THE THIRD WAVE
a package to his or her own needs. Says Yankelovich, “There is no one set of incentives with which to motivate the full spectrum of the work force.” Moreover, he adds, in the mix of rewards for work, money no longer has the same motivating power it once did.
No one suggests these workers don’t want money. They certainly do. But once a certain income level is reached they vary widely in what they want. Additional increments of money no longer have their former impact on behavior. When the Bank of America in San Francisco offered assistant vice-president Richard Easley a promotion to a branch only 20 miles away, Easley refused to accept the carrot. He didn’t want to commute. A decade ago, when Future Shock first described the stress of job mobility, only an estimated 10 percent of employees resisted a corporate move. The number has Jumped to between a third and a half, according to Merrill Lynch Relocation Management, Inc., even though moves are often accompanied by a fatter-than-usual raise. “The balance has definitely shifted away from saluting the company and marching off to Timbuctu toward a greater emphasis on family and life-style,” says a vice-president of the Celanese Corporation. Like the Third Wave corporation, which must respond to more than profit, the employee, too, has “multiple bottom lines.”
Meanwhile, the most ingrained patterns of authority are also changing. In Second Wave firms every employee has a single boss. Disputes among employees are taken to the boss to be resolved. In the new matrix organizations the style is entirely different. Workers have more than one boss at a time. People of different rank and different skills meet in temporary, “ad-hocratic” groups. And in the words of Davis and Lawrence, authors of a standard text on the subject: “Differences . .. are resolved without a common boss readily available to arbitrate. …The assumption in a matrix is that this conflict can be healthy . . .differences are valued and people express their views even when they know that others may disagree.”
This system penalizes workers who show blind obedience. It rewards those who—within limits—talk back. Workers who seek meaning, who question authority, who want to exercise discretion, or who demand that their work be socially responsible may be regarded as troublemakers in Second Wave industries. But Third Wave industries cannot run without them.
Across the board, therefore, we are seeing a subtle but pro-found change in the personality traits rewarded by the economic system—a change which cannot help but shape the emerging social character.
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