Introduction

Although high-quality employment is associated with improved health and wellbeing, poor-quality jobs are those that can have severe impacts on mental and physical health and interfere with employees’ lives inside and outside work [1,2,3,4]. Jobs and workers have transformed dramatically in recent decades, with information technology, globalisation and international competition increasing work intensity and spatial and temporal boundlessness, and societal and demographic shifts bringing into workplaces more women, people from different backgrounds, and people with different family structures, including coupled and single parents and childless couples and single people [4, 5]. Accordingly, existing job quality models may not adequately explain employees’ experiences [6, 7].

Existing job quality theories help to explain work contexts that impact employees’ working lives and wellbeing. Many have identified working conditions, including demands, resources and rewards, which constitute job quality dimensions, such as Karasek and Theorell’s demands and control model [1], Siegrist’s [2] effort-reward imbalance model, Demerouti, Bakker, Nachreiner and Schaufeli’s [3] demands and resources model, and Polanyi and Tompa’s [6] qualitative exploration of established and emerging job quality dimensions.

Demands can be broadly categorised as quantitative and qualitative. This paper focuses on quantitative demands, and their associated rewards and resources, which previous research has established as job quality dimensions that interact to influence employees’ physical and mental health and wellbeing [1,2,3]. Quantitative demands consist of interrelated demands relating to work amount (quotas, outputs and workloads); speed and effort (working hard, fast, intensely and under time pressure); length (working hours) and timing (working hours distribution, regularity and predictability) [1,2,3, 7], as well as conflicts between different quantitative demands, and between quantitative demands and employees’ health, needs, interests, attributes and non-work responsibilities (3, 5–9]. Rewards have traditionally included extrinsic rewards, such as adequate respect and recognition, advancement opportunities, and income and incentives, in return for employees’ efforts [2, 5,6,7,8]. However, others have identified intrinsic rewards, including feelings of accomplishment and success [5, 6], which can enhance the personal resource of intrinsic job motivation [9]. Finally, resources include supervisor and colleague [1, 3, 7, 10], leadership [5, 8] and organisational support [10, 11]. Some resources have also been categorised as rewards [9, 12], including job security, flexibility and control [1,2,3, 6, 7, 10].

Beyond identifying job quality dimensions, some researchers have emphasised interacting multilevel influences on job quality, including organisational, leader and team-level influences within organisations [13]; industry, labour market and societal influences beyond organisations [4, 7, 14]; and, congruent with person-environment fit theories [15], whether job conditions align with individuals’ life-contexts, including personal, family and community circumstances [7], and needs, interests, aspirations, personalities and identities [6, 16]. Accordingly, different job quality dimensions can be experienced as any or all of hindrance demands, challenge demands [17], resources or rewards, depending on the individuals experiencing them and the multilevel contexts in which they are embedded [6, 8, 18]. Importantly, Pocock and Skinner [7] have argued each of these interacting individual, organisational and societal-level influences on job quality, are influenced by employer-employee and gender power relations.

Combined, extant job quality theories provide a gestalt understanding of job quality and its interacting multilevel individual, team, manager, organisational and societal influences. Accordingly, this paper responds to calls to redress the dearth of multilevel and qualitative research on job quality [16, 18], by presenting a grounded theory explicating how employees of a large Australian company, “ComCo,” experienced and gave meaning to quantitative job quality (that is, quantitative job demands and their interlinking rewards and resources), within their individual, organisational and societal contexts. Aligning with Pocock and Skinner’s [7] emphasis on power relations’ pervasion of societal, organisational and individual-level influences on job quality, and the demographic shifts bringing women and men with changing family structures into workplaces, this paper illustrates multilevel influences on quantitative job quality by exploring similarities and nuances in gendered, classed and aged experiences among mothers, fathers and childless women and men.

Methods

The study was conducted in Australia from early 2019 to mid-2020. The research employed critical feminist grounded theory [19,20,21] to understand how mothers, fathers and childless women and men represented and gave meaning to quantitative job quality in their gendered, classed and aged individual, organisational and societal-level contexts.

While extant multilevel power relations theories informed our sensitising concepts, understanding quantitative job quality within ComCo’s unique context required enrichment of theory grounded in data [22], which drew upon job quality literature and theory as analysis and theory development proceeded, to contextualise participants’ experiences and facilitate deeper explanation of the emerging theory [19, 20, 23]. Accordingly, rather than reviewing empirical literature at the outset, it is (excepting the theoretical background) intertwined with the findings to privilege the grounded theory process [24]. Furthermore, we acknowledge researchers construct knowledge, and accordingly remained open to perspectives other than our own (as feminists, one mother and two childfree women) by endeavouring to recruit participants from various backgrounds and inductively analysing data.

