by Clare Goodman
In our growth obsessed Capitalist society we are constantly looking for ways to increase individual and company performance. The current employment situation with limited resources places even greater pressure on leaders to ‘get more from less’. So how do we raise the bar? How do we motivate our employees and teams to step up, stretch and grow along with the company year after year? And how do we motivate ourselves? How do we renew and re-invigorate ourselves as leader?
Well in a recent article in Harvard Business Review (for full article go to http://www.hbr.org/) Nitin Nohria, Boris Groysberg and Linda-Eling Lee shed some light and offer some answers to those questions in the article ‘Employee Motivation: A Powerful New Model’.
The authors set out to provide a clear framework of how to best motivate employees. Based on surveys from 385 employees in global financial services and IT companies and 300 Fortune 500 company employees they offer insight into four motivators for employees:
The authors claim that employees are motivated by:
- The drive to acquire to bolster our sense of well being. Employees seek to acquire money, status, and even the corner office, that is to have more of everything and especially have more than others.
- The drive to bond – build that sense of belonging with others and with the company.
- The drive to comprehend – the need for meaning, challenge and to feel like they are making a meaningful difference.
- The drive to defend – the need to defend themselves from attack, the fight or flight response. This need leads employees to seek transparency and fairness at work.
The research completed by this team indicated that as a leader if we take care of these four drives through targeted reward systems, building a team oriented culture and designing meaningful jobs, we could lift our employee’s performance significantly.
So what’s your view? What strategies have you used? What has been the impact?
Of course this article is one in a long list of articles and books that de-construct motivation in the workplace and provide insight. Perhaps the most notable model is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs – a standard model in most MBA’s and Leadership Development Programs – it is well known. When you ask most people where they are motivated from in the Maslow model most would say ‘self actualization’ – it’s a question I ask in a lot of my workshops! In the book Spiritual Capital by Danah Zohar and Ian Watson, they provide further research that indicates that in for most employees the key motivations overwhelmingly come from Maslow’s deficiency levels – Security and Belonging. These are further broken down into four motivators:
- Self assertion – can be defined by thoughtlessness, self centeredness, pride, competitive behaviours. These individuals are driven by need for status and need to be admired by others.
- Anger – can be defined by reactive, angry, frustrated, irritable and injustice collectors. These individuals lash out if their self esteem is threatened.
- Craving – is defined by an inner emptiness – these individuals are driven by measuring themselves against others, and by jealousy.
- Fear – can be defined by seeing situations as threatening or others as possible enemies. These individuals are on alert for what may ‘hurt’ them and can react aggressively or passively.
The book goes on to explore alternative motivators based on Maslow’s higher order needs – self esteem, self actualization and peak experience – and how these link to we seem to happier, less stressed and more fulfilled lives for all. And asks the questions about how we bring in more of these motivators into organisations- when according to their research less than 15% of employees are motivated from the higher needs? How do we create organisations where employees are encouraged to explore these higher level motivations and what they look like for them?
It is easy to envision some of the positive consequences we might expect from a business culture inspired by spiritual capital. This culture would steward and renew vital resources, and it would include future generations as stakeholders. Its broader vision and deeper values would inspire participants, replacing much of today’s stress with a sense of fulfillment and making leadership a higher vocation.
Zohar and Marshall – Spiritual Capital. The employee motivation model from Nohria, Groysberg and Lee seems to span Maslow’s model to a certain degree as they link the drive to comprehend to be the motivator for meaning, challenge, growth and sense of purpose.
Zohar and Marshall echo the advice of Nohria, Groysberg and Lee. They all say that paying attention to our employee’s motivations and meeting their needs will lead to higher performance and potentially healthier individuals and organisations.
So if motivation is one significant factor that can increase performance of an organisation whose remit is it to ensure that it is addressed. In many cases it is the role of HR to provide the framework for motivating employees and yet it is a business- wide issue. In Nohria, Groysberg and Lee’s research it was clear that another factor that clearly impact’s the motivation of employees is their leader – how they lead, how they attend to their employees needs and create a positive work environment. So although HR can create some world class programs – unless we can get our leaders to view motivation as a strategic imperative some of the power and traction of the HR initiatives will be undermined by inadequate leadership.
Time for you to have your say! Let’s share our ideas about how we can strategically and locally tackle motivation within organisation? How can we build positive, sustainable cultures that lead to higher levels of motivation for our employees and for ourselves?
Clare Goodman Clifford
July 2008
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