On Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa Week: Do you know a co-worker with a side hustle?
Jennifer Nahrgang, professor and Henry B. Tippie Excellence Chair of Management and Entrepreneurship, discusses how it might affect them at work.
Jennifer D. Nahrgang is Professor and Henry B. Tippie Excellence Chair of Management and Entrepreneurship in the Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa. Her research focuses on leadership and teams, employee voice and engagement, and the future world of work. Her research has also been featured in The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, and Harvard Business Review.
Successful Side Hustle? Don’t Be a Jerk at Your Day Job
When someone starts a side hustle, it might change how they do their day job.
But not always in a good way. My research has found that when people have a successful side gig, their behavior at their full-time job often becomes less than friendly to co-workers and managers. You could almost say they become jerks.
We surveyed 200 employees who also have side hustles. We included their colleagues at their day job, too, to see what impact the second job has on the first.
We found they began to show more hostility to their coworkers – by feeling angry, irritated and annoyed with them. Not only does this alienate them from co-workers and create a more difficult workplace, we found it also reduces their productivity.
Our research found this behavior is caused by a loss of control. Side hustlers are so used to the autonomy they have in their second job that the relative rigidity and lack of control in their full-time job starts to wear on them. They have so much freedom in their side gigs that they begin to feel boxed in by their full-time jobs. That frustration takes the form of lashing out and other counterproductive behaviors.
But we also found an upside to side gigs in that they can improve performance in the employee’s day job. Rather than getting angry, employees can opt to deal with their frustrations by increasing initiative in their full-time jobs and restore control over their work. This not only keeps their frustrations in check, it also benefits their work performance.
What solutions do managers have when their side gigging employees are not playing nice with co-workers? We found counterproductive behavior can be mitigated if managers provide more autonomy to their side hustling employees so they feel less boxed in.
Read More:
[CNBC] – Reimagining work: Supporting employee side hustles
[Bloomberg] – Amazon CEO targets the meeting before the meeting
[Fast Company] – What mouse mover technology teaches us about the future of work
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