In 2018, ComCo agreed to its involvement, including business-hours employee participation. However, ComCo consented only to “white collar” employees’ participation (who were paid by annual salary), and not to that of blue collar and casual employees’ (who were paid by hourly wage), due to expense and impracticality. In early 2019, eligible employees were invited to complete a self-administered online questionnaire. This paper incorporates data from forty-seven of the respondents’ answers to open-ended questions asking them to describe any positive or negative experiences of working at ComCo connected with being mothers, fathers or childless women or men. From late-2019 to mid-2020, in-depth interviews were conducted with 10 employees, recruited using questionnaire contact details and snowball sampling (noting this paper focuses on participants’ experiences before COVID-19). Participants were interviewed twice for between 45 and 90 min per interview, employing semi-structured interviews exploring participants’ experiences of working at ComCo, asking participants, for example, to describe a typical working day from when they work up to when they went to bed, and how they experienced their everyday working conditions. Second interviews explored topics not covered in first interviews and issues emerging from first interviews. The audio-recorded interviews were transcribed verbatim. Three interviewees validated their transcripts. Although organisational constraints limited us to the original ten interviewees, combining qualitative questionnaire and interviewee data provided a range of perspectives and enabled saturation of many categories. However, while there were similar numbers of participants from support, commercial and operations departments, women and men, and mothers, fathers and childless women, few childless men participated, and participants were dominated by people who were head office-based, full-time employees, managers, aged 35 years or over, bachelor-qualified, spoke only English at home, Australian-born and heterosexual. Finally, using QSR NVivo 12, data were inductively and iteratively analysed using open, axial and selective coding, facilitated by data immersion, memo writing and constant comparison between data, emergent theory, and pre-existing literature and theory [19,20,21].

The remainder of this paper presents the multilevel quantitative job quality grounded theory, including quantitative job demands, their multilevel influences, and (de)motivating, (un)rewarding, (un)rewarded and (un)resourced quantitative hindrance/challenge demands, and our discussion and conclusions. Throughout, we use terms such as masculine, feminine, middle/working-classed, patriarchal, neoliberal and capitalist, to refer to attributes, practices or cultures that can be seen through a feminist lens as having been socially, culturally and discursively configured as gendered or classed, or as being produced by, and reproducing, unequal power relations, to emphasise power relations’ influence on participants’ experiences. Finally, to protect ComCo’s confidentiality, we have broadly identified its industry and not specified the number of employees. Additionally, we have carefully edited participant quotations, and attribute quotations with the minimum descriptors required to compare nuanced experiences, similar to strategies for protecting confidentiality in other organisational research [25]. Within-paragraph quotations are presented in double quotation marks.

A Multilevel Grounded Theory of Quantitative Job Quality in a Gendered, Classed and Aged “Growth-Driven” Organisation

ComCo, a multinational subsidiary with offices around the world, was an incorporated private company beholden to “meeting [and] exceeding shareholder expectations,” which manufactured consumer goods. In Australia, employees worked in what participants described as “middle-classed” and “heterosexual” but gender-diverse national office, “blue collar” and male-dominated factories, state offices or the field; and in male-dominated operations (research, development, quality, manufacturing, logistics, supply chain), support (finance, legal, corporate affairs and female-dominated human resources), and commercial (male-dominated sales, female-dominated marketing) areas, suggesting gendered and classed divisions of labour [25].

As illustrated in Fig. 1 (Multilevel grounded theory of gendered, classed and aged quantitative job quality), the grounded theory suggested participants’ experiences of masculine [26,27,28] excessive quantitative job demands, whether they could meet such demands, and whether they felt extrinsically and intrinsically resourced and rewarded for doing so, flowed from ComCo’s societally-embedded gendered, classed and aged inequality regimes [25, 29] (which, as discussed in depth elsewhere [30], triangulated organisational documentation and participant narratives about ComCo’s values, cultures, policies, practices and expectations, suggested were produced by ComCo’s overarching masculine-neoliberal-capitalist [27, 31] growth imperative by which ComCo sought “growth on growth on growth on growth,” which cascaded to diversified (including both masculine and feminine) growth mechanisms and quantitatively extreme and qualitatively conformant ideal worker discourses that were represented as contributing to growth); as well as individual, family and community-level contexts themselves embedded within gendered, classed and aged organisational and societal contexts [4, 27, 32, 33]. Although excessive quantitative demands aligned predominantly with ComCo’s masculine quantitatively extreme ideal worker discourses, they were also influenced by some qualitatively conformant ideal worker discourses [30]. However, interactions between multilevel influences produced nuanced and inequitable gendered, classed, aged and tenured experiences of quantitative job quality among mothers, fathers and childless women and men. We discuss the data from which the grounded theory emerged in the following sections.

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Notes: 1 Constituted by interacting laws, policies, political and media discourses and ideologies, divisions of labour and parenting and working beliefs, aspirations and performances [32]; 2 Growth imperative, cascading to diversified growth mechanisms and quantitatively extreme and qualitatively conformant ideal workers, discursively constituted by participant narratives and organisational documentation regarding ComCo’s organisational, leadership, team and workplace cultures, values, policies, practices and expectations [30]; 3 Shows only those conformant worker expectations that are relevant to quantitative job quality

Quantitative Job Demands

Although research has found some differences in the extent of quantitative job demands reported by mothers, fathers and childless women and men [34,35,36], participants experienced quantitative job demands aligning with ComCo’s idealised masculine extreme worker discourses and established job quality dimensions [1, 3, 5, 37], regardless of sex or parent-status. Many participants experienced and normalised as “doing [their] jobs,” overarching high performance demands, including “constant pressure” to go “above and beyond” to “deliver” “high,” “unrealistic” and “undoable” “targets,” “goals,” “numbers” and “growth.”

