Work Is More Than Just a Paycheck
Why do we work? If we don’t overthink the question, and if we could only give one answer, then the vast majority of us would say, very simply, “we work so we can be paid”. But of course, that’s an oversimplification. There are plenty of other reasons that we cite when we’re allowed to give more than one answer to the question of “why work?”. Perhaps the more interesting and targeted question is: how does working benefit our mental health? An equally interesting question is: how can work harm our mental health? …but that question is best saved for another day. Let’s start with the positive side of the coin first.
When I first started contemplating the psychological benefits of work, I could easily name a number of things: I liked getting to use my professional my skills. I liked working side-by-side with colleagues towards a larger goal. I liked being able to look at my organized, detailed calendar to know what I would be up to any given week (I know that’s not everyone’s cup of tea though). However, as a psychologist-in-training at the time, I wanted more of a bigger picture understanding of what work offers us, as opposed to just being able to name specific, personal examples.
That’s when I found Marie Jahoda, a psychologist who tackled a slightly different question. Dr. Jahoda was interested in what workers felt deprived of when they lost their job. In other words, when you lose your job, what are you deprived of? To answer that question, she created an unemployment deprivation model. Working from there, it’s a short logical jump from “well, if you’re deprived of certain things when you become unemployed, then those exact things are what you gain from work when you are employed”. So what does her model look like? At the broadest level, Dr. Jahoda categorized the benefits of working into two broad categories— manifest vs. latent benefits.
Manifest benefits are the intended and explicitly laid out outcomes of working. And I literally mean that these are explicitly laid out — these benefits are what you find listed in job offer letters, employee handbooks, etc. Note that other than the first manifest benefit listed below, you’re pretty lucky if you get a handful of these at your job, and some are only available to a very small portion of the total workforce. Here’s a (non-exhaustive list) of manifest benefits:
a pay check
paid leave
sick leave
health insurance
dental insurance
a retirement plan (or more rarely, a pension plan)
professional development funds
student loan and/or tuition assistance
family leave
childcare assistance
an employee assistance plan (EAP)
life insurance
employee discounts
Latent benefits are considered the secondary, “unintended” outcomes of working. These benefits are squishier —most are harder to define and measure in a precise way. These are the types of benefits that get highlighted during job interviews when an employer is trying to convince a prospective employee to join their organization. Others are individual and highly personal benefits to working. As with manifest benefits, not every job allows for every latent benefit - Marie Jahoda likely developed her model with traditional white-collar worker jobs in mind, and our contemporary world looks quite different from when she first published her ideas. Also, even if it’s theoretically possible to gain a specific latent benefit at your job, your individual mileage may vary. With all that said, it’s still an instructive list. Here are Jahoda’s 5 latent benefits of work:
Valued social relationships and shared experiences
Structured time
Enforced activity
Collective sense of purpose
Identity and status
Do you recognize your own need for these elements in your work? I certainly do. And so do a lot of other people, as research on this topic has shown. I also think the set of latent benefits represents a simple, accessible way of conceptualizing how work benefits our mental health. In fact, it goes beyond that — it represents a set of needs that are required for our psychological well-being. In other words, if you lack some or all of these elements in your work life (such as when someone’s been laid off), your mental health may suffer.
So if you’re looking for a way to evaluate your job and/or career, make sure you take some time to look at each of these latent benefits, one at a time, and ask yourself some of these questions:
“How important is it to me that I get X from work?”
“Do I get X from my current job?”
“What parts of my job give me X?”
“If I don’t get (enough of) X from my current job, is there a way that I can change that?"
“If I don’t get (enough of) X from my current job, is there some other place I can get it in my life?”
As my last question points to, maybe we don’t absolutely need to get every single latent benefit from work - there might be other places in our lives where we can achieve a collective sense of purpose, for example (e.g. through involvement in our communities). Still, I find Dr. Jahoda’s model to be useful and worth thinking about when you want to take stock of what psychological needs you have at work, and how being able to meet those needs (or not meet those needs) affects your mental health.
And if that’s not enough to mull on, I leave you with one final question to ask yourself: are there any additional psychological needs that work fulfills for you that Dr. Jahoda might have missed? Let me know in the comments below.
