Work takes up most of our waking hours, so getting it right matters. I'm Clif P Lewis, an organisational psychologist, and I write about what the research says makes work work.
Last week I argued that pay explains far less about why people hate their jobs than we assume, and that humans reason best in groups that argue things out. Yet almost every system at work, from hiring and targets to appraisal, promotion and pay, treats us as lone performers. That's the blueprint, and this week I want to look at where it came from and what to do about it.
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🧠The organisational psychology lens
Then we built work around the individual
We hire individuals, train individuals, set individual targets, appraise individuals, promote individuals, discipline individuals and pay individuals. Teams appear on the org chart, but nearly every system that decides someone’s fate is aimed at one person. Human needs and group interests arrive as an afterthought, usually in the form of a wellness app or a team-building day.
Now you might be thinking “But Clif, isn’t the individual just the natural unit of work?” It only looks natural because it's all any of us, or our grandparents, have known. When Frederick Taylor set out scientific management in 1911, he argued that workers “herded together in gangs” were far less efficient than those whose “personal ambition is stimulated”, and made it a rule to deal with one man at a time (Taylor, 1911, pp. 43, 72). From the 1980s, human resource management pushed further in the same direction, putting the individual employee first and sidelining unions and collective bargaining (Storey & Bacon, 1993).
I’d argue it stuck because individuals are easier to measure, manage and control than autonomous groups, but I’ll spare you my communist manifesto (for now). Alliger and McEachern (2024) make a related point, suggesting that workplaces may be organised in ways that minimise worker solidarity, including through “individualistic, achievement-oriented solutions to systemic problems” (p. 14). Put a group-thinking species into a system built for lone performers and you get Mercier and Sperber's pen underwater, for an entire career, because when every goal, review and pay rise belongs to one person, colleagues become rivals or strangers. The everyday experience of working something out together and sharing the win quietly disappears. That may well be why everyone hates their job.
Possible remedies, with a warning label
If that diagnosis is right, two lines of research offer possible remedies, though neither is a silver bullet:
The first is belonging. Baumeister and Leary (1995) argued that frequent, positive contact within stable relationships is a fundamental human need, and lonelier employees get rated as poorer performers by their managers (Ozcelik & Barsade, 2018).
The second is relational job design, which connects people to the humans their work affects (Parker et al., 2017).
Now the warning label: In a preregistered study of 2,240 Swedish employees, job insecurity, poor work–life balance and illegitimate tasks predicted anti-work attitudes, while social community at work had no independent link with them (Sinclair et al., 2026). Connection is a basic need. It does not replace job security, sane hours or work that makes sense.
What this means for leaders
Find out where the individual is your default.
List every system that decides someone’s fate, from hiring and goals to pay, promotion and discipline, and mark the ones that only ever see individuals. Then look at what that design does to people. Full disclosure, Human Score™ is my company, so I’m biased, but it was built for this. It draws on employees’ own accounts to show how well your structure lets people reach each other, argue productively and solve problems together.Give teams goals they own together.
In a meta-analysis of 146 studies, team-based incentives had a larger average effect on performance than individual ones (Garbers & Konradt, 2014). Start with one goal a team owns jointly and a reward that depends on all of them. Atlassian’s free Goals, Signals and Measures exercise gives you a 90-minute session in which the whole team defines what success looks like, together.Let groups argue before big decisions.
Before approving one person’s proposal, put the options to a small group and ask them to argue it out. Liberating Structures, a free set of facilitation methods, includes simple formats such as 1-2-4-All, where people think alone, then in pairs, then in fours, then as a whole group.Connect people to the people they serve.
Build regular contact between staff and the customers, communities, patients or students who benefit from their work. This relational side of job design, first proposed by Grant (2007), has since been supported and extended by later research (Parker et al., 2017). The University of Michigan's Job Crafting Exercise helps employees reshape the relational side of their roles as well as their tasks (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001).Don’t sell belonging as a substitute for security.
A friendly team will not offset constant restructuring or impossible hours (Sinclair et al., 2026). Check for those first with the free Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire (under the supervision of a trained professional), the instrument Sinclair et al. used, which measures job insecurity and work–life conflict alongside social community at work (Burr et al., 2019). Fix what it turns up, and retire the “we’re a family” line, because appeals to togetherness can distract people from problems the organisation itself created (Alliger & McEachern, 2024).Make every fix systemic, structural or habitual.
A one-off team-building day or wellness webinar changes nothing if the goals, reviews and pay waiting the next morning still only see individuals. Build the change into how work is organised and how people work together week to week, or expect it to fade by next quarter.
💬 Final thoughts
In case you forgot, Chandler from F🔴R🟡I🔵E🔴N🟡D🔵S spent a long time collecting raises for a job he loathed, though he did eventually quit, and a raise had nothing to do with it. He walked out when the job threatened to keep him away from Monica, and took an unpaid internship in advertising that he enjoyed far more. Years of raises had kept him in the old job without ever making him like it.
No number of incentives, support programmes or team-building days will change how work affects people’s lives while the work itself is designed for someone who doesn’t exist, the lone performer who needs nobody. Design for real people. They’re social animals. Even the Transponsters.
How's the depth of today's edition?
If something here speaks to you, I’d love to hear it.
Stay human,
Clif
P.S. Where do your pre-hire criteria stop matching what your team surely values and rewards? Reply to this email and let me know.
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