I see it as just doing my job, [but I’m] constantly getting recognised for going above and beyond … delivering what I need to deliver. [Childless man, non-manager]

In turn, most participants experienced interlinking quantitative demands as necessary to achieve high performance and do their jobs, as elsewhere [36,37,38]. These demands included “ridiculous” and “overwhelming” “work overload” that sometimes “never ended,” whether consistently or in “peaks and troughs.”

Last month, almost every week I was thinking, ‘I’m still behind, I don’t know how to get on top of it, I don’t know how to get on top of it.’ Now there’s enough there, but I’m on top of it. [Mother, manager]

Additionally, many participants experienced “the daily grind of relentless work,” including working “extremely hard,” “intensely,” “efficiently,” “single-mindedly” and “urgently,” to manage excessive workloads and meet “targets,” “goals” and “tight deadlines,” and not having enough time to “complete tasks” before “rushing to the next task.”

It’s not an easy job. It’s an all day, every day, all year, every year, effort. [Childless woman, non-manager]

Moreover, many participants needed to work “excessive” or “crazy” hours, whether traditionally or flexibly, to manage “unreasonable” workloads, deadlines and targets, either “constantly” or during “peaks,” including part-time workers with full-time workloads, reflecting ComCo’s gendered extreme, but penalised, part-time worker discourses (Fig. 1).

Constantly working excessive hours as the workload is relentless. [Mother, manager]

It was, ‘It’s a full-time role. If you wanna do it in four days, that’s fine, but just work your arse off to make it happen, and we’ll pay you 20 percent less. And on the day you’re not working, we expect you to communicate, be on email and approve things.’ [Mother, manager]

Finally, many participants needed to be “always” available, connected and flexible for work in which there was no temporal or spatial “clock on, clock off.” Many participants experienced physical availability demands during and outside business hours. Many also needed to be “always connected” during evenings, weekends, carer’s leave, annual leave and part-time workers’ “days off,” in an evolution of entrenched visibility cultures [39] driven by technology and flexibility to include online visibility.

You’re always connected electronically … If you have a sick child and you’ve got a 30-minute call, sometimes you can distract your child and do the call. [Mother, manager]

Additionally, some participants’ roles’ travel requirements imposed geographic flexibility demands.

I was away all the time, most weekends and of course during the week. [Childless woman, non-manager]

Although most participants experienced some or all of ComCo’s excessive quantitative demands, some whose life-contexts ran afoul of organisational discourses doubting the capability and commitment of gendered and aged employee categories [30], experienced a greater burden of proving they were meeting quantitative demands. For example, reflecting aged and tenured organisational discourses of “doubted” and not yet “trusted” younger and newer employees, some newer employees felt they needed to “prove [their] worth” by “delivering.” Similarly, emanating from societal and organisational discourses of mothers “not dedicated” to work, mothers who had returned from parental leave or were working flexibly, felt pressured to “deliver,” “perform” and “justify” their commitment, as in Thornton’s study [38].

I think they judge me when I race out the door and they’re still working … I’ll do more hours [at night], but I feel like I have to justify it. [Mother, manager]

Similarly, while most participants strained to meet some or all of ComCo’s excessive quantitative demands to the extent they were able, research has demonstrated that masculine quantitative demands create barriers to not only meeting and being rewarded for meeting such demands for those unable or unwilling to perform the masculine ideal (overwhelmingly women and mothers given the family-level context of disproportionate caring and domestic burdens); but also engaging in non-working lives for those able or expected to perform the masculine ideal, including childless people and fathers [27, 28, 40, 41], reflecting and reinforcing societal and organisational-level policies, ideologies and discourses constructing caregiving, career-sacrificing mothers, unencumbered breadwinning fathers and citizen-working childless people, which create unequal conditions for complying with nominally gender-neutral economic citizenship and ideal working [27, 28, 32, 42]. Conversely, a childless woman described personal characteristics, such as not being “efficient” or liking “having a lot on,” which limited her capacity to meet her job’s “unreasonable” quantitative demands without “tipping over.” Although, as elsewhere [38, 43], she believed parents were “forced” to develop those skills, she was cognisant such skills did not necessarily translate to being rewarded, which was predicated upon her temporally unconstrained ability to meet quantitative demands.

I’m not good at managing stress and thinking on my feet and being efficient … I don’t like having a lot on … If I push too hard on that, I would tip over. I think having children … forces you to develop those skills … [However] it was easier for me to do things that were beneficial professionally … I could keep going, and they couldn’t… and that isn’t necessarily fair. [Childless woman, non-manager]

