Groups & Teams Overview
Motivation is one of three key performance elements. In fact, research suggests that performance is a function of ability, motivation and opportunity:
Performance = Function {Ability × Motivation × Opportunity}
Ability refers to a person’s or a team’s ability to perform a task. Opportunity refers to the timing and situation around the task. For instance, if a hospital sets out to be known for successful heart transplants, it must have a team of surgeons that are skilled in performing transplants (ability), and there must be adequate space and equipment to perform transplants, as well as patients who need them (opportunity). Managers have little influence over ability, and they can only somewhat influence opportunity.
Can leaders influence employees to be more productive by understanding their sources of motivation, or even creating sources of motivation for their employees? Most researchers agree that the answer to that is yes. Motivation isn’t a stable state of mind, and what motivates an employee right now might not be the same a year later. But researchers don’t necessarily agree on the best way to accomplish that—and perhaps there is not one best approach.
Motivation is one of the most researched topics in organizational behavior, because a manager’s ability to influence employee motivation can directly affect an organization’s bottom line.
What is Motivation?
People often equate unmotivated people with laziness. For instance, consider Danny, a student earns poor grades in history. He’s not interested in his textbooks, doesn’t want to read. He’s intelligent but doesn’t do the reading needed to get As or even Bs. You might say Danny is unmotivated about reading or say that he’s lazy. But when the latest comic book in his favorite series comes out, he’s the first in line to purchase it, and he reads it from cover to cover the first chance he gets and then a couple of times more before he finally puts it down. He’s memorized lines, carefully considered the storyline, and messaged friends speculating where he thinks the storyline might be going. Nothing lazy or unmotivated about that!
Motivation results when an individual interacts with a situation. It’s a state of mind where the individual determines the level of desire, interest and energy that will translate into action.1
Motivation = Intensity + direction + persistence of effort
Intensity refers to how hard a person tries to achieve their goal. Danny clearly enjoys reading and does a lot of it—his intensity for reading is high, but his intensity around history is low.
Direction refers to the area to which an individual focuses his efforts, and the quality of those focused efforts. The direction of Danny’s reading—that is, reading comic books instead of textbooks—is poor. When he reads his textbooks, the quality of the effort Danny puts into the activity is also poor. He doesn’t commit lines to memory or absorb themes like he does when he reads comic books.
Finally, there is persistence, or the amount of time an individual can maintain the effort to achieve a goal. Danny is an avid reader and will continue to read as long as his favorite authors and artists produce new issues and series. He’s persistent about that. When Danny opens up his textbooks and tries to read, but he doesn’t read for very long. His level of persistence is not where it needs to be to consider him “motivated.”
A person’s motivation changes from situation to situation and over time. Perhaps Danny’s motivation to read his text books will change if he finds he’s about to be expelled. Or maybe as the semester continues, he’ll find he’s more interested in history than he originally thought, and those textbooks will become easier to read. He’ll then alter his intensity (reading more history), his direction (focusing on school and setting comic books aside), and he will persist in efforts to learn the material. Motivation will have changed.
In addition to individual attitudes, motivation also considers a person’s needs. Needs are based on personality, values and relate to things that a person desires. In Danny’s case, he values and desires the entertainment of reading a comic book more than he values and desires good grades. Over time, he may risk losing a scholarship because of bad grades. Basic needs, like paying for his dorm room and a meal plan, might be threatened if that scholarship money were to go away. He needs to stay in school and graduate, so his values and desires may shift and cause him to read his textbooks.
So, there seems to be two factors at play in motivation in an individual. One is a behavioral aspect, the intensity + direction + persistence part that a person brings to the table, that’s existing inside him or her. There is also a factor that people are motivated to fill their needs—food, shelter, and more complex needs, too. It’s easy to see how motivation is a very individual thing.
Motivating People at Work
In the workplace, motivation leads to action and is one of the three elements of performance. More importantly, it’s a variable that can be influenced, because motivation is not a stable state of mind. Leaders who can influence motivation can increase performance.
We already understand what motivates one worker will not necessarily motivate another. When a manager adds workplace components, like job design and work environment, and organizational components, such as company culture and workplace politics, it becomes even more challenging to understand how to motivate an employee.
