RESEARCH BULLETIN: What Really Motivates Workers?

If you have been in the WLP profession for any length of time, you are likely to have encountered one of those lists about what motivates workers. The lists are particularly important in leadership development work to help managers and supervisors overcome the all-too-prevalent, simplistic and naive notion that money is the prime motivator at work.

For many years, "recognition for good work performed" has been the motivator at the top of these lists. But now Theresa Amabile*, the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration at Harvard, and her co-researcher Stephen J. Kramer, challenge that view with findings from a multi-year study of knowledge workers. The key motivator that emerges from this study is the sense of making progress in getting work done.

As the authors note, managers ...

"should regard this as very good news: The key to motivation turns out to be largely within your control. What’s more, it doesn’t depend on elaborate incentive systems. (In fact, the people in our study rarely mentioned incentives in their diaries.) Managers have powerful influence over events that facilitate or undermine progress. They can provide meaningful goals, resources, and encouragement, and they can protect their people from irrelevant demands. Or they can fail to do so.

"This brings us to perhaps the strongest advice we offer from this study: Scrupulously avoid impeding progress by changing goals autocratically, being indecisive, or holding up resources. Negative events generally have a greater effect on people’s emotions, perceptions, and motivation than positive ones, and nothing is more demotivating than a setback—the most prominent type of event on knowledge workers’ worst days."

How do we as WLP professionals use this research? We need to get this information out to managers, so that they can begin acting on it. And as coaches and consultants to managers, we need to be identifying and advocating the removal of barriers to achievement at work.

*In the interests of full disclosure, Dr. Amabile is a favorite of mine due to her groundbreaking research into workplace creativity. I relied on her work extensively in doing my doctoral dissertation.