Multilevel Drivers of Quantitative Demands

As we explore at length elsewhere [30], many participants ascribed masculine [26,27,28] performance, workload, hard work, working hours and availability demands to ComCo’s globally and societally embedded growth imperative, growth mechanisms, and extreme and conformant ideal worker discourses (Fig. 1). Briefly, ComCo’s masculine-neoliberal-capitalist growth imperative [27, 31] entailed “nearly undoable expectations [for] growth on growth on growth on growth;” while masculine-capitalist [31] exploitative cost-cutting through redundancies and restructures created “bigger and busier roles” and exacerbated working-hours availability demands because “no-one was available” to “cover” absences. Masculine, neoliberal [26, 27, 44,45,46] hierarchical, self-interested leaders and managers who wanted to maximise their “substantial” bonuses, “pressured” participants to meet “unreasonable” expectations and targets in “unrealistic” timeframes. Performing feminine-collective [27, 45, 46] collaborative ideal worker practices entailed “back-to-back meetings” and “constant” emails that consumed some participants’ working days to the extent they had no time for “work,” producing a more than full-time workload; and required many participants to “be there” physically to meet local colleagues’ needs and attend meetings scheduled during and after business hours, as well as virtually, to collaborate with global colleagues “at different times of night.” Finally, performing qualitatively conformant ideal worker characteristics and practices (including going over and above core roles for masculine career growth [27, 47], building feminine relationships [27, 46], and masculine-neoliberal self-promotion [27, 45, 46] upon which bonuses and salary increases for high performance could depend) and “organising” and “improving” labour flowing from feminine beneficent growth mechanisms [27, 31] (such as committee membership or organising “fun” activities), necessitated time and availability beyond participants’ core roles, as Ely and Meyerson have observed [27].

Conversely, some organisational contexts aligned with resources provided by managers, teams and colleagues that alleviated or enabled participants to manage quantitative demands [3, 10]. Unlike hierarchical leaders, some participants’ managers personified feminine supportive leadership [27, 31, 46]: they provided instrumental support for managing quantitative demands by “taking on as much as they can,” “restructuring” workloads, “backing” participants to “prioritise,” encouraging participants not to “take on too much,” “readjusting” goals and respecting participants’ work-life “boundaries.” Conversely, a childless man felt “inconsiderately” drawn into being available outside working hours by flexibly working managers, despite their supportive “intent.”

On the bottom of their email they’ll say, “I work odd hours, please don’t feel pressured to respond after hours or on weekends.” … Regardless of your intent, the impact is different … I don’t feel pressured to respond, but I can’t stop myself from reading it … then you can’t stop it from affecting you and making you think about work on the weekend. [Childless man, non-manager]

In this respect, a flexibly working manager mother who felt negatively judged by colleagues, performed after-hours “online” visibility to “justify” her commitment. Thus, despite ComCo’s mainstreamed flexibility initiative (Fig. 1), lingering societal and organisational stigmatisation of “uncommitted” mothers and flexible workers may have driven some flexibly working managers’ visibly outside-hours emails, which in turn “bred anxiety” in subordinates.

Similarly, ComCo’s discourses idealising feminine collaboration and teamwork [27, 45, 46] flowed to reciprocal instrumental support sometimes exacerbating and sometimes alleviating quantitative demands. For example, many participants’ and their teams assumed greater workload or availability demands to alleviate each other’s.

We all try to help each other out, to smooth out those peaks. [Father, manager]

[Manager] works some mornings from home … that generally will become the whole day, because I’ll say, ‘I’m happy to cover that meeting, there’s no need for you to come in.’ [Childless man, non-manager]

However, other participants experienced imposed, rather than voluntarily, increased workloads to support colleagues.

Having to do more work than your peers because they can’t manage. [Childless man, non-manager]

Additionally, although performing ComCo’s feminine [27, 45, 46] relationship-building ideal worker practices could exacerbate workloads, once established, relationships and networks provided resources enabling many participants to meet or alleviate quantitative demands. For example, many participants felt networks facilitated “getting work done” in interconnected jobs or knowing who to influence about what to work on.

I don’t think it’s ever going to get down to a relaxing amount of work. But you can … shift what’s important and sell that into people. You get better at it the longer you’re there. You know how to do it and who to do it to. [Father, manager]

Finally, some participants described “excessive” quantitative demands as personal “choices” resulting from personally “high standards of performance,” wanting to “say yes” to and “do everything,” being “driven” and “self-motivated,” and “loving the work;” reflecting ComCo’s masculine [47] qualitatively committed ideal worker discourses, and internalising societal and organisational neoliberal individually responsible worker discourses absolving ComCo of responsibility for excessive demands (Fig. 1) [48].

I’m probably my worst enemy in terms of how much I take on. [Mother, manager]

Similarly, some participants attributed working intensely to not only workloads and urgency, but also life-contexts such as children, relationships, or maintaining physical and mental health, that constrained them to limiting their working hours. For example, expanding on research with mothers [38, 49], some fathers and a childless man worked more “efficiently,” or “focused” on work rather than building relationships, in order to minimise office hours and increase time for life. Participants’ attributions of quantitative demands to personal contexts supported arguments job demands can be exacerbated by personal demands [5, 8]. However, individual responsibility discourses can underestimate organisational and societal contexts (such as masculine [26,27,28] quantitatively extreme and masculine-neoliberal [47] “driven,” “committed,” “passionate” self-actualised ideal worker discourses) which constrain and manipulate individuals’ choices and identities in favour of those which serve organisational and societal imperatives [33, 50].

