Dying for a Paycheck - How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance—and What We Can Do About It

Jeffrey Pfeffer

Harper Business

2018

272 páginas

9h 4m

ISBN-13: 9780062800923

In one survey, 61 percent of employees said that workplace stress had made them sick and 7 percent said they had actually been hospitalized. Job stress costs US employers more than $300 billion annually and may cause 120,000 excess deaths each year. In China, one million people a year may be dying from overwork—literally dying for a paycheck. And it needs to stop.

In this timely, provocative book, Jeffrey Pfeffer contends that many modern management commonalities such as long hours, work-family conflict, and economic insecurity are toxic to employees—hurting engagement, increasing turnover, and destroying people’s physical and emotional health—while also being inimical to company performance. He argues that human sustainability should be as important as environmental stewardship.

You don’t have to do a physically dangerous job to confront a health-destroying, possibly life-threatening workplace. Just ask the manager in a senior finance role whose immense workload, once handled by several employees, required frequent all-nighters—leading to alcohol and drug addiction. Or the dedicated news media producer whose commitment to getting the story resulted in a sixty-pound weight gain thanks to having no downtime to eat properly or to exercise. Or the marketing professional who was prescribed antidepressants just a week after joining her employer.

In Dying for a Paycheck, Jeffrey Pfeffer marshals a vast trove of evidence and numerous examples from all over the world to expose the infuriating truth about modern work life: even as organizations allow management practices that actually sicken and kill their employees, those policies do not enhance productivity or the bottom line, thereby creating a lose-lose situation.