An Underappreciated Classic

It is among the most beloved works of literature in East Asia, and its literary influence in the region has been compared to that of the works of Shakespeare on English literature. It is arguably the most widely read historical novel in late imperial and modern China.

This book is called Romance of the Three Kingdoms and it was written in the 14^th century.  It’s quite long and with far more characters than you can reasonably keep track of.

This story is virtually unknown in the U.S. but it is really quite enjoyable.  The Chinese have made many TV series based on it.  For your convenience one is available on Youtube with English subtitles.  I highly recommend that you give it a chance.

“Some people will work only if you beat them. Other people will work only if you don’t beat them.”

The title of this article is a quote from a now retired coworker of mine and aptly sets the theme of this article.

I once saw a TV show in which I guy was running a restaurant, probably some kind of reality-based cooking show; I don’t remember too clearly.  I am certain, thought, that he mentioned that his secret to success was keeping his employees in a state of constant “urgency.”  This sounded to me like he was intentionally trying to create stress in his employees.  This doesn’t sound like a good idea but when you think about it, it’s definitely common sense.  A small amount of stress can motivate us to work.  If the stress is too high, we may be too worried to work well.  The name of this common sense observation is the Yerkes–Dodson law and the relationship between arousal/anxiety/stress is illustrated below.

Wikipedia says: “For simple or well-learned tasks, the relationship can be considered linear with improvements in performance as arousal increases. For complex, unfamiliar, or difficult tasks, the relationship between arousal and performance becomes inverse, with declines in performance as arousal increases.”  So the interesting conclusion is that for complex jobs, only a small amount of stress is beneficial, whereas for simple jobs an appropriate amount of stress would be higher.

Intentionally creating stress in employees looks like it may pay off in some cases when the job is not too complicated but there are other factors to consider.  Long term stress is connected to all kinds of mental and physical health problems that the employee may have to face decades later.  Even if there were financial benefits to creating stress there would be ethical concerns.  Effectively, creating stress that was not expected during the hiring phase would effectively be stealing from the employee (just as creating too little motivation might effectively cause the employee to steal from the employer) and hence be unethical.  Additionally, the employee may not be factoring the health damage caused by stress into deciding whether to take the job contract in which case, the employee would be a sucker and taking advantage of suckers can also be considered unethical.