Thoughtful advice for managers and employers.
Strategies for a healthy workplace.
Psychologist Maslach, creator of the Maslach Burnout Inventory, and Leiter, an organizational psychologist and consultant, offer a well-grounded examination of the causes of widespread job dissatisfaction and burnout along with proposals for solutions. “At a time when leaders extol the virtues of respectful workplaces and engaging teamwork,” they note, “complaints of incivility, abuse, and bullying run rampant.” If workers feel “ignored, limited, manipulated, distrusted, and undermined,” they become increasingly frustrated. Chronic exhaustion, cynicism, and a feeling of ineffectiveness are caused by problems that include work overload, breakdown of community, and workers’ sense of a lack of control—problems that became exacerbated during the pandemic, when working at home eroded boundaries between jobs and private life. Because burnout has been stigmatized as a sign of weakness, workers “are often reluctant to self-identify as having this problem or needing help.” The authors, though, see burnout as “a social phenomenon” that needs to be addressed by organizational solutions. Although a “massive self-care industry” advises getting enough sleep and eating healthy foods, these suggestions alone will not eliminate burnout, which is caused by a mismatch between workers and workplace environments. These mismatches, the authors have found, can be discovered through direct input from workers and managers, surveys, and organizational assessments. In an appendix, they present an informal questionnaire designed for a worker’s self-assessment. Once the area of a problem mismatch is identified, employers should consider ways to pivot to improve the job-person relationship—e.g., creating a sustainable workload, nurturing a supportive work community, and giving workers ample choice and control. The authors’ approach to problem-solving “combines the power of collaboration, customization, and commitment. These ‘three C’s’ all serve to boost participation” and can lead to lasting improvements. “Essential to any pivot,” they add, “is to pose a basic question: What will success look like?”
Thoughtful advice for managers and employers.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-67425-101-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.
A waggish, cautionary compilation of pitfalls associated with systematic cognitive errors, from novelist Dobelli.
To be human is to err, routinely and with bias. We exercise deviation from logic, writes the author, as much as, and possibly more than, we display optimal reasoning. In an effort to bring awareness to this sorry state of affairs, he has gathered here—in three-page, anecdotally saturated squibs—nearly 100 examples of muddied thinking. Many will ring familiar to readers (Dobelli’s illustrations are not startlingly original, but observant)—e.g., herd instinct and groupthink, hindsight, overconfidence, the lack of an intuitive grasp of probability or statistical reality. Others, if not new, are smartly encapsulated: social loafing, the hourly rate trap, decision fatigue, carrying on with a lost cause (the sunk-cost fallacy). Most of his points stick home: the deformation of professional thinking, of which Mark Twain said, “If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will be nails”; multitasking is the illusion of attention with potentially dire results if you are eating a sloppy sandwich while driving on a busy street. In his quest for clarity, Dobelli mostly brings shrewdness, skepticism and wariness to bear, but he can also be opaque—e.g., shaping the details of history “into a consistent story...we speak about ‘understanding,’ but these things cannot be understood in the traditional sense. We simply build the meaning into them afterward.” Well, yes. And if we are to be wary of stories, what are we to make of his many telling anecdotes when he counsels, “Anecdotes are a particularly tricky sort of cherry picking....To rebuff an anecdote is difficult because it is a mini-story, and we know how vulnerable our brains are to those”?
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-221968-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
