Morale comes from having the nice things in your life correlated with effort.
Hmm I think this is only sort of true, and my disagreement stems from my disagreement with the provided definition of morale.
Morale is, roughly, “the belief that if you work hard, your conditions will improve.”
My first pass rephrasal is:
Morale is, roughly, “the belief that if you try, your conditions will improve.”
I want to capture that sometimes you want to work smarter, not harder, and indeed, getting great outcomes for low-effort-but-smart solutions is extremely satisfying and seems like a central type of morale-building experience imo. Admittedly you can interpret “effort” and “work hard” in ways that automatically capture this, but I feel like this point was missing.
(This is more a response to the post than your comment, I like the connection to learned helplessness.)
I understand the point here, but I don’t really think that “try” really changes the meaning much in the direction you want, because of course you can also try really hard without taking a break to think that perhaps your attempt vector isn’t quite the right one. It’s functionally identical to the term work here.
Perhaps a more accurate phrasing for your interpretation involves “doing the right things”, which I think compounds both the choice element and the hard-work element. (This also ties the word morale nicely to the word moral, an etymological sibling.)
I think the core important belief is that your actions have consequences, and that those consequences matter. To be fair to the post, I think the original definition with “working hard” is a respectable simplification that boils it down to the component that we can really control longer for our life as a whole.
If we do decompose the problem into the components hard work and good decisions, then hard work is the part which we need dopamine for. Which we need to try and get our body to produce for us through habit. It is this that I think the post is actually about, and thus why that is a fair definition to choose.
Although I agree with you that there are cases where the choice component is important to factor in. That component is, I think, controlled much more by how smart you are, both intrinsically and from an having environment that boosts your decision-making skills (for example: parents that teach good life lessons, or role models that show you how they make good decisions). I think this is somewhat already conditioned on when we talk about the morale of a specific individual. But it could potentially be important when comparing people(s), depending on how much it actually matters for morale overall.
Very tangential, but this made me think that perhaps the latter is also one of the reasons that less intelligent people are more prone to addictions (for example problematic gambling, adjusted for socioeconomic factors). My hypothesis here is that if, on average, your effort correlates less with reward due to making poor decisions, the scale of reward required to disrupt your standard morale is also lower. This is pure conjecture of course; I just thought of it and wanted to share.
I agree that ‘hard work’ does not precisely capture that which high morale systems reward. ‘Effort’ might be closer, but rewarding someone who is effortlessly friendly or effortlessly smart (when either is required for the job) would not hurt morale.
I would perhaps phrase it as the alignment of perceived incentives of the individuals to the goals of their employers. You get what you reward.
For example, a terrible workplace in which it is common knowledge that promotions are the result of having sex with your superior might seem low morale, but strictly speaking is not. Over time, you will attract a lot of people who are highly motivated. Specifically, motivated to have sex with their bosses and land cushy bullshit jobs. Naturally, for most organizations this is orthogonal to their mission, so as far as advancing the interests of the org are concerned, morale would be low, just as if promotions were assigned by lottery.
Hmm I think this is only sort of true, and my disagreement stems from my disagreement with the provided definition of morale.
My first pass rephrasal is:
Morale is, roughly, “the belief that if you try, your conditions will improve.”
I want to capture that sometimes you want to work smarter, not harder, and indeed, getting great outcomes for low-effort-but-smart solutions is extremely satisfying and seems like a central type of morale-building experience imo. Admittedly you can interpret “effort” and “work hard” in ways that automatically capture this, but I feel like this point was missing.
(This is more a response to the post than your comment, I like the connection to learned helplessness.)
I understand the point here, but I don’t really think that “try” really changes the meaning much in the direction you want, because of course you can also try really hard without taking a break to think that perhaps your attempt vector isn’t quite the right one. It’s functionally identical to the term work here.
Perhaps a more accurate phrasing for your interpretation involves “doing the right things”, which I think compounds both the choice element and the hard-work element. (This also ties the word morale nicely to the word moral, an etymological sibling.)
I think the core important belief is that your actions have consequences, and that those consequences matter. To be fair to the post, I think the original definition with “working hard” is a respectable simplification that boils it down to the component that we can really control longer for our life as a whole.
If we do decompose the problem into the components hard work and good decisions, then hard work is the part which we need dopamine for. Which we need to try and get our body to produce for us through habit. It is this that I think the post is actually about, and thus why that is a fair definition to choose.
Although I agree with you that there are cases where the choice component is important to factor in. That component is, I think, controlled much more by how smart you are, both intrinsically and from an having environment that boosts your decision-making skills (for example: parents that teach good life lessons, or role models that show you how they make good decisions). I think this is somewhat already conditioned on when we talk about the morale of a specific individual. But it could potentially be important when comparing people(s), depending on how much it actually matters for morale overall.
Very tangential, but this made me think that perhaps the latter is also one of the reasons that less intelligent people are more prone to addictions (for example problematic gambling, adjusted for socioeconomic factors). My hypothesis here is that if, on average, your effort correlates less with reward due to making poor decisions, the scale of reward required to disrupt your standard morale is also lower. This is pure conjecture of course; I just thought of it and wanted to share.
I agree that ‘hard work’ does not precisely capture that which high morale systems reward. ‘Effort’ might be closer, but rewarding someone who is effortlessly friendly or effortlessly smart (when either is required for the job) would not hurt morale.
I would perhaps phrase it as the alignment of perceived incentives of the individuals to the goals of their employers. You get what you reward.
For example, a terrible workplace in which it is common knowledge that promotions are the result of having sex with your superior might seem low morale, but strictly speaking is not. Over time, you will attract a lot of people who are highly motivated. Specifically, motivated to have sex with their bosses and land cushy bullshit jobs. Naturally, for most organizations this is orthogonal to their mission, so as far as advancing the interests of the org are concerned, morale would be low, just as if promotions were assigned by lottery.