True Motivation at Work

Richard Bolstad

Wealth Addiction Is Not Motivation

How do managers in the kind of cooperative workplace we say we want motivate their staff without threatening and coercing them? Is it bribery? Actually, money is far from the most successful motivator in business. Twenty years ago, sociologist Philip Slater published a daring critique of the modern western obsession with wealth. Slater claimed that “The idea that everybody wants money is propaganda circulated by wealth addicts to make themselves feel better about their addiction.” (1980, p 25). Since then, the research has collected to back his challenge. Dr Tim Kasser and Dr Richard Ryan have completed a number of studies in 13 different countries, comparing people who are highly motivated by making money to those who are not. They say “The more we seek satisfactions in material goods, the less we find them there.” Even when such money-motivated people believe that they are likely to succeed in making money, the obsession is correlated with low self esteem, depressed mood, and increased use of drugs. When they succeed, “The satisfaction has a short half-life; it’s very fleeting.”

Motivation to feel more connected with people, on the other hand, correlates with increased sense of well-being. A study by business school lecturers Dr Aric Rindfleisch, Frank Denton and Dr James Burroughs confirmed that “people who are more materialistic tend to be unhappy with their lives”. Interestingly, their research suggests that the depression accompanying an obsession with money is reduced if the person has close, caring relationships. This research, Kasser and Ryan note, seems to contradict some important assumptions of the “American dream”. NLP trainer Dr L. Michael Hall puts this more clearly than most other motivational experts when he says “Making money only for the sake of having more money does not really enrich our internal experience of life, or give us more quality in our thinking or feeling.” Reviewing a study of successful millionaires by Dr Scrully Blotnick, he urges “Would you like to become rich? Good. Set that as your goal, then forget it…. It’s not about money. Blotnick noted that almost all of those individuals who eventually became millionaires hardly noticed.” (Hall, 2000, p 27).

What Really Motivates Employees

This research presents a dilemma for employers, because most employers believe that the main “contract” they are making with their employees is one where the employer gives money and the employee gives their labour. Management consultant Tom Peters sums up the conventional employer wisdom (which he is critiquing) as “If we give people big straightforward monetary incentives… the productivity problem will go away.” (Peters and Waterman, 1982, p 43). More explicitly, monetary incentive systems are promoted as the solution to motivation problems. The theory is that “The more closely pay is tied to performance, the more powerful its motivational effect.” say psychologists Richard Guzzo and Raymond Katzell (1987, p 110).

Guzzo and Katzell did a meta-study of 330 research comparisons, and showed that financial incentives are actually unrelated to absenteeism, productivity or worker turnover. In fact, the most reliable “programs” for improving these areas are training and employee goalsetting. W. Edwards Deming, the American advisor who helped Japan create its economic miracle in the 1950s and 1960s says economic rewards are “the most powerful inhibitor to quality and productivity in the western world.” He claims this system “nourishes short-term performance, annihilates long-term planning, builds fear, demolishes teamwork, nourishes rivalry and… leaves people bitter.” (Deming, 1986, p 102).

Edward Deci and Richard Ryan call money an “extrinsic” or contingent motivator, meaning it tries to motivate you to do better work because of something you might get from outside the work itself. They contrast this with intrinsic motivators, meaning the enjoyments you get just by doing the job. An example is a sense of accomplishment. Their review of forty years of studies has continued to confirm their original conclusion: “the research has consistently shown that any contingent payment system tends to undermine intrinsic motivation.” (1985, p 299). That is, the more people pay attention to how much money or other “rewards” they might get out of working, the less they enjoy their work itself. This is the theme of Alfie Kohn’s very thorough text “Punished by Rewards”.

Kohn tabulates a number of studies which ask workers what motivates them in a job. Consistently, workers rate money very low. Even salespeople (traditionally thought of as highly money-motivated) cite it as the least common reason for changing job (Greenberg and Greenberg, 1991, p 10). The researchers say “In fact, we believe that one of the biggest management fallacies is that salespeople can be motivated by external factors.” The Families and Work Institute studies a random sample of 3000 American workers, asking them to list their priorities in deciding whether to take a job. Money consistently figures at the bottom of a list of 20 factors, well below open communication, positive co-worker relations, control over work content, stimulating work and opportunity to gain new skills (Bond, Galinsky and Swanberg, 1998).

Amazingly, workers are more likely to report feeling “happy” when they are on the job than when they are in their leisure time (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, p 158). Signalled by beeper at random times and asked to rate their level of happiness, those studied were happy 54% of the time while at their work, but only 18% of the time while engaged in leisure activities. If workers are not motivated, then the problem is not that work is intrinsically boring. Management consultant Frederick Herzberg makes the solution clear by saying “If you want people motivated to do a good job, give them a good job to do.” Deci and Ryan suggest that the whole question behind incentive schemes is wrongly phrased if we are seeking real motivation. Managers have asked ” ‘How can we get the employees to do what we tell them?’ The former sort of workplace is about working with; the latter sort is about doing to. Rewards, seen from this perspective, are just one more way of doing things to people. They are basically ‘control through seduction’.” (Deci and Ryan, 1985, p 70).

