For decades, HR practitioners, business owners and team leaders have been vexed by what effect company culture has on employee motivation, and vice-a-versa.
This is the question that saw Lindsay McGregor and Neel Doshi in 2015 survey 20,000 workers in 50 major companies, conduct a series of experiments and peruse a score of academic research. Their conclusion: Why people work determines how well people work.
In the 1980s, Professors Edward Deci and Richard Ryan identified six key reasons why people work, which were:
- Play – Motivated by the work itself. Play is linked to learning, and tied to curiosity, experimentation and exploration
- Purpose – Direct outcome of work fits a worker’s identity. The work is done because its impact is value
- Potential – Direct outcome of work benefits a worker’s identity. The work enhances a worker’s potential
- Emotional Pressure – A person works because an external force threatens their identity. The use of guilt to get a person to perform an action is an example of emotional pressure
- Economic Pressure – An external force makes a person work. Work is done to gain a reward or avoid a punishment. Separated from the work and the person’s identity
- Inertia – The motive is far removed from the work and a person’s identity, they do not know why they are working
Play, Purpose and Potential are direct motives as they are directly connected to the work in some form, and are likely to improve performance in different ways. Emotional Pressure, Economic Pressure and Inertia are indirect motives as they are not linked to the work, and tend to reduce performance.
Company processes that effect employee motivation
McGregor and Doshi found that high-performing work cultures seek to maximise the Play, Purpose and Potential realised by their staff and minimise Emotional Pressure, Economic Pressure and Inertia. This distinction is referred to as creating Total Motivation.
It so follows that an organisational culture that inspires Play, Purpose and Potential while negating indirect motives produce better customer outcomes because employees have a vested interest in the work performed. This motivation differential has a fundamental impact upon organisational revenue generation, with high Total Motivation workplaces outperforming low Total Motivation workplaces.
McGregor and Doshi further found that an employee’s motivation can vary dramatically depending on company processes, with different workplace elements affecting Total Motivation levels. Often, the difference between a well-designed and a poorly designed process can lead to significant changes in employee motivation.
Among the processes that can change an employee’s Total Motivation, the following rose to the surface based on their influence upon a Total Motivation scale of 100 (highly motivated) to -100 (unmotivated):
- Role design (87)
- Organisational identity (65)
- Career ladders (63)
- Community (60)
- Workforce and resource planning (53)
- Leadership (50)
- Compensation (48)
- Adaptive governance processes (42)
- Performance review (41)
All these different processes affect an organisation’s culture, which is a complex ecosystem that as McGregor and Doshi suggest, acts as an organisation’s operating system. In this respect, leaders can target and maintain a high-performing culture by showing managers how to lead in ways that maintain a high performing culture.
They can do so through, for example, holding reflection sessions with their teams once a week, explaining the why underpinning the team’s work and reflecting upon how their team’s processes have been designed. For example, does everyone have space for Play?
High performing cultures are hard to create but offer significant competitive advantage. Organisations that treat culture as an “engineering discipline” versus an amorphous one are more likely to succeed. In doing so, it is crucial that they considering what is truly motivating their employees and how company processes can be altered to engender increased motivation and performance.
Letsema’s Consulting team is highly experienced in working with clients to create a high performing company culture. To find out how Letsema can help your organisation engineer a high performing culture, email info@letsema.co.za.
