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NAMO
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'THE
BUDDHIST HOUR'
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Hillside
Radio 87.6 FM & 88.0 FM |
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The Buddhist Hour Radio Broadcast Sunday 18 March 2001
Today’s Program is called: How to increase Job Satisfaction
THE FIVE TRUSTS LEADING TO WORK SKILL - ONE OF THE HIGHEST BLESSINGS In the Mangala Sutta, it is stated ‘Much wisdom and much science ... this is the highest blessing’. The mind that rejects work, rejects the highest blessing and is unwholesome. There are 14 unwholesome types of mind and any one of these could reject the notion of work. There are 24 wholesome minds and any one of these could accept the notion of work. The Christian work ethic and Protestant work ethic as expounded are based on unwholesome principles. There is no wholesome motivation towards work in Christian theology. To cultivate the mind requires time and few duties. Work for work’s sake is not recommended. Those persons who do not wish to work are rejecting the highest blessing. They create poverty for themselves and others now and in the future. This is unwise. Work skills are needed. There is no such thing as unskilled work. Boredom at work is a misunderstanding of the role of work in society that can be removed by training the minds. The mind set of persons can be changed by generosity (dana), morality (sila), and friendliness (adosa). An unskilled person with friendliness can learn new work skills. For such reasons there is still a need for unskilled persons to learn how to be friendly. This can only occur when the person is given the opportunity to practice the correct work skills. Friendliness and the desire to learn will make the learning process very fast. Persons who desire to learn but have unfriendly minds will be able to learn, but at a much slower rate and without finer knowledge and expertise. A worker’s boredom maybe based on a mind with hate. Hate is an unwholesome mind. To approach work with boredom is to approach work with hate. The net result of bored workers is they tend to sabotage the equipment and procedures that are set up in the workplace. Interruption of a series of work processes means the cost of producing goods or services is increased, and customer satisfaction is denied. The result is such workers are unemployable because of their attitude to work. When a workplace is restructured the workers having an unfriendly attitude are sometimes given an opportunity to retrain and reskill themselves for a new work task. Unfortunately, because of boredom with old work tasks, unfriendliness is carried over into retraining for new work tasks so therefore such workers cannot be retrained. The rate of appearance of new jobs and disappearance of old jobs is estimated to be twelve fold over the career of somebody leaving school in 2001 in Australia. The persons who will have continuous employment over the next three decades are persons who are friendly and can learn new skills, ideas and competencies. John D. Hughes identified, on a subjective basis, five trusts that appear to be useful in the information area. The Trusts identified and used were: 1. Trust in the technology used 2. Trust in persons using it 3. Trust in work as input 4. Trust in work as output 5. Trust in managers interests If you would like to read more about the Five Trusts, you can find information on our website at www.skybusiness.com/j.d.hughes There are many different organisational theories on how to increase employees job satisfaction. It has been said that if employers create working conditions that employees like they are likely to produce more quality work. Persons whose primary needs are not being met, as described by Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, are unlikely to be able to perform at higher orders or claim to have a high level of job satisfaction. Maslow documented a five tier hierarchy of human needs. In ascending order the needs are: food then shelter, social, esteem and finally self actualisation. When a person has accomplished and attained one level then they may, if they wish, move to operate on the next level. Executive management must set forth its goals and strategies in written form, and communicate the plan to all workers concerned with its implementation. Repeated communication of corporate objectives may reduce the chance of misinterpretation by persons carrying out the tasks allocated. If the choices are given without the reliable criteria to make the correct choice - what happiness can be found in that? The insights gained through Buddha Dhamma practice allows individuals to discover the correct values. It is necessary to find the appropriate resolution of conflict to cure and minimise the causes of such problems. One of the problems of our times is related to employee’s satisfaction or lack of it in organisations. Numerous theories have been formulated in order to understand and reduce the dissatisfaction in the workplace. There are about six schools of thought that have been investigated. One school of thought is based on psychological needs theory. Its exponents are Argyris, Maslow, Herzberg and Likert who have argued that people in general have psychological needs that they hope can be satisfied through work. Failing that, there is no job satisfaction. What needs? Self esteem, self fulfillment, and love. People motivated by these needs have shown a willingness to work in occupations where there are high opportunities for status, responsibility, co-operation and recognition. Another school of thought regarding satisfaction theory is the style leadership. Blake, Moulton and Fiedler argue that what determines satisfaction in the workplace is related to the climate of the work environment for which top management is responsible. A third school of thought among which we can consider Vroom and Lola looks at job satisfaction from the point of view of