The salon owner I’ve been telling you about says that she observes interesting differences in terms of work ethic among her American and Eastern European workers. Americans are, of course, more hard-working and driven (what else is new?) but she still prefers working with Eastern Europeans.
“Americans find it very hard to work within a hierarchy and accept that this is MY business, MY money, MY risk, and I’m the one who will have the final say,” she explains. “I’m tired of constantly battling them over every tiny little thing. We are a culture of people where everyone feels like a boss, and that’s tiresome.”
Eastern Europeans, on the other hand, don’t have this problem. They inscribe themselves well into hierarchies, which fully compensates for their more laid back approach to work.
I find these observations very interesting because I’m seeing the same thing at work. My American colleagues find it very hard to accept authority. This sometimes turns into a completely insane thing when a request – not even an order but a request – from an administrator about something of a very tiny import leads to a bloodbath with people getting fired, lawsuits being filed, heart attacks occurring.
Hey, Eastern Europeans, this is good news for us. We can still enjoy our relaxed approach to work yet beat the competition.
Clarissa's Blog 
Yes, this works splendidly until the Americans decide they simply prefer to be at the top of all of the hierarchies …
OH BUT EVERYBODY IS SUPPOSED TO BE ABOVE COLONIALISM NOW
[and even with this they still want to be at the top of the hierarchies …] 🙂
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“Americans find it very hard to work within a hierarchy and accept that this is MY business, MY money, MY risk, and I’m the one who will have the final say,” she explains. “I’m tired of constantly battling them over every tiny little thing. We are a culture of people where everyone feels like a boss, and that’s tiresome.”
I wonder how much of this is an offshoot of the advice, “Think like an owner and come up with solutions to problems” and “Quantify your achievements” when applying for jobs and/or to prove you merit a raise trickling down from business articles aimed at white collar workers to blue collar workers.
There’s also the expectation that your job is your personhood. So if your job is increments and tiny things, every increment and tiny thing becomes about the ego. With higher status persons, the fact that their job is higher status correlates to some kind of virtue, so taking any order from anybody lower status even if it’s in service of their job or to help them rankles more than it should.
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Exactly, it absolutely is some sort of a weird ego thing. I love to work, but I never get emotionally attached to workplace minutiae. It’s strange for me to see how involved people get with work-related things, even those that are very unimportant.
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Spaniards. Americans, anyone from any place in this hemisphere, are far less personally involved with that sort of thing than Spaniards.
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Really? Why do you think that is?
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At almost every job I had in the US I was amazed at how negatively people took instructions (not talking about criticism). A significant minority seemed to take any kind of instruction about what the job was or how it was to be performed as a personal attack.
This of course has an effect on how I perceive “Oh my workplace is soooooo toxic” complaining. I’m sure this is a problem for some people, but I think a lot of them are just taking things too personally.
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“A significant minority seemed to take any kind of instruction about what the job was or how it was to be performed as a personal attack.”
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At almost every job I had in the US I was amazed at how negatively people took instructions (not talking about criticism). A significant minority seemed to take any kind of instruction about what the job was or how it was to be performed as a personal attack.
With the increasing demands that people be on-call, have their work bleed into their life, perform emotional labor and evince identification with work, this issue is just going to be worse. You’re going to see more people bristle at instructions, and those who already do are going to be worse.
Also, I think the better compensated a job is, the less emotional hooks management uses to get work or money out of people, and therefore you have all these disproportionate emotional reactions to instructions that should come out in response to other things.
Why It’s Bad Your Boss Wants You to Be Happy
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“With the increasing demands that people be on-call, have their work bleed into their life, perform emotional labor and evince identification with work, this issue is just going to be worse.”
This is of course, what the Jewish folk like to call “Chtuzpah”: We expect you to display fanatical devotion to your job and spend every waking minute thinking of how to serve us better but forget about job security. That’s over!
The healthy reaction to that is “Fuck you! Pay me!” (stolen shamelessly from technologyasnature)
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The stories I’m describing are not about evil bosses who demand anything from anybody. People are choosing to behave this way even when bosses actively discourage them from doing it. As for “job security”, the people who engage in all this at my university are all tenured.
This is not about anybody being a victim. This is simply about a cultural difference.
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Yeah, they’re separate issues. A lot of Americans cannot handle completely reasonable requests or instructions from a superior at work (and may in fact bristle at the word ‘superior’).
But the new mantra “build your entire existence around a job with no security” is so profoundly irritating on its own so I thought I’d give that a swipe while I was here.
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Perhaps the exaggerated “I do it my way” phenomenon has something to do with a reaction to the kinds of “corporate happyfeels” described in the article that Shakti linked to …
When you have employers essentially demanding that you be happy at all times, the corporation changes from being an entity that simply collects the efforts of labour and capitalises on them.
It instead becomes a “Corporate Maoist Cult”.
To me it’s not surprising to hear what comes out of the mouth of Zappo’s Hsieh — there’s a reason that Amazon bought the company. Corporate Maoist Cults tend to like other Corporate Maoist Cults.
Of course, I believe the proper reaction to Corporate Maoist Cults is to run away from them, very, very fast, but for the people who sense that they’re in environments where people are quite literally demanding they remain happy at all times, the “I do it my way” phenomenon becomes a sort of psychological survival technique.
“Smile or Die” indeed …
[BTW, I do business with Amazon on the basis of being like that Roman Emperor who pined for having “a Rome with one neck”, so that he could choke the crap out of it when it misbehaved …]
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