The Problem With Performance-Based Work Cultures

• Across all industries, managers are adopting a performance-based ideology that glorifies overwork and promotes the notion of an “ideal worker.”
• The heightened focus on measurable performance encourages workers to pursue individual achievements instead of collaborative efforts and harms the mental health of employees.
• In academia, scholars who must meet performance standards grow alienated from colleagues and frustrated by a lack of time to pursue research and teaching that align with their interests.

 
Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, workers have felt pressure to achieve high levels of productivity. This pressure has led to a global rise in workplace stress and employee disengagement.

A large part of the problem lies with today’s neoliberal workplace culture, which places a great deal of importance on profitability. This increasingly common ideology has arisen across industries due to a societal shift that institutionalizes overwork under the veneer of excellence. It also promotes the notion of an “ideal employee” who devotes unrealistic amounts of time to work at the expense of a personal life. This creates inequities and additional stresses in the workplace.

In a recent study, the five of us examine the negative effects that have been caused by adhering to a performance-based ideology in the post-pandemic world. We argue that the culture of excellence must be tempered by a commitment to providing care to the people who inhabit the workplace. We question conventional notions of the “ideal worker.” And we assert that showing care for each other in everyday work is a powerful force for community growth and change.

While our paper specifically examines how a neoliberal culture affects academia, our conclusions apply to organizations across industries and offer solutions for managers in all sectors.

Why Is ‘Managerialism’ a Problem?

Managerialism is a management style in which business leaders focus on productivity by constantly measuring outputs. When managers exercise greater control and oversight, they promote individualism by focusing on how well each person is performing.

But such an approach doesn’t take into account the importance of group cohesion and the effects of community-building activities. It creates scenarios where employees are less likely to engage in collaborative work or develop feelings of attachment to their colleagues. This approach results in workplace cultures that are less inclusive and supportive.

This heightened focus on productivity, measurable performance, and accountability can have negative consequences. As the second year of the pandemic began in early 2021, huge numbers of disillusioned workers quit their jobs in a phenomenon dubbed The Great Resignation. According to a report from MIT Sloan Management Review, toxic workplace cultures were among the key factors pushing people out the door. And a recent survey by PwC indicates that a Great Resignation 2.0 is on the horizon, driven by workers’ perceptions that they are overworked and underpaid.

These studies show that it is essential for organizations to preserve the mental well-being of their employees—not just to ensure the health of their workers, but also to maintain the health of businesses and labor markets.

How Does Managerialism Manifest in Higher Education?

Today’s universities and business schools have begun implementing corporate management practices, performance metrics, and audits. This has turned many schools into market-driven institutions where productivity is the top priority and the concept of care has been relegated to an afterthought. This is problematic for several reasons.

When scholars are required to focus on quantifiable outcomes defined by international rankings and performance standards, they have less time to pursue research and teaching activities that align with their values and interests. As a consequence, academic freedom and autonomy are diminished while free and invisible academic labor is ignored. This culminates in a sense of alienation and frustration among teachers and researchers, who feel forced to sacrifice their own mental health to meet managers’ expectations.

Today’s business schools have begun implementing corporate management practices, performance metrics, and audits. This has turned many schools into market-driven institutions where productivity is the top priority.

While funding, performance, and rankings are undeniably important in higher education, a market-driven approach can lead to the prioritization of activities that directly create revenue, often at the cost of educational quality and meaningful research exploration. This puts the sector on a slippery slope toward the commodification of education and research.

For instance, the pressure to publish frequently in high-impact journals can lead to an overwhelming workload for academics, both in terms of quality and quantity. At the same time, the competitive nature of funding allocations can create an environment where collaboration is stifled in favor of individual achievements. Furthermore, the impact of reducing academic work to a series of measurable outputs often neglects the intangible aspects of teaching, learning, and community-building.

In addition, many scholars are facing individual struggles at work, particularly as the pace of change has escalated rapidly over the last three years. For instance, some find it difficult to adopt new generative artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT.

It is unrealistic for administrators in higher education to assume that a performance-based approach is sustainable in the post-pandemic world. It’s up to academic leaders—and managers from every industry—to challenge this prevailing culture.

Why Is the ‘Ideal Worker’ Not So Ideal?

Both in industry and academia, unrealistic work expectations that overemphasize competency have led to a warped view of the “ideal worker.” Too often, success is defined by a person’s ability to meet unrealistically high key performance indicators that do not take into account their needs as human beings. This restrictive mindset can inadvertently discriminate against certain employees because it fails to consider the needs and priorities of those who fall outside its inflexible standards.

