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5,868 views   Ted Geisel (Credit:New York World Telegram)  The
following guest post is by author David Sturt, an executive vice
president  for O.C. Tanner, which develops employee recognition
and rewards programs.  In 2001, University of Michigan Professor
Jane Dutton and a colleague, Amy Wrzesniewski from Yale began to
study how people in unglamorous jobs were able to cope with what
we might call “devalued work.” As their first example, they
chose hospital janitors. What they learned from their studies,
however, took them by such surprise that it changed the
trajectory of their research for an entire decade.  As they
interviewed the cleaning staff of a major Midwest hospital, they
discovered a subset of hospital’s cleaners who didn’t see
themselves as part of the janitorial staff at all. These
individuals saw themselves as part of the professional staff and
as an integral part of the healing te