Implications For Managers

There are some important implications for managers from this research.

• Firstly, in encouraging people to set goals and follow their dreams, it is useful to make clear the difference between goals which are likely to lead to happiness, and addictive goals (eg to get stoned more, to get drunk, to win a million dollars at the casino). Encouraging people to set and pursue addictive goals associates a negative emotional experience with this potentially very powerful source of life satisfaction.
• Secondly, when managers want a program to motivate their employees, or to improve the success of an incentive system, it is useful to understand the underlying contradiction in the creation of extrinsic motivation systems. Asking more fundamental questions than “How do I get them to do what I want them to?” will elicit more long term success.

Alfie Kohn describes his experience consulting with Marshall Industries, a huge electronics components distributor which took this advice to heart (Kohn, 1998). After a year of discussions, CEO Rob Rodin agreed to eliminate all incentives, sales commissions, and contests. In the following few years, staff turnover was reduced 80%, morale soared, productivity escalated and sales more than doubled.

Creating Intrinsic Motivation

Creating employee motivation, of course, involves far more than simply giving up incentives. It involves meeting the “values” which employees really hold important. These values, as Frederick Herzberg points out, are remarkably similar across the world. The Families and Work Institute research (1998) groups these in two  clusters: job quality and workplace support. Job quality refers to autonomy, meaningfulness, security and opportunities for improvement. Workplace support is subdivided into respectful treatment, equal opportunity and flexibility, and supportive team relationships.

A General Motors intern, visiting the co-operatively run Fairmont factory described how enthusiastically the workers ran their own workplaces there. On his tour, one plant manager commented that four men were doing a job that took six men to do at his plant. He called out to the workers “Bravo! You guys are something else! If only I could have people like you!” After he left, the intern overheard one of the workers turn to another and say “It’s too bad isn’t it, that they don’t realise that they already have people like that.” (Tanner Pascale, 1990, p 72-75). This motivation comes not from incentives schemes, bonuses or any extrinsic rewards, but from systematically meeting the criteria that matter to workers themselves. The workers at Fairmont experience their work as something they enjoy doing, something that they are intrinsically satisfied by.

Robert Rosen, president of Healthy Companies, has been a consultant with dozens of Fortune 500 companies, and describes the Fairmont factory as an example of a new kind of contract that is emerging between workers and management, in this era of reduced job “security” and rapid innovation. He lists the values of this new contract (Rosen, 1992, p 116-120) as:

• Commitment to self-knowledge and development
• Firm belief in decency
• Respect for individual differences
• Spirit of partnership
• High priority for health and wellbeing
• Appreciation for flexibility and resilience
• Passion for products and process

Rosen says “Organisations of the future are networks of relationships. And the relationships are what glue people together. We are really running human communities or human enterprises.” (in Makower, 1994, p 170).

Juanita Brown, president of Whole Systems Associates, considers this issue of the “corporate community” from an NLP-compatible perspective (Brown, 1992). She notes that the mental image conjured up by the word “corporation” is not very motivating, even when she asks senior executives about it. The image conjured up by the alternative metaphor of “community” is much more exciting, and Brown considers its use to be the most pragmatic motivation tool a CEO could adopt. One senior executive who has taken her advice is Mike Szymanczyk of Procter & Gamble and Kraft General Foods. Szymanczyk says “If I keep giving you more money to satisfy you, I can never give you enough. If I keep creating the opportunity for you to explore your own potential in the exploration of the business’ potential, then we have a positively reinforcing system. The opportunity of the community model is to build this reinforcing system and have people feel rewarded and satisfied and fulfilled from it, instead of feeling like the only possible reward or satisfaction they can get is another raise or another bonus cheque.” (in Brown, 1992, p 138).

The implications of the community metaphor (using community in the older rural sense, called in sociology “Gemeinschaft”), are breathtaking. Communities have individuals but they also have community meetings. Maybe they have community “elders” instead of CEOs. Maybe they have systems for checking to make sure that the neighbours are okay. People in a community know each other and have multiple points of contact with each other. Most of all, people in a community are there because they want to be part of that community.

Even On A Small Scale?

The business that I manage is a small one, but I consider it a community in itself (perhaps, at this size, a “family”), and the focal point of a wider community of NLP Practitioners. The people who have worked for me over the last twenty years have been people who share my vision of personal and global transformation. This changes my perspective on many of the activities that happen in our office. When, as has sometimes happened, our office administrator brings her toddler to work, instead of feeling imposed on, I feel proud that we have a workplace where that is possible. My main worry is that she will overwork to compensate for the time spent with him, because I know that she truly values having a job that accepts her family responsibilities. Similarly, when our accounts person takes time discussing her political beliefs with me on the job, instead of feeling anxious about the clock, I feel excited that I have an office where people bring all their beliefs and values with them. My main concern is again that I notice her doing more than she has arranged to do, and helping out around the office with tasks that were not part of her contract, and don’t earn her money. Every job that happens in our office is part of our mission, no matter how “matter of fact” it may seem. The person who does our mailouts, packing pamphlets in envelopes tells me “I love working for you people. If there’s anything more I can do, just tell me.”