For instance, some workers—frequently women—have caregiving responsibilities outside of the workplace. This means they have less time to spend endless hours at the office, a quality that is associated with the ideal worker.

Similarly, employees with disabilities can be challenged by workplace designs and management practices that fail to accommodate them. The effort to meet workplace demands absorbs their energy and makes it difficult for them to have lives outside of the office.

Employees who do not fit the model of the ideal worker often feel unsupported in their positions. Furthermore, they are frequently limited in their opportunities for progression.

Why Is the Concept of Care So Important?

Employers who want to optimize employee engagement and organizational performance can do so by promoting the good health and well-being of their workers, according to research from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

The organization envisions a future where approaches to work and management are rooted in empathy, compassion, and respect for all involved. Such environments will promote strong relationships among colleagues and enable all workers to effectively care for themselves and others.

It’s essential that managers foster relationship-building between colleagues to create environments where all employees can pursue their goals with autonomy and agency.

Through self-care, employees embrace a wide range of practices that nurture their physical, emotional, and mental well-being. They recognize and respond to their own needs, rather than constantly prioritizing external demands.

But it’s crucial that they balance self-care with care for others. People do not and should not inhabit workplaces in isolation, and so they must learn to be considerate of the different needs and perspectives of their coworkers. It’s essential that managers foster relationship-building between colleagues to create environments where all employees can pursue their goals with autonomy and agency, while still feeling motivated to show interest in the goals and well-being of others.

When employees take care of themselves and others, they’re not expressing weakness or diverting attention from rigorous work. In fact, the reverse is true. When care is the cornerstone of working life, it encourages an interdependence among employees and creates the right conditions for people to flourish.

If employees exercise care in their working relationships, they improve their performance and engagement, expand their personal horizons, and are more likely to meet the criteria for being successful while maintaining balanced lives.

If managers create workplaces that prioritize self-care and caring for others, they will nurture strong bonds of generosity between workers. This sense of solidarity will help workers overcome the sense of alienation and the career hurdles that can be created by neoliberal workplace cultures.

How Can We Change the Workplace?

From our own research, we find that there are four actions organizations can take to challenge the neoliberal workplace culture:

Acknowledge the culture’s structural injustices and unfair power dynamics. These injustices include unequal access to resources, opportunities, or decision-making processes based on factors such as gender, race, class, socioeconomic status, physical ability, tenure, and more.

A performance-driven workplace that prioritizes individualism and competition exacerbates existing disparities between employees and marginalizes certain groups within society. Recognizing these inequalities is the first step toward dismantling the systems of corporate and institutional governance that promote and reproduce them. Only after doing so can we work toward creating a more equitable and inclusive society.

We need to recognize the ways that harmful workplace cultures shape the opportunities available to people, and we need to build strong relationships with colleagues and peers.

Demonstrate self-care and care for others. This means being aware of our own and others’ lived experiences and differences. We need to recognize the ways that harmful workplace cultures shape the opportunities available to people, and we need to build strong relationships with colleagues and peers. This requires us to pay attention to our co-workers’ feelings and emotional expressions. We must try to understand how we can tap our emotive resources to shape our reactions to others and to impact or even transform perceptions at a group level.

Caring for others does not mean we force solutions upon certain individuals. Rather, it means we must honor our colleagues’ autonomy, personal needs, and potential for growth even as we offer them help in making their own decisions.

When managers create inclusive and empowering workplaces, their organizations will be poised to pursue sustainable growth. In academia, for instance, such growth will enable the higher education sector to meet its societal responsibilities.

Acknowledge how interacting with different people enriches lives. As we documented in our study, the five of us were able to conduct reflective conversations with each other by leading with an appreciation of our distinct and complex identities, advantages, and disadvantages. Even through videoconferencing, we were able to embrace an embodied connectedness that was grounded in a spectrum of emotions and affective expressions even as it acknowledged holes in the system.

Similarly, as employees build relationships with their colleagues in the workplace, they must maintain a healthy balance between self-care and caring for others. By managing the demands brought on by intersectional diversity, they will be able to build meaningful relationships with each other and sustain continued personal and professional growth within their daily working lives.

Broaden inclusivity. We must embrace the fact that people should be valued for their diverse strengths. Across all sectors, we should aspire to build workplace cultures that accept all employees for who they are and what they bring to their institutions.

In the higher education sector specifically, improving bonds between colleagues and creating inclusive work environments will raise the quality of education and open up new opportunities for societally impactful research.

In the neoliberal workplace culture, academia is a simple numbers game and academics are machines that generate journal articles. We must dare to demand professional lives that do not merely focus on quantity. We must demand the right to quality as well.