(De)Motivating, (Un)Rewarding, (Un)Rewarded And (Un)Resourced Quantitative Hindrance/Challenge Demands

Supporting Polanyi and Tompa’s findings [6], participants described nuanced experiences of quantitative demands and their attendant rewards and resources. While many participants experienced some quantitative demands as demotivating, unrewarding and unrewarded hindrance demands, others experienced them as intrinsically rewarding and motivating, extrinsically rewarded, and providing resources for managing demands. Although these experiences aligned with job quality theories incorporating job contexts’ alignment with individuals’ needs, aspirations, preferences, attributes and circumstances [6, 8, 16], job and individual contexts were embedded within and interacted with organisational and societal contexts [7].

Intrinsically (De)motivating and (Un)rewarding Hindrance or Challenge Demands. Quantitative demands created challenge and hindrance demands for different participants. Many participants felt “engaged” by the “challenge” of the high-performance demand of “getting more growth,” or felt intrinsically “rewarded” and experienced “pride” or “achievement” when “delivering well” or achieving “tangible results,” sometimes despite “working really hard” or receiving inadequate extrinsic rewards [6, 9].

There was a big push to ... achieve [target]. With a lot of hard work and time I managed to [meet target] and felt a sense of achievement. Not that I received much from the business. [Mother, non-manager]

As in other research [51], feeling intrinsically rewarded by meeting performance demands was particularly important to some mothers, to counterbalance “unrewarding” aspects of mothering; mirroring societal-level discourses rhetorically valuing mothering, but constituting paid employment as integral to self-actualisation and citizenship (Fig. 1).

I love being a mum, but sometimes it’s really unrewarding … At work if I hit a target, it’s an achievement. [Mother, manager]

However, few participants felt intrinsically motivated or rewarded by other quantitative demands. Some geographically untethered [4] childless participants felt rewarded by meeting masculine [4, 27] geographic flexibility demands: a man “loved it” because it kept him “fresh,” while a woman experienced working internationally as “personally and professionally” rewarding. Other participants felt motivated by “busyness.”

I thrive on that busyness sometimes. Not all the time, and not for a prolonged period, but it can make you productive and give you a sense of urgency. [Childless woman, manager]

Conversely, many participants experienced “unreasonable” performance demands and their prerequisite quantitative demands, as intrinsically demotivating, demoralising and unrewarding hindrances, which reduced their work enjoyment, engagement, morale and functioning, and conflicted with or crowded out other job quality dimensions [7]. Many participants experienced excessive quantitative demands as “unachievable” hindrances preventing them from meeting both masculine quantitative demands and personal “high standards” of “doing everything” and “performing their best.”

Doing your role with 70 percent satisfaction does wear you down. [Mother, manager]

Moreover, quantitative demands deprived many participants of adequate time to perform the practices of ComCo’s qualitatively conformant ideal workers (Fig. 1) aligning with qualitative job quality dimensions [1, 6, 7], such as feminine socialising and relationships [27, 45, 46] or masculine personal development [27, 47], which simultaneously deprived them of enjoyable, valued or rewarding aspects of their working lives.

Volume of work’s so high, if I take an hour lunch break, I have to make that up in my own time … You’re weighing up the benefit of catching up with people, developing relationships, working and enjoying it versus … trying to get work done. [Father, manager]

Similarly, regardless of sex or parent-status, many participants experienced “overwhelming” quantitative demands as impacting other job quality dimensions by conflicting with their mental and physical health and non-working lives [3, 5, 7], by making them feel “ill,” “stressed,” “anxious,” “miserable,” “burnt out” and “exhausted,” and reducing their time and energy for non-working lives and relationships.

Before the restructure I could complete my job without impacting my mental and physical health. Now I can’t. [Father, non-manager]

Interestingly, some childless participants and parents with older children, who described less time-intensive non-work responsibilities, perceived quantitative job demands’ impact on their health and non-working lives as less severe than many parents with younger children, despite similar descriptions of “never comfortable,” “tiring” and “stressful” demands. However, a childless woman’s efforts to meet her role’s consistently excessive demands “broke her health,” suggesting her lack of temporal limits enabled strain that surpassed her physical and mental limits. Such experiences support arguments [6, 7, 16] that job quality, including quantitative demands and their impact on non-working lives, is subjective and contextual, and can be influenced by feminine-encumbered-fallible (as opposed to masculine-unencumbered-infallible) time, effort and energy-consuming life-contexts such as caregiving responsibilities, relationships, personal interests and health. Many such life-contexts are immersed within patriarchal-neoliberal-capitalist societal structures and discourses [14], overwhelmingly reproduced in family-level structures [32, 52], of caregiving mothers, breadwinning fathers and citizen-working childless people (Fig. 1).

Extrinsically Rewarded and Resourced Demands. Emanating from ComCo’s diversified growth mechanisms, such as masculine individual and feminine collective rewards [27, 31], and feminine beneficent flexible working arrangements [27, 39, 42] (Fig. 1), which sought to create resources and rewards enabling and motivating all employees to meet ComCo’s quantitative demands and “accelerate” masculine-neoliberal-capitalist company growth [32], many participants experienced individual, team and company high performance as extrinsically recognised and rewarded, congruent with job quality models [2, 6,7,8]. Conversely, meeting workload, working hours, intensity and availability demands, though necessary for doing jobs, was rarely sufficient to attract extrinsic rewards without also achieving high performance.

