Table 5.
Management-induced pressures perceived as morally tainted.
| Category | Groundedness | Illustrative Quote | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tot 283 |
Jr 153 |
M 130 |
||
| Dirty pressures | 246 | |||
| Long working hours and high workload | 111 | 63 | 48 | “Yes, juniors work long hours. There are projects where they work for longer periods about 60 h a week.”—Manager 12. “Consulting is working from deadline to deadline. And if a deadline requires a lot, then working 80 h occurs easily.”—Junior 7. “Working here is working in a pressure cooker. It is just hard work. You have deadlines.”—Junior 11. |
| No support; barriers to request help | 78 | 50 | 28 | “Often juniors are ashamed, like, I am so young, why does it happen to me? As a manager you often discover it [overload struggles] later than their direct environment, and that it does not go well.”—Manager 3. “I know myself. I sure have my issues here. But I would never go with those to my boss.… opening up could be seen as a loss of face.”—Junior 4. |
| Focus on results instead of wellbeing | 57 | 26 | 31 | “Consulting is a hard environment. As a junior you have to satisfy your project managers. Failing to satisfy your manager can only happen 1 or 2 times. Then they look for someone else.”—Manager 9 “The key rule is: as long as the client is happy. And that can be a really dangerous criterion, in which you can easily go too far.”—Junior 10. |
| Dirty effects | 37 | |||
| Burnout | 18 | 5 | 13 | “What I do see, is the age at which people come down with long-term illness is rapidly declining. I have an increasing number of people under 30 coming to me with such symptoms.”—Manager 3. “If you struggle with boundaries, and want to do everything perfectly, working as a consultant is not sustainable. And that’s what happened to me. I made myself sick.”—Junior 10. |
| Decreased wellbeing & performance | 10 | 4 | 6 | “If you are not handling them [the stressors of consulting] well, you see that in your performance. Then you don’t even like working here, and you couldn’t care less about performance.”—Manager 5. “If it is not your own choice to work 80 h a week. It is also not constructive, for either you or your results.”—Junior 10. |
| High turnover rate due to pressure | 9 | 5 | 4 | “In the moment you are like ‘Okay, we have to get through this’. But you know it’s not sustainable. You can’t let juniors work that many hours for several weeks on projects. You know that they will leave after a year or so. It’s not sustainable.”—Manager 12. “If people are really unhappy with their projects, they will ask if this is the right job for them, and then they leave.”—Junior 11 |
Tot = Total; Jr = Junior consultant; M = Manager.