Read the Case and answer the questions

Motivation for Leisure

“When I have time, I don’t have money. When I have money, I don’t have time,” says Glenn Kelman, chief executive officer of Redfin. He’s not alone. While many workers find themselves faced with 60-, 70-, or 80-hour weeks (and sometimes more), others who are unemployed can find themselves with too much time on their hands. Take Dennis Lee, a sales associate working in Chicago whose girlfriend is unemployed. She has time to spare, but he says her unemployment makes it “financially impossible for me to support the both of us, even if we just go on a small trip, like, to Wisconsin and get a small hotel and stay for a couple of days.”

Those who are employed and who may have the financial means to take a vacation often leave those vacation days on the table. The average U.S. worker gets 2.6 weeks of vacation a year, yet only 43 percent take that time. Although the reasons U.S. employees may not be motivated to take their vacation time vary from a sense of job insecurity to heavy employer workload demands, some companies now let employees trade vacation days for cash, essentially selling the vacation hours they do not intend to use. Other employers cap the amount of vacation time that can be accrued.

The challenge of taking leisure time does not seem to be a problem for many European countries. Take the French, who get 30 days of vacation and say they take all of them. In fact, if you work in the European Union and get sick on vacation, the European Court of Justice says you are entitled to take a make-up vacation.

1) Do you think U.S. workers are less motivated by vacation time than workers in other countries? Why or why not

2) Why do you think U.S. workers often do not take all of their allotted vacation time, even if they may lose the benefit? Are these personal choices, or are they driven more by society, or by organizational culture?   

3) If many unemployed are spending around 2 hours/day looking for work as some research indicates, how would you evaluate the impact of unemployment on work motivation? How would you spend your days if unemployed?