Some passages on what makes a job “good” from The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt:
Psychologists have referred to this basic need as a need for competence, industry, or mastery. [Psychologist Robert] White called it the “effectance motive,” which he defined as the need or drive to develop competence through interacting with and controlling one’s environment. Effectance is almost as basic a need as food and water, yet it is not a deficit need, like hunger, that is satisfied and then disappears for a few hours. Rather, White said, effectance is a constant presence in our lives: Dealing with the environment means carrying on a continuing transaction which gradually changes one’s relation to the environment. Because there is no consummatory climax, satisfaction has to be seen as lying in a considerable series of transactions, in a trend of behavior rather than a goal that is achieved.
This reflects the importance of developing the craftsman mentality.
The effectance motive helps explain the progress principle: We get more pleasure from making progress toward our goals than we do from achieving them because, as Shakespeare said, “Joy’s soul lies in the doing.”
Believing the opposite was coined as “the arrival fallacy” by psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar, who wrote the best-selling Happier. (As in: I’ll finally be happy when I finish that big exam or project. No, when I graduate! Or get that promotion! No, when I retire!)
Contrast the effectance motive with the many narrowly defined clock-in clock-out closely supervised jobs that limit personal choices:
In 1964, the sociologists Melvin Kohn and Carmi Schooler surveyed 3,100 American men about their jobs and found that the key to understanding which jobs were satisfying was what they called “occupational self direction.” Men who were closely supervised in jobs of low complexity and much routine showed the highest degree of alienation (feeling powerless, dissatisfied, and separated from the work). Men who had more latitude in deciding how they approached work that was varied and challenging tended to enjoy their work much more. When workers had occupational self-direction, their work was often satisfying.
My profession of radiology can easily fall into this trap in the wrong environment. You have to carve out ways to take ownership of both the process and product.