The Economist January 29th 2022 Business 57W
hat is themeaning of mayon
naise? For Unilever, a consumer
goods giant whose products are all
meant to stand for something, the pur
pose of its Hellmann’s brand is to reduce
food waste by making leftovers tasty. For
Terry Smith, a fund manager fed up with
Unilever’s dipping share price, this is
crazy. “The Hellmann’s brand has existed
since 1913,” he wrote earlier this month.
“So we would guess that by now consum
ers have figured out its purpose (spoiler
alert—salads and sandwiches).”
Mr Smith’s concern is the financial
performance of Unilever (in the face of
investor disquiet, the firm is now plan
ning management cuts and an overhaul
of its operating model). But his underly
ing point, that doing the obvious job well
can be purpose enough, is one that has
much wider application. For it is true of
colleagues as well as condiments.
The very idea of a purposeful employ
ee conjures up a specific type of person.
They crave a meaningful job that changes
society for the better. When asked about
their personal passion projects, they
don’t say “huh?” or “playing Wordle”.
They are concerned about their legacy
and almost certainly have a weird diet.
Yet this is not the only way to think
about purposedriven employees. New
research from Bain, a consultancy, into
the attitudes of 20,000 workers across
ten countries confirms that people are
motivated by different things.
Bain identifies six different arche
types, far too few to reflect the complex
ity of individuals but a lot better than a
single lump of employees. “Pioneers” are
the people on a mission to change the
world; “artisans” are interested in mas
tering a specific skill; “operators” derive
a sense of meaning from life outside
work; “strivers” are more focused on payand status; “givers” want to do work that
directly improves the lives of others; and
“explorers” seek out new experiences.
These archetypes are unevenly dis
tributed across different industries and
roles. Pioneers in particular are more
likely to cluster in management roles. The
Bain survey finds that 25% of American
executives match this archetype, but only
9% of the overall ussample does so. An
other survey of American workers carried
out by McKinsey, a consulting firm, in
2020 found that executives were far likeli
er than other respondents to say that their
purpose was fulfilled by their job.
This skew matters if managers blindly
project their own ideas of purpose onto
others. Having a purpose does not neces
sarily mean a desire to found a startup,
head up the career ladder or log into virtu
al Davos. Some people are fired up by the
prospect of learning new skills or of deep
ening their expertise.
Others derive purpose from specific
kinds of responsibility. Research by a
couple of academics at neomaBusiness
School and Boston University looked atthe experience of employees of the Pari
sian metro system who had been newly
promoted into managerial roles. People
who had been working as station agents
before their elevation were generally
satisfied by their new roles. But supervi
sors who had previously worked as train
drivers were noticeably less content:
they felt their roles had less meaning
when they no longer had direct responsi
bility for the wellbeing of passengers.
Firms need to think more creatively
about career progression than promoting
people into management jobs. ibm, for
example, has a fellowship programme
designed to give a handful of its most
gifted technical employees their own
form of recognition each year.
Another mistake is to conflate an
employee’s commitment with good
performance. A recent paper from Yuna
Cho of the University of Hong Kong and
Winnie Jiang of insead, a business
school, describes an experiment in
which groups of people with managerial
experience listened to two actors playing
the part of colleagues. One group heard
an “employee” saying that he was look
ing forward to retirement; another group
heard the employee saying that he did
not want to retire at all. In all other re
spects the conversations were the same.
The observers assigned a bigger bonus
and a higher raise to the employee who
appeared to have more passion.
There is some logic here. Employees
with a calling could well be more ded
icated. But that doesn’t necessarily make
them better at the job. And teams are
likelier to perform well if they blend
types of employees: visionaries to in
spire, specialists to deliver and all those
people who want to do a job well but not
think about it at weekends. Like mayon
naise, the secret is in the mixture. Some people want to change the world. But not everyoneBartlebyPurpose and the employee
healthcare business especially hard.
Fourthquarter revenues declined by 3.5%,
year on year. On the same day Gregory
Hayes, boss of Raytheon, presented mixed
results, noting that the defence firm had
“seen its share of supply disruptions”. Oth
ers sniff trouble coming. On January 26th
Boeing said that supply chains were not a
“constraint” because its airliner produc
tion was low and inventories full. But, it
added, raw materials, labour and logistical
challenges were a “watch item”. Hours later
Tesla said supplychain snags had forced it
to run factories below capacity.
European firms are not immune. On
January 21st Siemens Gamesa, a windtur
bine giant, blamed supplychain woes for
poor results and a profit warning. Vestas, a
rival, has voiced similar concerns. ey, a
consultancy, reckons that Britishlisted
firms issued 19% more profit warnings in
the last quarter of 2021 than a year earlier. A
record number blamed supplychain dis
ruption and rising costs.
Shortages are like nothing seen before
(see chart on previous page). A chip crunch
knocked nearly 10m units, or more than
10%, off annual car production in 2021 asfirms slashed orders at the start of the pan
demic and were pushed to the back of the
queue when demand rebounded. Signs of
improvement are scarce. This month Toyo
ta said that it would cut output by 150,000
vehicles, or around 18%, in February for a
lack of chips. geblamed part of its health
care arm’s woes on the chip crunch. Large
American firms surveyed by America’s
Commerce Department reported that their
chip inventories had fallen from 40 days in
2019 to less than five days in 2021—and ex
pected no improvement for at least the
next six months. The department has