The other side of this story is that I have overheard each of these people talking to potential clients about the services we offer. The staff we have are excited about what we provide. If someone books in for the first half of a Practitioner course, for example, they might tell that person “I bet you’ll want to stay for the other half. Start thinking about it now!” I could have trained our staff to say this, or they could have decided to say it because they are trained in NLP language patterns themselves. But that is not why they say it. They say it because they have experienced our trainings, and they truly are excited about what the client is doing. They believe in what we teach. They believe working here is one of the most important things they could do with their lives. They are working for the intrinsic rewards, just as I am. When I discussed my staff with another NLP Practitioner recently, she said to me “Wow; you couldn’t buy that kind of dedication.” And that’s the point. You can’t buy dedication, ever!

The people who work with us are not “angels”, and neither am I. Sometimes they do things I don’t approve of, or I do things they don’t approve of. Over the twenty-five years I’ve been in business, I’ve also had people do things I didn’t know they were doing because they didn’t want me to know. Conflicts happen in any family. But you don’t turn your family into an army barracks because someone acts dishonestly. You are still a family.

Small Scale Action In A large Corporation

What if you’re “stuck” in a large corporation which doesn’t behave like a community? That’s difficult, its true. But I have a story I tell about that situation. Before I ran my own business, I worked as a teacher is a large tertiary institution. It was the same school where, many years before, I had trained as a nurse. One of my old nursing lecturers (lets call her Freda) was now my boss, and people warned me to “watch out” for her because she had a reputation as a “dragon”. This surprised me because I remembered Freda as an encouraging and friendly teacher. A couple of weeks after starting this job, I had an interesting interaction with her. I arrived at work in the morning to find a very angry letter from Freda on my desk. The letter told me that I had failed to securely lock the room I had taught in the previous evening. She warned me that such carelessness could cost money, and suggested that if I couldn’t be trusted with such a simple task, perhaps I was not in the right job. She told me she would be watching to see if I improved, and would take further action if it happened again.

My co-workers simply told me now I knew what they were coping with. This was what Freda was like as a Head of Department. I was quite frightened. This was a new job and I didn’t want to lose it. But as I sat down to think about it, I realised that I was much more than just frightened. I was sad. Sad that I had lost the chance of a decent relationship with my new boss, and sad that my admiration for my old teacher was being overtaken by this new style of interaction. So when I wrote her a letter back, I took the risk of telling her exactly that. I decided that I did not want to live in fear of my boss; and that I’d rather risk being fired than accept the “terms” of the relationship she seemed to be offering me. I apologised for leaving the door unlocked, and then I said “But I also want you to know, Freda, that I remember you with great affection, as my teacher in Nursing school. I have enormous respect for you. I promise you that you need never threaten me to get me to do something important. If you tell me something I did was a problem, I’m immediately incredibly motivated to remember and change; as motivated as I ever could be. I’m grateful for what you taught me as a student, and there will always be a place in my heart for you and your concerns.”

The response was dramatic. Freda came straight over to my office, apologised for being “in a bad mood” and reassured me that I was doing a good job. Our relationship from that moment on was completely different; and completely different from the kind of relationship that my colleagues had experienced. That, in turn, sustained my motivation. I had been completely honest. Respect and admiration are vastly more motivating to me than any extrinsic pressure Freda could exert.

Summary

The pursuit of wealth for itself is correlated with low self esteem and depression, and functions as an addictive craving. When corporations motivate their employees using extrinsic rewards such as money, the intrinsic enjoyment of the workforce is harmed. On the other hand, workers themselves are motivated most of all by the quality of their job and the relationships that support them there. Metaphorically, it may be more useful to view a corporation as a community which people want intrinsically to be part of. Even a small business can create this feeling of family or community and inspire workers with the intrinsic mission of their work. In a large organisation, individuals can influence the culture of the organisation by altering the presuppositions behind their individual actions. Working in the business field, we will clearly achieve more powerful results by chunking up from the details of “motivation programs” and focusing on the interpersonal climate of the organisation. The way to get people to do better in their jobs is to give them better jobs to do.

Group Exercise: Intrinsic Motivation Audit

Discuss in pairs. To what extent does your organisation create these values of the “new contract”? Where would be the next goal you would work towards to more fully do that?

• Commitment to self-knowledge and development
• Firm belief in decency
• Respect for individual differences
• Spirit of partnership
• High priority for health and wellbeing
• Appreciation for flexibility and resilience
• Passion for products and process

Bibliography

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Richard Bolstad is the director of Transformations International Ltd and the co-developer of Transforming Communication, a course in co-operative relationships used by businesses such as the Bank of New Zealand.