There’s a great article in the latest issue (August 2010) of Wired about stress. The article’s not yet online, but it’s entitled “Under Pressure,” and it describes how the stress of those working in a bureaucracy can be particularly difficult.
The article refers to a studies of British civil servants, part of the vast Whitehall bureaucracy, and describes findings in which Michael Marmot, professor of epidemiology and public health at University College London, was able to demonstrate that frontline workers carried more stress, of a more damaging kind, than leaders in that bureaucracy.
Here’s a link to more information on the Whitehall studies, information that includes links to the studies’ database.
Much of this confirms what people know, by experience — that lower-level workers are often brow-beaten and bullied, and that their lives are made miserable by leaders’ actions and inactions.
I’m not British, and I’ve not talked to anyone who ever worked in the British civil service, but I’d guess that at least some frontline workers had difficult lives because bureaucrartic leaders mistreated them while simultaneously projecting and image of civility and enlightenment to the outside world.
One can guess just as easily that this isn’t simply a British problem. America is lousy with self-promoting bureaucrats, grandstanding politicians, and their sycophants, who use government authority to advance themselves at the expense of those doing all the real work, behind the scenes.
It’s true, as has been said many times, that some leaders don’t think it’s enough to climb a ladder above others; they feel the need to kick down, at those beneath them.
I’m convinced that problems typically begin at the top, and spread downward.
This is the difference between someone who loves up and someone who loves down. A person who loves up cares mostly about his own interest, and is fawning to peers and superiors who might advance that interest. He mistreats those lower in the hierarchy as tools to his own end.
A person who loves down cares most for frontline and lower-level workers, and thinks first of them, even at the risk of his own career.
I’ll leave it to readers to conclude which environment is the one in which they work, and which is the one in which they’d wish to work.