Heterogeneities in the latent functions of employment: New findings from a large-scale German survey

Building on social psychologist Marie Jahoda’s pioneering work, the psychological literature has shown that work fulfills both manifest functions (e.g., monetary returns) and latent functions (e.g., social contact). This article uses data from the German panel study “Labor market and social security” (PASS), which contains information on latent and manifest factors (from a shortened latent and manifest benefits, or LaMB, scale), as well as a large array of other variables for over 9,000 respondents. This probability-sampled data allowed for detailed analyses that have not been previously possible. We investigate differences in these factors by labor market status, among those employed, and among those unemployed. We identify considerable variation between status groups, suggesting that employment, overall, is important and that longer periods of unemployment lead to a gradual decay of the latent and manifest factors. Furthermore, regression analyses show that the LaMB measures account for approximately 70% of the partial correlations between unemployment and various well-being measures.