Joy in Work Bible Study

What Kills Joy in Work

In his book The Social Conscience of the Evangelical, Sherwood E. Wirt writes:

The German studies of Henri De Man in the 1920s, and the concurrent Hawthorne experiments conducted at the Chicago plant of the Western Electric Co., revealed for the first time in a scientific way the enormous importance of inter-relationships between employees in the development of work satisfaction and incentives. The Hawthorne studies showed that workers would increase their output even when the lights were dimmed to the strength of moonlight, if they thought that their labours were considered by other people to be important and significant. It was proved beyond doubt that the size of the pay envelope is not the greatest incentive to doing good work, or the chief source of work satisfaction. De Man maintained that the acquisitive instinct may drive a man to his work, but it is hardly a constituent of joy in work. On the contrary, thought about daily bread, thought about earning, kills joy in work.

John Stott, The Preacher’s Notebook: The Collected Quotes, Illustrations, and Prayers of John Stott, ed. Mark Meynell (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018).