The Expectancy Framework
Yale University Professor Victor Vroom, an authority on the psychological analysis of behavior in organizations, proposed an expectancy framework. This framework illustrates the components of motivation.
The expectancy framework assumes that motivation is a cognitive process and considers how workers feel about their efforts and how they’re related to performance and outcome. The focus is on how employees feel about these things because it’s an employee’s perception of events. Managers should understand how employees feel about a situation if they’re going to motivate them.
The framework is basic: employees feel their efforts lead to good performance, and good performance leads to outcomes (see Figure 1). This seems pretty simple. Employees who understand that their effort yields good performance and outcomes will be motivated!
But what about Danny and his motivation to read? Does he not understand that effort reading his history text yields good performance on a test, and thus the outcome of a passing grade? You’re right, this model doesn’t quite speak to motivation yet. Let’s add in a couple more components.
First, there is expectancy. Expectancy asks, “Will more hard work achieve this goal?” This is the individual’s perception as to how difficult the target goal is to accomplish, or how much effort will need to go into accomplishing it. Next, instrumentality comes into play. Instrumentality asks, “Will the outcome/reward actually be delivered as promised?” Finally, there’s valence. Valence asks, “Is this reward worth the work?”
Figure 2
Adding the elements of expectancy, instrumentality and valance help us understand how individual perception figures into the expectancy framework. Now, let’s use that expectancy framework to help us understand the three components of motivation—individual, workplace and organ
Individual Components of Motivation
When managers considers their team, the biggest difference they may see in each individual is what motivates them.
Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivators
For an individual there are intrinsic (internal) and extrinsic (external) motivating factors.
- Intrinsic motivation comes from within, and it’s usually driven by individuals’ needs to do something for themselves. Each person has unique desires: they may want to learn a language or skill, or reach a goal of finishing a 5K in a certain amount of time. Intrinsic motivation is the reason why people climb mountains. (It’s not because they’re there!)
- Extrinsic motivation comes from an external source. People may work a second (or third) job because they need additional money to pay the bills.
An individual’s view of these intrinsic and extrinsic motivational factors is impacted by previous experience, current needs, gender, and personal and cultural values. For instance, women tend to site “personal satisfaction” and “job security” as workplace motivational factors, while men tend to site “status” and “wealth” as the reasons they get up in the morning. Older workers indicate “company loyalty” as a motivational factor, but Gen X’ers and Millennials, who are more likely to job hop, are motivated by “job flexibility” and “challenging work.” Cultural differences can fall into play as well—European countries value vacation time and use quite a bit, while in the United States, workers sometimes don’t even use the days they’ve been given.
Locus of Control and Self-Esteem
An individual’s personality can affect their perception of how effort leads to performance. Two personality aspects are particularly important in this scenario—locus of control and self-esteem. Locus of control is one’s perception of who has control over their lives, their environment, and external events. People who have an internal locus of control feel that their successes and failures are largely due to their own efforts, knowledge and choices. People with an external locus of control feel that external factors have an undue influence on the current situation they’re in.
There’s a spectrum of internal vs. external locus of control, and people can be very high on one end or the other (highly internal or highly external), or fall somewhere in between (Figure 4). People with a high internal locus tend to be more task oriented because they feel they’re in control of their own success. People with a high external locus credit luck, people in higher leadership positions, or divine powers for their successes or failures, and they tend to be more reactive to issues.
Self-esteem interacts with motivation similarly to locus of control. People with a high self-esteem tend to feel that their performance is linked to their efforts. The opposite is often true for people who have lower self-esteem.
When leaders understand the personality differences in their employees, they help employees build the necessary links between “effort” and “performance” in the expectancy framework. Leaders can do this through encouragement and regular feedback for those that bring an external locus of control or low self-esteem to the team.
Employee Needs
After considering an employee’s personality, consider their employee’s needs. Older approaches to understanding employee motivation focus almost solely on needs, and the more we learn the more we find that those early approaches aren’t necessarily accurate. This doesn’t mean that an employee’s needs don’t factor into motivation, because they do. On the expectancy framework, needs tend to influence an employee’s perception of the value of a proposed reward. For instance, a person who has wealth and status may look at a reward differently than a person who has less.
