significance of fun job titles

Fun article in HBR about the value of letting employees make up their own job titles. I especially liked "Germ Slayer" for an infectious disease specialist)

https://hbr.org/2016/05/creative-job-titles-can-energize-workers

From the HBR article:

The researchers surveyed the workers, along with members of two control groups, about their attitudes toward their work before the retitling and five weeks later. They found that those who had been asked to choose new titles had lower levels of emotional exhaustion, felt more validated and better recognized for their work, and experienced greater “psychological safety,” which can promote free information exchanges. They concluded, “Rather than viewing titles solely as sources and reflections of formality and rigidity or mechanisms of bureaucratic control, our research suggests that titles can be vehicles for agency, creativity, and coping.”

The underlying academic paper is "JOB TITLES AS IDENTITY BADGES: HOW SELF- REFLECTIVE TITLES CAN REDUCE EMOTIONAL EXHAUSTION" at Academy of Management Journal 2014, Vol. 57, No. 4, 1201–1225. http://dx.doi.org/10.5465/amj.2012.0338 .

from the article:

Similarly, when one of the authors of this article was an assistant professor, an executive
once asked, “Who do you assist, and when will you get to teach your own classes and do your own research?”

I have had the same experience and hate using that title - especially since I am in my mid-40's. It makes me sound like a TA instead of an actual faculty member.

The authors conduct a mixed methods study, doing a qualitative, grounded theory study at a local chapter of the Make A Wish (MAW) Foundation where they initially discovered that this chapter encouraged employees to come up with their own job titles (in addition to formal titles granted by the organization). They made some generalizations, then ran a quasi-experiment at a hospital where the treatment group was encouraged to make up their own job titles. After five weeks, the treatment group showed reduced emotional exhaustion.

Subjects from both the MAW and hospital treatment groups liked their self-reflective job titles, though a significant minority at the hospital did not use them and/or did not think they were appropriate for the organizational context.

The authors point out some risks - namely that cynical employees could take advantage of the freedom to create names and create inappropriate/disruptive titles. My thought is it would take a fairly strong culture to overcome that kind of behavior - if management simply vetoed employees who made inappropriate names, the cynicism would just be enhanced. For censure to be effective and not counterproductive, it would have to come from peer rejection - employees would have be feel ashamed of making cynical names.

I really liked this article. Very creative and interesting.