Many participants felt “acknowledged,” “appreciated,” valued,” “respected,” “proud” and “motivated” by recognition of their performance and (to a lesser extent) underlying hard work, through informal “day-to-day” peer and manager recognition of doing “a good job” or their “efforts;” formal performance ratings as “exceeding expectations” (which influenced awards, promotions, salary increases and bonuses), formal individual and team performance awards, and company celebrations.

Team won [award] … a lot of hard work, hitting targets … going beyond that … doing that time and time again. I was absolutely stoked. [Mother, manager]

As elsewhere [38], some participants felt “entitled to” and “deserving” of more substantive non-material rewards for meeting “performance” and “output” demands, whereby managers “trusted” them to “get the job done” and accordingly gave them “control” over how, when and where they did their work, and supported flexible working arrangements.

I’ve got KPIs to reach, but they let me do it whichever way I want to … I really appreciate that trust. [Mother, manager]

Reflecting organisational discourses of flexibility for work and life (Fig. 1), many such participants valued the job quality dimensions of control and flexibility [6, 18] as resources enabling them to, for example, manage masculine excessive workloads [26,27,28] by being more “efficient” and “productive” when working remotely, as well as feminine, encumbered life demands [27, 31, 47, 53], such caregiving responsibilities, long commutes or maintaining mental and physical health.

I need to take my dog to the vet … so I’ll work from home … Because you don’t have the distractions … you get so much work done. [Childless woman, manager]

However, as we discuss in detail elsewhere [30], participant narratives suggested that, despite ComCo’s mainstreamed flexibility initiative, these resources were not automatically bestowed, but rewards contingent upon masculine “output” and “high performance,” excluding newer employees who had not yet “earned their stripes.” Additionally, the kind of flexibility “rewarded” participants could use to manage work and life demands, was influenced by sex and parent-status, amplifying societal discourses of caregiving mothers, breadwinning fathers and childless citizen workers: mothers had the most, and fathers and childless people the least, access to flexible hours to manage life; while remote working for managing work as well as life, was more widely “embraced” and available. Finally, “blue-collar” and “male-dominated” operations and factory workers, who “needed to be available” and had “command and control” leaders, were excluded from being rewarded with flexibility and control.

Similarly, aligning with job security as a job quality dimension constituting both a resource enabling employees to cope with demands [3] and an extrinsic reward [2], some participants felt secure in their roles despite cost-cutting restructures (Fig. 1) because their managers and ComCo “valued” them, their work added “value,” or there was “so much workload” ComCo could not “move it around;” revealing job security as a reward for masculine [26,27,28] high performance and excessive workloads.

I look at our team and the value it brings and impact it makes … I don’t feel worried at all. [Childless man, non-manager]

However, other participants were “realistic” job insecurity was “just what happens these days” in a “business that keeps restructuring and saving money,” internalising neoliberal-capitalist organisational discourses of employees as expendable growth mechanisms (Fig. 1).

There’s always this unsettling level of, ‘I could be made redundant at any point.’ You just go into that thinking it’s a financial transaction … and find something else. [Mother, manager]

Although different participants from support and commercial areas felt either “secure” or “uncertain” about their jobs, some participants observed that gendered and classed restructures and redundancies disproportionately “affected [blue collar, male-dominated] waged and manufacturing areas” and “operations.”

Confirming another job quality dimension [2, 8], some participants experienced career development opportunities or promotions as “tangible” performance rewards.

Being promoted through the business … based on my performance and track record … makes me feel valued. [Childless man, non-manager]

However, career rewards were nuanced and gendered [6, 8]. Many participants felt intrinsically motivated and rewarded by “more difficult challenges” and “responsibility” accompanying promotions. However, some men who described themselves as “ambitious,” but only one woman, also got “value out of a title” or “more profiled” roles, and experienced “progressing” as demonstrating to themselves and others they were “achieving” and “excelling;” internalising societal and organisational discourses valorising masculine ambition and career progression [27, 47].

Finally, reflecting financial rewards as job quality dimensions [2, 7], many participants normalised an obligation to meet masculine excessive quantitative demands such as working “hard” and “long hours,” in return for ComCo’s “good” base salaries. Accordingly, many participants felt paid “well” and “fairly,” despite awareness that long hours meant hourly rates “wouldn’t be very good.”

I’ve got a good salary … higher than similar jobs at different organisations … There’s an expectation you work really hard for that. [Father, manager]

Additionally, ComCo rewarded high individual performance with annual salary increases, and combined individual, team and company performance with individual bonuses [30]. However, ComCo’s seniority-based employee class-structure and participants’ life contexts produced nuanced experiences of ComCo’s masculine-neoliberal financial rewards [27]. Some mothers and fathers in more senior roles, for whom bonuses were a “significant part” of their remuneration that could be “maximised” by “performing well,” described bonuses as a “factor” in “wanting to perform.” Indeed, the lure of bonuses undermined feminine [27, 31, 46] manager support alleviating workloads, for some participants cognisant that “doing less” meant “not getting a high-performance rating …. then [getting] a smaller bonus.” Conversely, many lower-level managers and non-managers, who received relatively insubstantial bonuses, were motivated more by wanting to “give their best,” as elsewhere [6].