Beyond money, there are other needs that a leader can fulfill for employees. Employees with a high need for achievement might enjoy public recognition, and getting recognized for their achievements can keep their motivational drive high. Some workers appreciate the opportunity to work independently, with less supervision. Others might appreciate the ability to work remotely so they can save money on their commutes and be closer to family that needs attention. Needs are very individual, and they’re not necessarily all filled by a paycheck and health benefits.
Cultural Differences
Finally, embrace cultural differences to understand what motivates employees. Cultural differences can often trip us up where motivational theories are concerned—where many of them work in our culture, that doesn’t hold true for others.
If a manager understands the individual component of motivation—the personality traits, needs, and cultural differences that factor into an employee’s willingness to put forth effort toward performance—they can tailor motivation for each employee.
Organizational Components of Motivation
Fortune Magazine counts them down every year: the top 100 best companies to work for.
So just what makes a great company? If you look at employee quotes, a few things quickly rise as common elements of good organizations.
- Organizational culture and politics.
- Leadership and coworkers.
- Sense of equity.
Organizational Culture and Politics
Culture encourages its associates to try new things, push the limits, and go beyond what we know as acceptable in today’s marketplace. It fosters healthy work-life balance and consistently encourages associates to live a better life.
As written earlier, culture encompasses values and behaviors that contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of a business. It’s an organization’s “personality.” A good organizational culture might, in itself, not be a primary motivator, but an organization that fosters teamwork and encourages team members to mind their own well-being is certainly planting the seeds for individual motivation.
Conversely, an organization filled with gossip and negative company politics can de-motivate some employees. Employees working for an organization with this type of culture might foster distrust for others, and even create an atmosphere that contributes to lack of productivity. This can have an adverse effect on the performance-outcome link of the expectancy framework.
Leadership and Coworkers
“The [owners] and all executives and leaders are engaged, invested and committed to our mission of helping people live healthier, better lives through food, and in doing the right thing.”
“What makes [this] a great place to work for me is the teamwork, cooperation, the overall attitude, but most importantly the people. The people in our organization truly do care for one another as well as the guests coming onto our property.”
These are quotes from employees at two different companies, but they both speak to the same thing: people. Leaders and coworkers can be an important element in the organization component of motivation.
Leaders who support their employees and adopt (or even live) the company’s mission set the stage for strong performance. Performance-to-outcome link in the expectancy framework, and at the same time companies are building a supportive organizational culture. Strong leaders also build trust, as an employee needs to trust in their leader to provide feedback and direction in their job.
A great team also supports motivation, as indicated in the second quote. Coworkers who support and encourage one another are motivating, and team members are often even motivated to do the work for one another. A great set of coworkers means looking forward to going to work each day.
Poor leaders and coworkers can be demotivating. A team member might look to a leader or coworker for advice, and he has to trust that the advice will be good and honest. When there is a lack of trust between coworkers, they may sabotage others for their own gain.
A poor leader might not give feedback or provide direction, and then harshly criticize an employee who thought they was doing a good job. None of these situations motivates employees.
Sense of Equity
Equity in a company, or an employee’s perception of equity, is perhaps the most important element of the organizational component. For instance, this employee is quoted as saying that all employees have amazing benefits, but if something were to go wrong for a member of the organization, the whole company comes together to show support. This illustrates supportive coworkers and a sense of equity: everyone receives equal treatment.
Equity is an individual’s sense that everyone is treated fairly. Most of the time, equity appeals to an extrinsic elements of a person’s motivation in that they feel their efforts and skills are being compensated with salary and benefits and other things that the company offers.
When employees feel as though they are putting in more effort than they are receiving, there is a sense of inequity, which adversely affects the performance to outcome link in the expectancy framework. When perception of inequity exists, a manager has to respond with hard facts and data that support equity. For instance, if people believe they are not being paid fairly, a report of average salaries for similar jobs in their geographical areas may change their minds and restore their perceptions of equity.
Culture and politics; leaders and coworkers; and equity—while they may not stand alone in motivating employees to do a great job, they certainly build a foundation for great work to happen. Everyone wants to work for one of those Fortune 100 Great Companies to Work For, and that’s because they understand the organization component of motivation.
