A Country Doctor Writes:

Every once in a while something in the business literature catches my attention. Last week I found an article in the Harvard Business Review daily newsletter about Job Crafting. I had never heard the term, and I had not paid any attention to the possibility that how we view and approach our career can affect our personality and our morality instead of the other way around.

Business professors Smith and Kouchaki write:

“As originally presented by scholars Amy Wrzesniewski (Yale University) and Jane Dutton (University of Michigan), people can craft their jobs by first altering the way they think about their work (cognitive crafting), second, changing the scope and type of tasks they engage in (task crafting) and, third, changing the nature of their relationships and interactions with others at work (relational crafting). To date, most scholars and practitioners have explored job crafting as a means to make work more meaningful and satisfying, and potentially increase individual performance. But we suggest that you can also engage in job crafting to become your best moral self.”

I don’t often see articles about morality and business, and not often about health care and morality either, for that matter. But last week’s reading gave me reason to think about how our work can elevate us to a higher plane if we view it the right way. We often think that we bring some of our own selves into our work, but we don’t talk nearly enough about how our work shapes us and how we make daily choices in exactly how and in what direction we allow that to happen.

“Whether you view your job as merely a paycheck, as a step up the career ladder, or even as a calling, we encourage you to also approach your job as an avenue for becoming a better person — as a laboratory for refining your character. Doing so will not only help you become virtuous, but it can help others as well. Psychology research on elevation (the moral emotion experienced upon witnessing the virtuous acts of others that leads to a desire to become a better person yourself) suggests that morality can be contagious. Crafting your job in a way that leads to exemplary behaviors might just result in a moral contagion that benefits others in your organization as well. Like a tiny pebble tossed into a vast pond, your simple job crafting efforts might ripple throughout your entire workplace. Try job crafting to make the world a better place — one life at a time, starting with your own.”

I guess we and the journals that cater to us need to claim some of our attention and reading time to consider not just drugs and diseases, patients and third parties but us, the healers, the physicians and other clinicians who are at constant risk of burning out if we don’t see the moral value in and resonate with the moral implications of how we do our work, of our behavior and of our attitudes.