From timeslive.co

Compared to the work culture in North America, the work culture in East Asia has always been notorious for its extremely long working hours. Yet, despite already knowing this hard fact, I was still dumbfounded to hear from my family relative who worked as a software engineer at a large IT corporation in China that his standard working hours were around 16 hours per day. As someone primarily educated in North America, I was more used to hearing about 8 hour work days and the numerous benefits such as vacation pay and health insurances that came with them. Thus, reading about job satisfaction in Chapter 3 of the textbook was of particular interest for me.

In North American culture, job satisfaction is often valued so highly that if people hate their jobs, they will be inclined to quit it even if their wages are really high. However, for many in East Asia like my family relative, the high wages are often so enticing that people will choose to rather toil away each day than to quit. The textbook describes this kind of commitment to be continuance commitment and states that continuance commitment leads to an “increased tendency to be absent and lower job performance”. I believe this statement to be very true because continuance commitment is not really true commitment. Rather it is people feeling the need to fulfill their end of a contract and thus, I have a hard time being convinced that such kind of extrinsic motivation would result in any productive work being accomplished.

Reading a recent article about how many Japanese companies are starting to rethink their culture of long working hours, I feel very optimistic that such kind of culture may finally be abolished. Often companies are too caught up trying to increase productivity of its employees by offering monetary compensation in exchange for more working hours. However, what they do not realize is that all those extra working hours are essentially going to waste because employees are no longer actively engaging in their work. For instance, in the article, Yahoo Japan Corp. is introducing more options of working from home and longer vacation periods in an effort to give the employees more social flexibility. If workers are allowed to enjoy a happy life outside of work, I believe that directly translates into intrinsic motivation to do better at work.

Citations:
1. Langton, Robbins, Judge, Organizational Behaviour, 7th edition, p. 95-100.
2. Oda Shoko, “Japan’s Rethinking Its Culture of Long Work Hours,” Bloomberg News, Jan. 17, 2017,
https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-02-06/now-aussie-voters-snub-turnbull-after-leader-s-spat-with-trump