Name: Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance—and What We Can Do About It
Author: Jeffrey Pfeffer
ISBN: B071VR9313

Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance—and What We Can Do About It

by Jeffrey Pfeffer

What it's about

Jeffrey Pfeffer presents a data-driven indictment of modern management practices that prioritize short-term profit at the expense of human life. He demonstrates that toxic workplace conditions are as damaging to employee health as secondhand smoke and argues that leaders must prioritize well-being to improve both societal outcomes and long-term company performance.

Key ideas

The death toll of work: Workplace stress leads to an estimated 120,000 excess deaths annually in the United States, a figure comparable to major diseases like diabetes or Alzheimer's.
Economic insecurity creates physical pain: The lack of control and stability in the modern gig economy directly lowers human pain tolerance and increases reliance on medication.
The business case for health: High-stress environments are inefficient because the indirect costs of disengagement and physical illness are five times higher than direct medical spending.
Leadership as the lever for change: Organizational culture is a direct byproduct of management choices, making leaders the primary agents responsible for creating sustainable, healthy environments.

You'll love this book if...

You are a manager or executive interested in the tangible financial benefits of a healthier workforce.
You want to understand the systemic forces driving modern workplace burnout and the loss of job security.
You enjoy research-based arguments that challenge the assumption that high-pressure environments are necessary for success.

Best for

HR professionals and business leaders who want to build a more sustainable and productive culture.

Books with the same vibe

Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber
The Truth About Employee Engagement by Patrick Lencioni
Drive by Daniel H. Pink

10 popular highlights from this book

Key Insights & Memorable Quotes

The most popular highlights from Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance—and What We Can Do About It, saved by readers on Screvi.

One study of relatively highly paid contractors in Silicon Valley found that free agents didn’t really feel free because of the need to be always searching for their next gig and therefore frequently took less leisure time than regular employees.

Using both experiments and field data, a recent study found that economic insecurity was associated with increased consumption of painkillers and produced actual physical pain and reduced pain tolerance, with the absence of control providing one mechanism explaining these results.

Necesitamos empresas saludables con valores que regeneren la cultura tóxica para construir una sociedad sostenible. Y la bisagra para el cambio necesario, la especie clave del ecosistema humano, el roble del que depende que crezcan y se desarrollen tantas otras especies, y que se oxigene o se contamine el ambiente, es el llamado «líder empresarial».

A review of some 113 published studies concluded that there was good evidence for a relationship between health and productivity

Indirect costs from things such as disengagement, being physically present but not feeling well enough to do one’s best, and being distracted by stress are typically estimated to be about five times as large as the direct medical costs, an issue I return to toward the end of this chapter.

For instance, “For men, prolonged exposure to work-related stress has been linked to an increased likelihood of lung, colon, rectal, and stomach cancer and non-Hodgkin lymphoma.”36 Moreover, we are increasingly understanding the mechanisms linking stress to disease.

Doing this calculation showed that the United States experiences about fifty-nine thousand excess deaths and about $63 billion in incremental costs annually compared to what would be predicted given its per capita income level. Considering the total toll we previously estimated (of about 120,000 excess deaths and $180 billion in costs), our analyses indicate that about half of the deaths and about a third of the incremental costs from workplace conditions appear to be potentially preventable if the United States were more similar to other advanced industrialized economies.

Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger found that the proportion of people working in alternative work arrangements had increased some 50 percent in the ten years from 2005 to 2015. Moreover, “94 percent of the net employment growth in the US economy from 2005 to 2015 appears to have occurred in alternative work arrangements.”4

Employing a model designed to reduce the likelihood of double-counting, Goh, Zenios, and I estimated that the number of total excess deaths each year attributable to the ten workplace conditions was about 120,000 people. To put this number in perspective, this is more deaths coming from poor, unhealthful, stressful workplace conditions than the number of deaths resulting from diabetes, Alzheimer’s, influenza, or kidney disease and about as many deaths as were reported in 2010 from both accidents and strokes. The data on deaths by cause come from the Centers for Disease Control.28