how effort and reward are related. Everyone has a subjective notion of what they consider a “fair day’s pay” and if they perceive that they are not receiving a “fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work” one would expect job satisfaction to be very low. However, this is usually true. Another school of thought argues about the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic factors of job satisfaction and emphasises that the extrinsic factors like bosses, rewards and situational factors are secondary to the work itself. They argue that in order to increase satisfaction, job design and control over jobs are essential. From a Buddha Dhamma perspective, it would be desirable that work be Intellectually Stimulating and it should provide the ability to generate many merit-making opportunities. Because the majority of people are not Scholars they are happy to stay in an unsatisfying job as it provides a sense of security (approximately 80% of the workforce like highly programmed repetitive jobs because such work satisfies their high expectations for security and predictability - Pan Business publication “Managing People at Work” written by John Hunt, published in 1979. However, modern work is not highly repetitive, therefore such people have to be re-trained in attitude. Buddha Dhamma practice, through the experience of Scholarship enables individuals to develop a higher order of thinking. This assists in overcoming the complacency of remaining in an unsuitable environment and accepting conditions unsuitable for Buddha Dhamma practice, simply because it is the conventional cultural norm that allows them to do so. Buddha Dhamma practice leads to the Mangala Blessings that are listed in the Mangala Sutta. Does your workplace have any of these highest blessings? The Mangala Sutta highest blessings are higher satisfiers than what we accept as the cultural norm. The cultural norm teaches us to strive for minor blessings such as Wealth. Ironically, attainment of the Mangala Highest Blessings brings to the practitioner the minor blessings as a by-product. This is due to the law of cause and effect. There is one more argument that interpersonal relationships bring about satisfaction at the lower echelon of the organisation. Satisfaction appears to be the result of a web of situational factors and personalities. One discourse in the Dhammapada “A hunter who was attacked by his own dogs” reads: One morning, a hunter, by the name of Koka was going to hunt with his pack of hound dogs. He met a Bhikkhu entering the city for almsfood. He took that as a bad omen and grumbled to himself, ‘Since I have seen this wretched one, I don’t think I will get anything today’, and he went on his way. As expected by him he did not get anything. On his way home he again saw the same Bhikkhu returning to the Monastery after having his almsfood in the city and the hunter became very angry. So he set his hounds on the Bhikkhu who swiftly climbed up a tree to a level just out of reach of the hounds. Then the hunter went to the foot of the tree and pricked his heels with the tip of an arrow. The Bhikkhu was in great pain and was not able to hold on to his robes; so the robes slipped off his body onto the hunter who was at the foot of the tree. The dogs seeing the yellow robe thought that the Bhikkhu had fallen off the tree and pounced on the body, biting and pulling at it furiously. The Bhikkhu, from his shelter in the tree, broke a dry branch and threw it at the dogs. Then the dogs discovered that they had been attacking their own master instead of the Bhikkhu and ran away. He came down and found the hunter had died and felt sorry for him. He also wondered whether he could be held responsible for the death, since the hunter had died by having been covered by his yellow robes. So, he went to the Buddha to clear his doubt. The Buddha consoled him, ‘You are not responsible for the death of the hunter; your morality (sila) is also not soiled on account of that death. Indeed, that hunter did a great wrong to one to whom he should of done no wrong and so had come to this grievous end.’ As we progress from childhood to adult working life we carry with us the cultural norms learned from our parents and childhood teachers. Without being aware we internalise many attitudes and practices that are not based on a clear understanding of the causal relationship between effort and reward. Behavioural scientists distinguish between extrinsic and intrinsic factors of job satisfaction and argue that extrinsic factors (like bosses, rewards and situational factors) are secondary to the work itself. The design and control over jobs are the clues to increasing satisfaction. We might have an objective entity set to plan to develop, say, five persons with the fifth order skills needed to be, say, Vice President of the World Fellowship of Buddhists (WFB). If they keep working on 3rd and 4th order mindsets in managing ONLY TASK MANAGEMENT, they think ALL management is, is to deal with a series of tasks. This task view of management is so shallow it thinks management is about getting the job (a series of tasks) done. Management is not just about getting the job (a series of tasks) done. Management is not that simple. By using the superior 5th order level of thinking and taking on board the Management by Objectives culture, the individual can work with the vision and creativity this thinking level holds, while transcending the limitations of the parents culture without lessening in any way the respect for the parents that is one of the highest blessings outlined in the Mangala Sutta. The capacity to grow requires the development of an ability to recognise the limiting influence of childhood conditioning, which has become an internalised set of drivers that prevent our ability to develop higher orders of thinking. We imagine we are different from the cultures we work so hard to differentiate ourselves from, but we overlook the fact that even this reaction is the result of our earlier cultural conditioning. For example, one might be asked the question ‘how many star performers do we want in our organisation?’ Your answer might be ‘the first number you think of, let’s say 10 out of the organisation’s 60 members’, whereas someone operating on 5th order might say ‘as many stars as we can get’. The sad reality is that we carry these habits of thought in our management culture, and when we become managers we limit the potential of ourselves and others we work with to overcome the inherent cultural limitations. What does this expose? That as our Members experience the nature of these cultural limitations within the management environment, they recognise that they can shift to a higher level of awareness that enable Management by Objectives to be a reality. Without this awareness, the only management possible is one stuck at 3rd or 4th level thinking. At that level, management can only be seen as a series of tasks. To be effective, Management by Objectives team members need to develop synergy in real time every time they come together to work on a project. Each time our Members meet, they cannot take for granted that what worked in the past will work again in the new setting. Even though the same persons meet again to work together on a project, they have to go through the process of synergy building, as a set of conditions including the people themselves have changed because of impermanence (in Pali anicca). In each situation a new set of components come together that have never arisen before. This process can only be facilitated by a higher degree of awareness using fifth order thinking. Empowered with clear objectives and a shared vision, the result is increased awareness giving the cutting edge to your existing skills. At the Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd. this process of synergy building is one way in which we define what it means to be human. In the synergy building there is also enthusiasm being generated among the team members. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines enthusiasm as the ‘rapturous intensity of feeling on behalf of a person, cause, etc., (the) passionate eagerness in any pursuit’. In Buddha Dhamma we describe this synergy as clarity of purpose, generating an operational level of activity arising in minimal waste of energy. Once we get to this level of team operation we learn to maintain the level of creativity necessary for optimum work performance. Behavioural scientists distinguish between extrinsic and intrinsic factors of job satisfaction and argue that extrinsic factors (like bosses, rewards and situational factors) are secondary to the work itself. The design and control over jobs are the clues in increasing satisfaction. Another school of managerial philosophy argues that the managerial style and values of senior executives create climates and attitudes of an overall feeling of satisfaction. Satisfaction seems to be a complex result produced by a host of personality and situational factors and if something is missing, persons invent some fictions that they see as saving the organisation from conflict. The assumption of much managerial literature is that conflict is bad for organisations. Conflict may energise, excite, rejuvenate, whether it occurs in families, groups, or organisations. Destructive conflict may arise from internal or external organisational causes. The most frequent cause of conflict is the formal structure demanded by law and this can be in sharp contract to the informal structure. We introduce performance indicators in an informal non-threatening manner. We feed into the informal communication system (our grapevine) the idea that we encourage Members to make merit because they cannot stay together unless they behave towards each other in a friendly manner. While it is true that persons may become friends, it is the kammic condition of hundreds of thousands of previous lives that really brings a powerful “togetherness” feeling. The view we introduce on the grapevine (and it certainly appears to be so) is that members learn to enjoy one another’s company over time through working together in harmony, meeting in harmony and separating in harmony. There is no external agency or all-powerful being who distributes the gift of friendship to different persons in diverse measures. May you increase your job satisfaction. May you get the highest blessings.
This script was written and edited by John D. Hughes, Julian Bamford, Frank Carter, Evelin Halls, Lisa Nelson, Rill Oellien, Nick Prescott and Pennie White. Disclaimer:
As we, the Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd., do not control the actions of our service providers from time to time, make no warranty as to the continuous operation of our website(s). Also, we make no assertion as to the veracity of any of the information included in any of the links with our websites, or an other source accessed through our website(s).
Accordingly, we accept no liability to any user or subsequent third party, either expressed or implied, whether or not caused by error or omission on either our part, or a member, employee or other person associated with the Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd.
References: Ewing, David, W. (1972), Long Range Planning for Management, 3rd Ed., Harper and Row Publishers, U.S.A. Dhammananda, K, Sri. (1988) The Dhammapada, Sasana Adhiwurdhi Wardhana Society, Malaysia. BDDR Volume 4 No. 1, Registered by Australia Post Publication No. VAR 3103. January 1994. Our ref: Word Pro - I:\km\radio67 I:\km\radio\radio75 Our ref: I:\jdh\Informal.doc. Created by John D. Hughes. Created on 01/23/00 3:06pm. Updated by John D. Hughes. 6.0 Methods of Overcoming Hearsay - Use of the Grapevine.
Document Statistics Totals Words:
2679 Averages Words per
Sentence: 19.8 Readability Statistics Flesch
Grade Level: 19.8 For more information, contact the Centre or better still, come and visit us. |
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