Replication Data for: Bureaucracy, Happiness, and Satisfaction At Work

Despite increasing material prosperity, industrialized nations face declining self-reported happiness and increasing workplace dissatisfaction. This study investigates bureaucratic burden as a driver of diminishing job satisfaction, analyzing 7.9 million Glassdoor reviews of more than 8,000 companies from 2008-2023 using natural language processing and instrumental variables methods. We identify reviews mentioning bureaucracy and quantify their association with 1-5 star employer ratings. Mentioning bureaucracy corresponds to around 0.7-point lower ratings (a 22% decline from the mean), comparable to the impacts of mentioning low pay (-0.8) or workplace conflict (-0.9). Two-stage least squares analysis, instrumenting with future bureaucratic mentions at the same company, implies a causal relationship. These findings support theories about the harm of ``illegitimate tasks'' at work and suggest revisiting conventional efficiency rationales for workplace bureaucratization. Organizational practices emphasizing employee autonomy and meaningful tasks could partly mitigate declines in satisfaction.