CC licensed content, Original
- Motivation in Organizational Behavior. Authored by: Freedom Learning Group. Provided by: Lumen Learning. License: CC BY: Attribution
- Images: The Expectancy Framework. Provided by: Lumen Learning. License: CC BY: Attribution
- Image: Locus of Control. Provided by: Lumen Learning. License: CC BY: Attribution
- Image: Intrinsic versus Extrinsic Motivation. Provided by: OpenStax CNX. Located at: https://cnx.org/contents/Sr8Ev5Og@10.16:MLADqXMi@11/10-1-Motivation. License: CC BY: Attribution. License Terms: Download for free at http://cnx.org/contents/4abf04bf-93a0-45c3-9cbc-2cefd46e68cc@10.16
Beyond engagement: What leaders need to know about empowering others
Empowering employees doesn’t mean you won’t need to manage them. But it does mean leaders need to think differently about their roles.
Discussing the concept of “empowerment” with organizational leaders often exposes an interesting dichotomy: While leaders often support empowering teams, they’re occasionally wary of empowering individuals. Empowered teams, the thinking goes, are innovative and agile—but empowered individuals are obstinate and rebellious. Therefore asking senior leaders to invest in efforts to empower individual contributors could potentially sound like a request to equip everyone with a blowtorch and a machete.
Let’s take a look at some possible roots of this apprehension regarding employee empowerment initiatives and discuss what we can do to help shift that perception. To do that, we’ll need to define more specifically the notion of “empowerment” in this context. Then let’s explore how managers can use situational leadership techniques to navigate the complexities of helping every individual reach his or her potential.
Beyond engagement
In 2016, I established an associate engagement program with the goal of ensuring every associate in our department understood how his or her work contributed to the success of our team, top-level function, and company. “Engagement” was all the rage in business articles that year, and I put considerable effort into making the distinction between engagement and satisfaction. Yes, I said, parties and t-shirts and cake-pops are fun and can play an important role in fostering recognition and team-building and overall satisfaction, but engagement is about more. Engagement is about helping people find the purpose and meaning in work that might at times feel pointless and boring, especially when you’re far, far down on the organizational chart and don’t always have the clear, big-picture connections that might otherwise help you understand how that seemingly minor support ticket you just triaged eventually saved the company $5 million in renewal revenue.
By the time my department was ready to start planning for 2017, we realized that what we were after went beyond engagement; while we wanted everyone to understand their contributions to our collective success, we also wanted to empower them with access to all the information, training, tools, and connections to people and other teams that they need to do their best work, as well as a safe environment in which to do that work so they felt comfortable making their own decisions. To more accurately reflect our objective, our director suggested we change the name of our program from associate engagement to associate empowerment.
The goal of empowerment
One of the best illustrations of the concept of empowerment comes from General Stanley McChrystal’s book Team of Teams (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Reproduced from Team of Teams
The left side of the diagram depicts the current state: The problems we face are complex, and market demands in the age of digital transformation can change rapidly. No individual or team team can afford to operate in isolation if we have any hope of keeping pace, because we’re all so interdependent.
The way through (depicted on the right of the diagram) is to continually adapt. At the size and scale most organizations operate, the way to become adaptable is for leaders to create a shared sense of consciousness so that individuals feel empowered to act on their behalf, when and where appropriate. Individual contributors shouldn’t have to wait for three levels of managerial approval before working on a feature or sending out a slide deck; everyone should have all of the information, training, tools, and connections they need in order to know what to do (or what not to do) in the context of each moment to help their team and company succeed. In other words, leaders should build other leaders who can carry out their vision.
All of this is possible only with a core of genuine trust and a sense of a common purpose. A lack of one can lead to a lack of the other—and without either, you can forget about empowerment.
And in the center of the diagram are the words TRUST AND COMMON PURPOSE. These words are in bold for a reason. All of this is possible only with a core of genuine trust and a sense of a common purpose. A lack of one can lead to a lack of the other—and without either, you can forget about empowerment.
What do you mean, “don’t need approval”?
