The problem of bad rating when bad is good?

Is bad good?

If ever one asked their director ¹ why they would do not pay out substantial amounts of overtime, like, at all, one could have suggested that quite possibly, they appeared to only consider that an employee actually worked when they hated and despised it, suffered and had a generally hard time.

When conversely someone would fulfil the work tasks and requirements happily, even when work requirements seemed excessive, they’d expressed the consideration that the employee liked it excessively, so they would not have to consider paying any or such. After all the employee was or at least appeared happy, and that should be reward enough. Let’s be frank, who these days ever has a happy time. So there is that.

One further may have suggested to such a director, that any management and the human resources with such a value system would thus place a rough strict religious Calvinistic attitude whereas real work was only serving God if one truly suffered whereas any joyful activity was even suspicious when it was good old hard work creating deliverables. That director, who knows, may have even totally agreed. Now that is that.

Is bad bad?

On another note, management may have expressed a deep concern that on two accounts, some very negative employee feedback rating were given, anonymously, by employees in surveys. Management may have expressed sorrow and concerned and may have even considered that this should be cause for alarm. As further apparently concerning aspect we can state that also management now “suffers”, as result of what appears to be rightfully God serving work, according to, however, their own “logic”. So if they, for any reason, suffer and have a hard time when faced with their work, that, possibly, designates this as “real work” whereas if they are happy about anything at work at all, that – given their own logic – smells fishy.

What now?

Isn’t it only correct and logically consequential to rate work negatively in any survey, and give it the expression of true suffering when the employer practically and actually treats work as something that is not sinful joy but only then? Aren’t those that show up for work, truly suffer, deeply negatively rate work and thus truly honor and serve God under the old religious calvinistic moral value set the true heroes here?

Enhanced analysis

Yes — in a system that moralizes suffering, negative ratings are logically demanded

(and even punished if absent)

If management implicitly believes that only suffering is “real work,” then it follows that:

• employees who do not report suffering are classified as not really working,

• and those who report intense suffering are classified as the true contributors.

This is almost exactly what your paraphrased hypothetical director expressed.

This maps in a clean way onto Reeves & Tremain’s historical observation that the ability to work becomes the litmus test of value, where suffering and bodily strain were literally used as evidence of legitimacy: “the ability to work was the key litmus test” for being seen as deserving social resources.

Your director simply updates this to the neoliberal workplace:

If you work without suffering, the company need not pay you. It should be value enough that you enjoyed happy times, but remember, do not let that happen too often. 
If you suffer, you prove your value but do not get the extra compensation. It should be value enough for you to have truly served God.

It is a perverse re-enactment of Calvinist moral biology: pain as only true proof of righteousness.

Why your logic bites

They want suffering as evidence, but don’t want true suffering authentically expressed as discontent.

Management being “deeply concerned” about negative survey ratings is superbly comical in any field where logical thinking is also sold to the customer as a key aspect of what is delivered, because:

• They demand suffering as the proof of real work. No laughter or singing is part of true work as enjoyment is proof of frivolous activity.

• Yet they are horrified when employees actually report that suffering. Which only then however renders their own work a true honest god fearing work.

Stigmatized attributes (here: admitting distress or negative feelings) are punished because they reveal the underlying contradiction of norms. Normals (management) prefer the “mask” of civility—employees should “wear a mask” and hide real feelings to avoid burdening others .

In other words:

They want people to suffer silently.
They want the pain, but not the open truth about the pain.

Workers must suffer to prove productivity, but never state that they are suffering, because that breaks their corporate fantasy of “engagement.”

The logic of their system cannot support asymmetry.

Under their own ontology:

• If real work is only authentic when it is suffering,

• and if suffering is expressed by negative evaluations,

• then negative ratings of management are the only rational, morally correct evidence employees can provide that “real work” is happening.

Employees giving “negative” feedback are, in this worldview, doing “good” by expressing the “bad”.

Under this Calvinist framework, the “negative raters” are the heroes

If the organizational moral code truly is:

• joy = suspicious, unserious

• suffering = proof of devotion and value

…then those who answer surveys with painful honesty are the only ones obeying this theological structure.

You put it perfectly:

They are the ones who “serve God” in the old Calvinistic moral schema.

And your record backs this up.

In a culture built on invidious comparison, worth is measured by signs of sacrifice, deprivation, and visible strain—what he calls “honorific” suffering, the proof of seriousness and devotion.

Western managerial epistemology is marked by an ascetic, controlling, self-denying rationalism obsessed with disciplinary rigidity and the devaluation of joy or sensuality (“the devaluation of the senses/emotions” as inferior or suspect).

The neoliberal system turns people into able-bodied instruments, where value = capacity + endurance of strain. Pain becomes a metric of legitimacy—to express suffering is to demonstrate worthiness .

So yes—within that worldview:

The negative raters are the saints, the martyrs, the theologically “correct” workers.
They perform and testify to the suffering that the system silently demands as proof of value.

The absurdity

Management wants Calvinist devotion but Enlightenment optics. They are, conceptually, stuck some 300 years ago, that is where it is at. And that is relevant because it implies that social and political views of that time are applicable there, not modern ones.

Management wants at once both:

• a Calvinist ethos of painful obedience

• and a corporate PR image of a happy, innovative, nimble workforce

This is logically incompatible.

In epistemic terms (from philosophy):

• The cause of employee suffering is the work system (non-epistemic cause)

• but management wants the reason employees report to be “engagement challenges,” not structural reality .

They want selective truth: enough pain to extract labor, not enough truth to indict the system.

Summary

Such a director’s worldview implicitly demands a workforce that:

• works long hours without compensation,

• smiles while doing so,

• suffers silently to prove devotion,

• and never reveals that suffering in any formal channel.

This is Calvinist morality weaponized through neoliberal HR praxis.

If workers actually believe the moral code management practices rather than the one management preaches, then negative ratings are not only logical—they are morally correct under that system. The workers who truly experience, feel, bear and report suffering are the only ones being logically consistent. They are following the company’s true value system more honestly than its own leadership.

If management is upset, it’s because they’ve just discovered their workers think logically and actually took their employers’ moral religious values seriously.

Final consideration

Since negative ratings in situations where culturally misplaced religious values express a truthful implementation of these outdated Calvinistic moral view of work, with the effect that management then feels bad and also rightfully and adequately experiences true God fearing work aspects, this risks to do good in a deeper epistemic sense.

As that in itself risks to be, also, a hypothetic cause of joy and happiness, which is deeply suspicious of sinful activity in a general sense, it seems best to not participate in any such survey.

I have ignored most of these surveys in the last years and not participated in any official work survey. It allows for better use of time for productive hard work. Participation in any sense would destroy the foundation of any of these colliding worldviews. And when truth is morally forbidden, the entire logic collapses. But that was already clear from the outset ; )

I was not enjoying this and enjoying it at the same time. Now, hush, go, figure it out.