(Not in Why we wrote the book
Are you happy at work? Or do you just grin and bear it? We spend an average of 25% of our lives at work, so it's important to make the best of it.
Peter Warr sees it like this:
I’m an Emeritus Professor in the Institute of Work Psychology at the University of Sheffield. For a long time I’ve been intrigued by people in their jobs:
- On the one hand, how do people find their way into, cope with, enjoy and change their jobs? How do they become more skilled? And what happens if they haven’t got a job?
- On the other hand, how do organizations select and fit together their people and how do they successfully keep the organization alive and productive?
Pursuing those interests as a research psychologist, I’ve worked with a large number of organizations, management groups and trade unions, and I’ve published many dozen articles and more than twenty books about people, jobs and organizations. I’ve been Director of a very large academic group carrying out applied research into psychology and employment, and I’ve been elected a Fellow of key professional groups in several countries.
That excessively boastful paragraph sets the scene for what I have not done. In common with most academics, I’ve rarely tried to pass on research findings to the general public. Encouraged by a clearly defined career structure, much university research is rather introverted, seeking to build on previous academic studies more than investigating practical problems. And academics communicate their findings almost entirely to other academics.
Their publications for each other are of course essential. But research knowledge should also be passed to people who could benefit from it. In that way, academic studies of people and jobs (my own speciality) should be made available to workers and would-be workers. But how? It’s no good describing research in an academic sort of way — no-one will listen.
That’s where The Joy of Work? comes in. It’s very different from all my other books, setting out to communicate research results to non-academics in an informal and perhaps entertaining manner. And it’s gained a lot from being jointly written with Guy Clapperton, whose background is completely different from mine.
The book’s underlying research base is substantial and up-to-date, but it is kept hidden. The goal has been to get the information across and to suggest how people can apply it.
Not all academic colleagues will approve of the style or the practical suggestions. As for myself, I’m pleased with the result. I hope that many readers will be able to use it to make some differences to their working lives; there’s no doubt that small changes can lead on to bigger ones!
And Guy Clapperton’s view is:
I was delighted when Peter Warr asked me to contribute to the non-academic version of his considerable research. I’d been a freelance journalist in the work and business field for some 14 years and something that’s always interested me was that so many people seemed to think of work as something merely to be tolerated. As a fresh-faced young hack in the 80s and early 90s I’d interview someone and they’d tell me they’d earned a million or thereabouts and they were as miserable as anything.
This didn’t seem to add up but I had no ‘hooks’ to hang it on. Peter’s research-led approach gave me many such hooks and insights, balancing my more interview-oriented style.
The combination of our two approaches will, I hope, amount to more than the proverbial sum of its parts. Of course, I could knock out a book of interviews with people who are variously happy and unhappy with their work and try to draw some conclusions, but I wouldn’t have the resources to say whether these were typical, aberrations, or restricted to a particular sort of respondent — this sort of quantification simply isn’t part of my world.
So The Joy of Work? has resulted from a collaboration which is pretty much unique of its kind. Like Peter, I hope the material is useful for business owners and managers, workers, potential workers, and casual readers of all kinds.