I’ve never worked a minute harder to get a bonus. You do your job to the best of your ability at all times. [Father, manager]

Moreover, as in research in which few employees were motivated by money in itself [6], many participants felt motivated to “work hard” or “perform highly” for ComCo’s “generous” salaries and bonuses, because societally-embedded life-contexts made money “important.” For mothers, fathers and childless people, these included relying on sole, main or dual incomes to meet current and future practical financial obligations, such as “exorbitant” childcare, private school and university fees and mortgages; and aspirations for their own or children’s “lifestyles” and “financial security,” reflecting the neoliberal expansion of breadwinning and economic citizenship to women (Fig. 1).

Work means money … providing a lifestyle I want to live. But it’s also a gateway towards future prospects … You read about how expensive house prices are … all these areas affect my generation. [Childless man, non-manager]

Additionally, many women (but no men) were motivated by financial independence, echoing societal neoliberal-feminist discourses of independent women and mothers [28].

I’ve always wanted to be independent and not rely on someone else. I want that for my daughter as well. [Mother, manager]

Inadequate Extrinsic Rewards and Penalties. As in studies linking inadequate extrinsic rewards with job dissatisfaction and psychological strain [2, 5, 37], some participants experienced inadequate respect, recognition and rewards from colleagues, managers and “the business” for “working hard” and “exceeding” expectations, which reduced their “engagement.”

The daily grind of relentless work, with little recognition or thanks. [Mother, manager]

In this respect, women and other employees can experience societally and organisationally embedded barriers to being adequately rewarded [5, 54, 55], elucidated by participants’ gendered, classed, aged and tenured experiences of ComCo’s growth culture and mechanisms, and extreme and conformant ideal worker discourses (Fig. 1), discussed at length elsewhere [30]. Briefly, illustrating barriers to being rewarded with career opportunities and concomitant salary increases disproportionately affecting women and mothers in this and other research [4, 27], workload and availability-exacerbating “above and beyond” career growth prerequisites, and perceptions of “enormous” working hours and after-hours commitments “the further you move up the chain” that were possible for parents only with “full-time” at-home support, created barriers for participants with feminine [27, 31, 47, 53] encumbered time-intensive non-working responsibilities and priorities; requisite relocation to other sites or state, national or international offices for promotions imposed barriers for participants experiencing feminine [4, 27] geographic constraints requiring them to work nearby extended families and schools; and feminine [28] part-time employees were perceived as unable to meet high performance expectations and “blocked” from development and promotion opportunities. Exemplifying employee growth’s subordination to neoliberal-capitalist company growth, and aged, tenured and seniority-based class relationships in ComCo’s hierarchical organisational structure (Fig. 1), a highly performing younger employee was denied “promised” career development by a leader who wanted to use his expertise for “business ends;” while others felt expected to endlessly “broaden” and “get paid the same” because senior roles, salaries and bonuses were “monopolised” by a “35 to 45” year-old “age club” of employees with substantial tenure, who “do everything they can to keep that revenue in” to pay for “mortgages and kids,” mirroring the financial motivations of parents in more senior roles. Another younger participant had to “contest” his underpaid bonus, which he understood as a seniority-based “fight for resources.”

It’s a fight for resources within the company … when you’re further down the chain, you’ve gotta fight even harder. [Childless man, non-manager]

Furthermore, some experiences of inadequate recognition suggested conforming to or deviating from gendered, classed and aged qualitatively conformant worker discourses (Fig. 1) overrode or undermined high performance. For example, some participants’ achievements were “ignored” by masculine [46, 47, 56] authoritarian managers who praised and promoted feminine-submissive [47, 57] “favourites” who “toed the line,” “said yes” and “didn’t challenge,” and denigrated reputations of employees who “said no,” resulting in participants who were “doing a good job” and “exceeding” performance expectations feeling like they “were never going to progress.”

One person [who was praised and promoted] never challenged the manager and that was what [manager] liked. [Mother, manager]

Some participants’ descriptions of senior leaders’ “subjective” influence on bonuses and promotions in meetings “like a popularity test” where they “reviewed performance gradings of their subordinates,” “rated teams on … the next steps in their career” and developed career plans for “everyone … years in advance,” further explicated demands to “toe the line,” “not challenge” and “self-promote” with managers and senior leaders in order be adequately rewarded (Fig. 1). As in Casey’s research [33], two manager mothers experienced the necessity of masculine [27, 45, 46] “self-promotion” and “selling achievements” to achieve high performance ratings upon which salary increases, bonuses and promotions were based; requiring both women to undertake workload-exacerbating activities such as “tracking,” “recording” and “sharing” achievements, and one to compromise her feminine [27, 47, 53] “quietly achieving” nature.

I thought, ‘I’m going to make sure people know what I achieve … and I’m going to track and share our progress” … because I felt like my rating was based on self-promotion, versus what I achieved. [Mother, manager]

As elsewhere [37, 49], other participants described inadequate incomes in return for meeting quantitative demands, suggesting a lack of effort-reward fairness [2] in service of exploitative masculine-capitalist [31] cost-cutting and cost-saving. Some participants were given substantial additional work “from other people’s roles” or resulting from redundancies “with no increase in pay;” a part-time working mother was paid “20 per cent less” for a “full-time” workload; and a manager’s mostly female casually employed team members received inadequate wages despite their results.

