Boredom, and especially boredom at work, is certainly not boring to Madeleine Rauch, Associate Professor in Strategy and International Business at Cambridge Judge Business School.
“Boredom is everywhere,” says Madeleine. “As adults we’re trained not to say we’re bored at work. But when people open up about their feelings on work, they acknowledge that there are times that work is repetitive and boring, and many adult workers realise that the last time they said they were bored was when they were children.”
In fact, prior research cited by Madeleine estimates that 87% of workers have experienced boredom at work. But is this necessarily a bad thing?
What is boredom, and how do deeply committed workers respond to it?
Those realities on the ground often reflected boredom. So, what is boredom?
It has been described variously in academic studies, including one that said the word refers to “an unpleasant, transient affective state in which the individual feels a pervasive lack of interest in and difficulty concentrating on the current activity”, such that “it takes conscious effort to maintain or return attention to that activity”. The German word for boredom, ‘langeweile’, literally refers to a long while, and the French word for boredom, ‘ennui’, reflects workers’ feelings of dissatisfaction and disengagement.
In her research, Madeleine focuses on a simple definition of boredom as an emotional experience associated with an absence of meaning, and that raised a key question for her: how do workers who are deeply motivated to enact idealised futures – rooted in an aspirational set of values and morals, rather than in the current reality – experience and respond to boredom at work?
While most studies on workplace boredom have focused on the negative organisational consequence of idleness, including low morale and disengagement, the stakes are different in extreme and hostile contexts because boredom can jeopardise security, compromise a mission’s success, or prompt workers to abandon the mission.
“Yet, in many instances, workers persevere, indicating that there is much to learn about how boredom influences workers’ enactment of their idealised futures,” Madeleine writes. “My findings reveal boredom as a double-edged sword. While boredom can trigger disengagement, it can also motivate workers to address the lack of meaning in their work.” Dr Madeleine Rauch
Researching boredom at work: studying UN peacekeepers
“What people find surprising when I present my research is that boredom can be something positive and conducive to accomplishing things at work, and that’s because boredom is supposed to be something negative,” says Madeleine.
To examine how people cope with boredom at work, Madeleine spent 2 weeks in 2019 with United Nations blue helmet peacekeepers in South Sudan, the world’s newest country (it became independent in 2011) and one with continuing conflict and problems ranging from poor infrastructure to dangerous drought. She also had access to the unsolicited personal diaries of 63 such peacekeepers, who recorded their thoughts about peacekeeping duties and many other topics.
The result was a study published in the prestigious Academy of Management Journal that breaks new ground in introducing the concept of ‘idealised futures’ – or visions of how the world is imagined to be, grounded in strong moral beliefs – and how this relates to boredom.
With references to Aristotle (“It is not enough to win a war: it is more important to organise the peace”) and Nietzsche (who also said “the boredom of God on the seventh day of creation would be a subject for a great poet”), the study examined the contrasting responses to boredom among the peacekeepers in South Sudan.
While UN peacekeepers are assigned to many other countries, including Lebanon, Kosovo, Cyprus and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the South Sudan mission is the UN’s largest and most expensive with an annual budget of $1.2 billion out of the total UN peacekeeping budget of $6.45 billion, says the research.
Peacekeepers typically spend 6 to 12 months in a country, with tasks ranging from ensuring security for civilians to strengthening infrastructure to empowering women. Most have been trained as law enforcement officers, with extensive experience, in their home countries.
Following peacekeepers around the clock
To conduct her research, Madeleine collected 4 types of data focused on the blue helmets:
- unsolicited personal diaries
- interviews
- informal conversations
- nonparticipant observations documented in field notes, as well as internal documents
“For 2 weeks, I followed peacekeepers in their daily work and activities, traveling to various parts of the country, including the combat region, and observing daily briefings, staff meetings, and meetings with local politicians, army generals, and members of other local and international humanitarian agencies.
“Given the nature of UN missions, I was with the delegation around the clock. Sleeping and eating in the same location, often in provisional housing with little to no privacy, promoted bonding and enabled me to remain close to the action.”
To gain further knowledge about the political aspects of the UN and its mandates, she also attended briefings before and after her South Sudan field work at UN headquarters in New York and Geneva.
Image: Prostock-studio, Canva