Let’s return to this sentence, which might hint at the root of some of the anxiety around empowerment initiatives: “Individual contributors shouldn’t have to wait for three levels of managerial approval before working on a feature or sending out a slide deck; everyone should have all of the information, training, tools, and connections they need in order to know what to do (or what not to do) in the context of each moment to help their team and company succeed.”
We see two potentially polarizing concepts here: first, that individual contributors don’t need approval before publishing work (fear: employees gone wild!) and, second, that individual contributors should have access to the same information that a leader does (fear: loss of power and control!). And these fears might be valid if not for that all-important core of trust and common purpose.
Having a sense of common purpose means that your team has a clear vision (i.e., where you want to be in the future), mission (i.e., how you’re going to get there), and objectives (i.e., what you’re going to do). It also means that everyone has clearly defined roles and expectations so they understand which piece they are in the collective organizational puzzle and how they fit together and support each other to meet the shared objectives. Individuals empowered with all of this context won’t need to ask approval for everything because they’ll know what their leader and team would want them to do—direct orders from above give way to guidelines and best practices. And the leader is there to coach them if they ever veer off course.
Of course, trust enables all of this. Trust eliminates feelings of competition, especially when people clearly understand roles and expectations, and everyone is sharing information transparently. Without trust from their leaders and access to information relevant to their roles, people feel forced to spend most of their time seeking (often struggling) to find answers to questions rather than being valuable contributors to their team. And without a common purpose to rally behind, individual contributors are never able to define clear objectives—because they don’t know which direction to face. From the outside, these individuals look like poor performers because they can’t help realize a vision that hasn’t been articulated clearly. Nobody wins.
Encouraging a mindset shift
Our conversations about management theory tend to start with explanations of modern management’s origins on factory floors as means of maximizing output. As the type of work we do has shifted from mostly manual tasks (e.g., assembling widgets on the factory line) to knowledge work (e.g., building software or a website), styles of management must shift as well. After all, you can’t force a knowledge worker into creating original output for a full eight hours straight five days a week—our brains just don’t work that way. Knowledge workers need more support than command-and-control management styles can provide. But even in the context of knowledge work, we can’t apply the exact same style of management to every individual. For example, you shouldn’t hire someone fresh out of college and expect that person to understand how to translate a corporate vision into action on day one and then send them off, trusting them to figure out the best way to fill their responsibilities.
Enter situational leadership, a method for meeting individuals where they are in order to help them achieve their potential. The official “situational leadership theory” model from Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard has received varying degrees of criticism over the years, but the basic concept remains valid: Different management styles are appropriate for different situations and different individuals. For example, someone just beginning a career might need more direct tasking than someone who’s been with a company for a decade. The latter, however, might need general guidance and then generous freedom to explore different problem spaces and find ways to contribute the most value. What’s important is that we encourage both managers and individual contributors to shift their mindsets in favor of empowerment.
Figure 2 shows the additive nature of activity states as an organization moves from managed to empowered.
Figure 2: Organizational activity states from managed to empowered (courtesy of Allison Matlack CC BY-SA)
All teams are managed—whether they’ve stretched to empowerment or not. What changes as an organization becomes empowered is what that management looks like.
Starting out, managers supervise and direct people on a more granular task level (much like in the factories where modern management originated). Some teams—usually in organizations like sales or support—have enablement functions, which provide a central place for resources, training and development, and common messaging. In an extremely basic sense, at the level of enablement the goal is to make sure everyone has what they need to do their jobs. As the organization becomes empowered, management looks more like coaching, advocacy, and ensuring everyone understands the common purpose and how they contribute so they feel able to make decisions and act as appropriate in each moment.
Trust is the core
When we talk about empowering employees, we’re not talking about giving everyone carte blanche to do whatever they want to do. Nor are we talking about flattening the organization and removing people managers. What we are talking about is making sure that everyone is in the right role for them (depending on their passions and talents and the needs of the organization); that they understand their leader’s strategy and vision; and that they have access to relevant information, training, tools, and connections with different people and teams to perform the best version of that role. By setting a clear sense of purpose and clearly defining roles and expectations, leaders can then trust the experts on their teams to bring their visions to life.
Beyond engagement: What leaders need to know about empowering others https://opensource.com/open-organization/18/10/understanding-engagement-empowerment CC BY-SA 4.0