My team is not so good … we are one of the lowest [paid] in the market, I’m pretty sure … and they did their all. [Mother, manager]

Given restructures and redundancies predominantly affected male and working-class-dominated operations and factory-based roles, and part-time and casual roles were female-dominated, these experiences suggested gendered and classed distribution of adequate financial rewards in ComCo.

Finally, flowing from ComCo’s masculine [47, 58] growth mechanism of suppressing and penalising failure (Fig. 1), some participants described unfair extrinsic penalties for failing to meet “undoable” and “unachievable” masculine performance expectations. These included “negative” performance ratings, which impacted promotions, salary increases and bonuses; senior leaders “questioning” whether a previously highly performing employee “was right for the role” after a performance “dip;” and “redundancies” rather than “help and support.”

My manager and colleague were made redundant. I didn’t receive a promotion or change in pay grade when I took on the majority of their workload. I then received negative reviews at end of year because I was struggling to cope with the significant change in workload. [Childless woman, non-manager]

Discussion and Conclusions

The multilevel quantitative job quality grounded theory integrates arguments job quality dimensions are ambiguous and overlapping [18] depending upon the individuals experiencing them and their interacting personal [6, 16], family and community [7], team, leader and organisational [13] and societal contexts [7]. That is, it suggests employees’ experiences of quantitative job demands’ existence, whether such demands are hindrances, challenges, intrinsically or extrinsically resourced, rewarding and rewarded, and barriers and facilitators to meeting such demands, are influenced by intertwining gendered, classed and aged (and likely raced and abled) global, societal, organisational, leadership, manager, team, community, family and individual-level contexts, which produce nuanced and inequitable job quality experiences among mothers, fathers and childless women and men. Many such experiences reflect and reinforce societal and organisational discourses of intensive, career-compromising mothers, and unencumbered, ideal working breadwinning fathers and childless citizen-workers excluded from non-working lives [28, 32].

Participants’ experiences of masculine [26,27,28] excessive performance, workload, working hours, speed and intensity, and availability demands align with established job quality dimensions [1,2,3], which our research illustrates can undermine other job quality dimensions, including feminine [27, 45, 46] socialising and capacity to maintain health and engage in life, and masculine [27, 47] personal development [7]. Our research also confirms leader and manager behaviours (including feminine [27, 31, 46] supporting, empowering and rewarding or masculine [46, 47, 56] obstructing, directing and ignoring) can profoundly influence quantitative job quality [13], including the existence and extent of quantitative demands, and whether employees are adequately extrinsically resourced and rewarded with respect and recognition, control, flexibility and job security, career opportunities, and bonuses and pay increases. Similarly, our research illustrates Karasek and Theorell’s [1] contention that teams and colleagues can provide instrumental support to alleviate and meet quantitative demands, exacerbate quantitative demands by expecting physical or online availability for meetings, emails and collaboration during and outside working hours, and contribute to extrinsic rewards by recognising colleagues’ efforts.

However, experiences of resources and rewards also support less established job quality dimensions: whether employees feel adequately rewarded is influenced not only by the extrinsic rewards they receive, but also whether employees feel motivated by such rewards, and whether they feel intrinsically rewarded and motivated by meeting quantitative demands [5, 6]; experiences which are embedded within gendered individual, family, community, organisational and societal contexts [4, 27, 33]. Additionally, dimensions traditionally identified as resources, such as job security, flexibility and control, can also be experienced as rewards [9, 12]; creating a cycle in which crucial resources for meeting quantitative demands are not automatically bestowed, but rewards contingent upon meeting demands, creating barriers for unrewarded employees who have not yet met demands, to receiving resources that would support them to do so. Finally, our research facilitates a deeper understanding of quantitative demands and their non-material, career and financial resources and rewards, including leader, manager, team and colleague influences, by locating them within societally gendered, classed and aged organisational imperatives and their concomitant organisational, leadership, team and workplace policies, cultures, practices and ideal worker discourses.

This research’s strengths lie in its demonstration that exploring multilevel contexts can enhance researchers’ and organisations’ understanding of job quality, by providing nuanced understandings of job quality dimensions, drivers, experiences, barriers and facilitators. Importantly, such understandings enable targeted strategies for improving poor job quality by addressing its underlying causes. However, the research was limited by the relatively small and homogenous sample, which consisted of employees who were exclusively white-collar and predominantly full-time employed, managerial, head office-based, aged 35 years or over, university educated, heterosexual, Australian born and spoke English at home. Nevertheless, integrating interviewees’ deep descriptions, qualitative questionnaire data and previous research, strengthened the grounded theory. Although it cannot be generalised beyond ComCo and the perspectives of the study’s relatively homogenous participants, the grounded theory may be relevant to other profit-driven incorporated companies [59]. Given the utility of understanding multilevel contexts, we call for more such research, and for other organisations to follow ComCo’s example by participating in such research, in order to identify and address multilevel contexts contributing to job quality experiences.