secret that Americans don’t expect enduring loyalty of any kind these days. Marriages end. Companies lay off longtime workers. People don Yankees hats whenever they have a winning season. And in this rip-roaring economy—unemployment at a 30-year low!—workers find the strength to quit over and over again.
Thanks to the workers’ market, the National Quit Rate—the percentage of people currently unemployed who left their job voluntarily—is now at 14.7%, the highest in almost ten years. The average worker goes through about nine jobs by age 32, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For workers in some industries, notably tech, quitting is literally an annual event. The average job tenure in IT [information technology] has shrunk to about 13 months, down from about 18 months two years ago . . . Gen Xers quit often, but job tenure has declined among both younger and older workers. In 1983 younger workers (we’ll look at men aged 25 to 34) averaged 3.4 years on the job, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute. Today they are gone in three. At the same time, the average tenure among older workers (men 55 to 64) has plunged from 17 years to 12 years.”
While there is little loyalty among workers in our postmodern world, there is still a longing for continuity on the part of these workers. The challenge for leaders of postmodern organizations is thus to somehow tap into this longing for continuity and to appeal to those values of the knowledge worker that are best realized through sustained, high-quality work in one organization.
Knowledge and Autonomy: The Psychology of Approval and Shame
The new worker values of the postmodern era concern the praiseworthy commitments to meaningful work, exciting and productive work environments, and the balance between work and life. The shifting orientation of the new workers also concerns a more shadowy set of values. It builds on the strong desire of the postmodern worker to not only acquire and use knowledge but also to find a high degree of autonomy in the workplace. Richard Sennett suggests that knowledge is the new postmodern form of capital. Furthermore, the new worker value is closely associated with the need for autonomy. Sennett offers an even more provocative hypothesis that the thirst for knowledge and autonomy is closely linked to the need for psychological approval and the need to avoid the inverse of psychological approval–namely, psychological shame.[xxx]
