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Motivation:
Financial Incentives
vs. Intrinsic Drivers
Rewarding employees with financial incentives contingent upon performance is a widely used way to improve performance. But such incentives also can lead to unethical behavior, fuel turnover, and foster envy and discontent. In a fascinating article stuffed with examples and research results, Wharton management professors Adam Grant and Jitendra Singh argue it is time to cut back on money as a chief motivational force in business. Excessive reliance on financial incentives can lead to unintended consequences that sometimes defeat the very goals they are designed to achieve.
Instead, they say, employers should pay greater attention to intrinsic motivation: designing jobs that provide opportunities to make choices, develop skills, do work that matters, and build meaningful interpersonal connections. The Knowledge@Wharton article is well worth your time.
More about intrinsic motivation
Not long ago, Daniel Pink upended traditional thinking about Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Pink maintains that intrinsic motivation is often supported by three key factors: autonomy, mastery and purpose.
Autonomy involves freedom of choice in what to do, when to do it, where to do it, and how to do it. When individuals and teams are given autonomy, they experience greater responsibility for their work, invest more time and energy in it, develop better processes for completing it, and ultimately produce higher quality and quantity.
Mastery involves the chance to develop specialized knowledge, skills, and expertise. When employees are given opportunities for mastery, they pursue opportunities to learn and contribute.
Purpose involves the experience of contributing to a meaningful effort or cause. Adam Grant (one of the authors of the Wharton piece) has shown that when employees meet even a single client, customer, or end user who benefits from their work, they gain a clearer understanding of the purpose of their jobs, which motivates them to work harder. For example, when university fundraisers met a single scholarship student who benefited from the money that they raised, the number of calls they made per hour more than doubled, and their weekly revenue jumped by 500%.
Read more on all of this, including the best way to distribute financial incentives. |
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Greetings!
We have some great articles for you this month, I hope you enjoy them.
We are happy to report that our Strategic Recruiting Manager, Kelly Dingee, has been named one of the Top 25 Online influencers in Recruiting for 2011 - this is her third year in a row to be listed.
The most-read topics from our blog this month were:
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Four Practices of Lucky People
You've often heard that you make your own luck. Research proves that saying is true.
 Jessica Stillman, blogging for Bnet.com, writes about the psychology of luck. It's true that there are lucky people and unlucky people. But superstition and divine providence have little to do with it. Instead, lucky people have a particular outlook and way of operating in the world that maximizes the chances of happy coincidences occurring. Stillman writes about the work of author and psychologist Prof Richard Wiseman at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK. He says that lucky people do the following four things:
Maximize Chance Opportunities. Lucky people are skilled at creating, noticing and acting upon chance opportunities. They do this in various ways, including networking and being open to new experiences.
Follow hunches. Lucky people make effective decisions by listening to their intuition and gut feelings. They take steps to actively boost their intuitive abilities -- for example, by meditating.
Expect Good Fortune. Lucky people are certain that the future is going to be full of good fortune. These optimistic expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies. Playwright Tennessee Williams is quoted as saying "Luck is believing you're lucky."
Turn Bad Luck to Good. Lucky people employ various psychological techniques to cope with, and often even thrive upon, the ill fortune that inevitably comes their way. For example, they spontaneously imagine how things could have been worse, do not dwell on ill fortune, and take control of the situation.
More on each of these principles, plus information on how to make yourself luckier. |
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Hire Happy Employees
 Happy employees lure new clients and keep old clients coming back for more. They make the workplace more enjoyable for the employer and the other employees. Happy employees are more productive than unhappy ones. Some research has shown that happiness is the single greatest competitive advantage in the modern economy. According to Harvard Business Review, only 25% of job successes are predicted based upon intelligence and technical skills, though we spend most of our education and most companies hire based on this category. The "silent 75%" of long-term job success is based upon one's ability to adapt positively to the world: optimism, social support creation, and viewing stress as a challenge instead of a threat.
Here, are a few things to consider when searching for the happiest employees:
1. Hire optimistic employees. During the interview, ask open-ended questions that require the applicant to respond to a problem. Listen for optimistic responses.
2. Hire people with goals. People with goals are determined to get to a destination. You want well-grounded people that are going somewhere, preferably in the same direction as you.
3. Hire people with a sense of humor. Humor binds us together, lightens our burdens and helps us keep things in perspective. (See my recent blog post on this topic). |
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Strategy Questions Leaders Should Ask
As a leader, how effectively do you question your staff? Asking meaningful questions is "a wonderful discipline for executives," says Robert Simons, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and author of the recently published Seven Strategy Questions. When you hire and manage smart people who know more about their area than you do, asking the right questions is critical.  A managing partner of a major consulting company reports that he asks a variety of questions when he's meeting with his staff, but he asks one question in particular all the time: "How can I help you to be successful? I ask it 20 times a day." Questions like "how can I help you?" fall squarely into one of Simons' seven strategy questions.
Simons' questions, which grew out of 25 years of research on organizations and their development, focus on seven areas critical to business success: customers, values, creative tension, setting boundaries, and uncertainty and change -- which leaders get to by asking, "What strategic uncertainties keep you awake at night?"
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Six Styles of Leadership
 In Primal Leadership, authors Daniel Goleman (the guru of Emotional Intelligence), Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee describe six styles of leadership that have different effects on the emotions of employees.
Effective leaders switch leadership styles depending on the situation. The various leadership styles are:
1. Visionary: This kind of leadership moves people toward shared dreams.
2. Coaching: Coaching focuses on personal development rather than accomplishing tasks.
3. Affiliative: Affiliative leaders value people and their feelings. They stress harmony and build team resonance.
4. Democratic: The democratic style revolves around teamwork, collaboration, conflict management and influence.
5. Pace-setting: This type of leader sets high standards of performance and is obsessive about doing things better and faster.
6. Commanding: Such leaders expect immediate compliance with orders, without explaining the reasons behind them.
According to the authors, the leadership style used depends on the situation being faced. Leaders who have mastered four or more of the styles tend to be the most effective.
More about the styles and when to apply them ... |
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How to Staff a New Initiative
 If you need to staff an important new initiative, you know that every hire matters. How do you choose the ideal person? Steve Fredrick, writing for Bloomberg Businessweek.com, says that while the requirements for specific positions vary, there are some key traits that define someone who will work well in a new initiative environment:
1. Relevant experience that cuts down on training time. Experience always matters. For a new project, it matters more.
2. Someone not afraid to take risks. New initiatives thrive on people who are willing to make tough decisions and try things that have never been tried before.
3. A candidate who adds to your diversity.
4. Problem-solvers. A new initiative presents new challenges and opportunities.
"The world of a startup is like no other," says Fredrick. "It is fast-paced, exciting, and full of unknowns. It takes a special candidate to fill that role. Looking at a combination of specific job experience along with some of the more intangible traits noted above will usually net you a great hire."
Read Fredrick's entire article ... |
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Follow my posts in The Washington Business Journal
And now you can also read my posts in The HRExaminer.
Here are a few of the topics you may have missed:
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From ASAE: 