Indians The Fourth-Most Demotivated At Work Globally; Feel Routine Tasks Do Not Serve Any Social Good, Says Study

A study conducted by Robert Dur of Erasmus University Rotterdam and Max van Lent of Leiden University shows the percentage of the global population who feels their work is useless.

The two professors gathered and analysed data from 47 countries and found out that, on an average of 8 per cent feel that their job is useless to society and 17 per cent seem doubtful about its social benefits, as reported by LiveMint.

Indians rank fourth in this, with almost 12 per cent of them being pessimistic of their job and considering that their job is socially useless. India thus has one of the highest proportions, just behind Japan, Poland and Israel.

The study also points out that people in the private sector are more pessimistic about their social contribution vis a vis the public sector. 11 per cent of them find their routine tasks in works like marketing, finance, sales, etc. useless, which according to the authors is due to the fact that many of these jobs harm people than help them.

But in public sector jobs like education, healthcare and policy-making, the rate of pessimism is only 3 per cent.

The study suggests two reasons for this phenomenon. The first is Karl Marx’s Theory of Alienation, which expounds that dividing labour into highly specialised and compartmentalised parts can make meaningful work appear meaningless. The second possible factor could be Labour Hoarding, where firms hire more workers than necessary during recessions creating in ‘on-the-job underemployment’.