Love or money at work?

Would you take a really boring job if it paid well? Or are you the type of person to stay in a job that stimulates you even if the money is bad?

I guess it comes down to whether pay or job satisfaction is more important to you at work.

A recent UK survey found that British workers were now ranking job satisfaction lower than money when it came changing jobs.  

The Reuters report revealed that of the 2000 employees surveyed, more than half considered pay the main reason for wanting to change jobs.

Similarly, research by recruiting company Hay has found that graduates are now focused firmly on what kind of salary they will get, rather than the quality of the job they land.

That might be a trend created by the global financial crisis, as people become more aware of their financial circumstances. Around the world, we have rising food prices which some economists predict will rise 10 fold by 2014. Add to that fuel prices heading in only one direction.

But while people may seem to be more focused on money, there are limits. According to research by Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate and professor emeritus of psychology at Princeton, there is a specific dollar number after which more money has no measurable effect on day-to-day contentment and job satisfaction. That magic number is $US75,000 ($71,675) a year.

This means the more people earn, the more their job satisfaction increases, until they hit that number. After that, it’s just more of the same and there is no gain in job satisfaction.

It’s not that the extra money will do any harm. Kahneman suggests it’s more a case that it won’t necessarily make you any happier. It doesn't mean that you wouldn't be happier getting a pay rise that takes you way beyond that number, but Kahneman says other factors (like health and relationships) come into play at that point.

Kahneman maintains that the benefits of having a high income are ambiguous. On one hand, we can buy more of the things we value if we have more money. On the other hand, he says, we might enjoy them less.

"We suspect that this means, in part, that when people have a lot more money, they can buy a lot more pleasures, but there are some indications that when you have a lot of money, you will savour each pleasure less,’’ he says.

“Perhaps $75,000 is a threshold beyond which further increases in income no longer improve individuals' ability to do what matters most to their emotional well-being, such as spending time with people they like, avoiding pain and disease, and enjoying leisure.

"Our data speak only to differences. They do not imply that people will not be happy with a raise from $100,000 to $150,000, or that they will be indifferent to an equivalent drop in income.... What the data suggest is that above a certain level of stable income, individuals' emotional well-being is constrained by other factors in their temperament and life circumstances."

Some economists say your position and rank at work trumps pay every time, because it affects  how proud you are of your professional achievements.

Apparently this is important because it measures where you stand in comparison with other people. So in other words, doing better or worse than others affects your self-image and hence your job satisfaction.

There's been a lot of research on this. Examples include the phenomenon known as the Easterlin Paradox, detailed here and named after economist Richard Easterlin who teaches at the University of Southern California. He found that relative income, rather than absolute income, determines our satisfaction. In other words, it's all about keeping with the Joneses.

It’s an important question to consider if you’re thinking of going for a promotion which might deliver a bigger salary but at the same time, make you more stressed and less happy about your job. But it is not always so simple to do the sums.

Rank might correlate with job satisfaction for some but the problem is that everyone is different and not everyone will equate it with job satisfaction. After all, an engineer would have a very different assessment of job satisfaction to a sales person.

What makes it even more complex is that few of us actually know what truly makes us happy or satisfied. 

In his book Stumbling on Happiness,  Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert says most of us make three important decisions in our lives: where to live, what to do and with whom to do it. But we're really the first human beings to make those decisions. For most of recorded time, people lived where they were born and they followed their parents' jobs. The agricultural, industrial and technological revolutions changed everything, making happiness our responsibility.

Gilbert argues that people not only struggle to recall what made them happy, but also fail to predict or acutely remember the stuff that gives them joy or pain. He blames part of that on what he calls the ''psychological immune system'', where we cook the facts and rationalise heavily after big negative events such as a failed marriage or loss of a job.

We also have difficulty predicting what makes us happy because of the logic-processing imperfections of our brains. Each time we have a pleasurable experience, we adapt to it quickly so that it yields less pleasure next time.

Gilbert's argument highlights why Kahneman maintains that after a certain level of income, we get less pleasure from the things we buy - which is where job satisfaction might become more important than money.

So what means most to you? Job satisfaction or a large pay check?