Monthly Archives: June 2013

“Grit” Rivals IQ and EQ to Achieve Goals

Emotional intelligence has been demonstrated to be a better predictor of achievement and performance than measure of intelligence.

Angela Duckworth

One important component of Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is perseverance, the consistent, sustained and focused application of talent and effort over time, University of Pennsylvania’s Angela Duckworth.

Christopher Peterson

She refers to this perseverance and passion for long-term goals as “grit” in her research with West Point cadets and Scripps National Spelling Bee contestants, in collaboration with University of Michigan’ Christopher Peterson and Michael Matthews and Dennis Kelly of United States Military Academy, West Point.

Grit was not related to IQ but was highly correlated with “Conscientiousness,” a personality trait described in the Five Factor Model of Personality.
It was also a better predictor of “success” as measured by retention at West Point, and advancement in the National Spelling Bee.

Michael Matthews

In addition, “grittier” participants:

Achieved higher levels of education
Had fewer job switches and career changes
Earned higher school grades than their peers, despite having lower standardized test scores measuring intelligence and achievement
Devoted more hours to deliberate practice (defined as individual word study and memorization for spelling bee contestants).

Teri Kirby

K. Anders Ericcson

The most effective deliberate practice was rated as the least pleasurable, and “grittier” individuals did more of this effort in Duckworth’s expanded study with Teri Kirby, Eli Tsukayama, Heather Berstein, then of Penn with K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University.

Heather Berstein

Practice activities rated as more pleasurable and less effortful, like reading for pleasure, being quizzed by their parents, contributed less to spelling performance.

Paul Tough

Parents and educators found responded enthusiastically to Paul Tough’s popularized summary of “grit” research in his book advising parents and teachers how to help young people develop grit, curiosity, conscientiousness, and optimism.
He “gritty” attributes highly correlated with successful academic and career performance.

Duckworth expanded the investigation of grit to include “explanatory style”, seen in individuals’ propensity to explain events from optimistic or pessimistic perspectives.
Explanatory style is evaluated according to whether the individual considers event causes as:

Personal (Internal vs. External cause or influence)
Permanent (Stable vs. Unstable)
Pervasive (Global vs. Local/Specific)

Optimistic explanatory style is characterized by external, unstable, local / specific explanations, whereas pessimistic styles include internal, stable, global attributions.

Duckwork and team found that novice teachers with more optimistic explanatory styles rated themselves higher in both grit and life satisfaction, and these high ratings were associated with better work effectiveness, as evaluated at the end of the school year.

Eli Tsukayama

Katherine Von Culin

Her students, Katherine Von Culin and Eli Tsukayama “unpacked” grit and found different difference in motivation and beliefs for grit’s two components: perseverance vs passion.
Among more than 300 volunteers, they found that perseverance and passion had different meaning, pleasure, and engagement orientations to happiness and implicit beliefs about willpower.

Carol Dweck

The research team is evaluating the relationship between “grit” and “growth mindset,” introduced by Stanford’s Carol Dweck to signify viewing failures and setbacks as opportunities to learn and improve, rather than a permanent lack of ability.

ell

Dweck, with Lisa Blackwell, then of Columbia and University of Western Ontario’s Kali Trzesniewski demonstrated the impact of growth mindset and positive explanatory style on school motivation and achievement.

In addition, Duckworth and team are considering ability to delay gratification as a component of grit, since it has been associated with greater self-control and life accomplishment.

More grit may not always lead to greater accomplishment.
Duckworth and team speculate that grittier individuals may be:

More vulnerable to the “sunk-cost fallacy”
Less open to information that contradicts their present beliefs
Handicapped by judgment and decision-making biases
Likely to new opportunities because they are tenaciously focused on the original goal.

Emilia Lahti

Duckworth‘s colleague at Penn, Emilia Lahti is leading research on grit’s Finnish cousin, “Sisu,” implying perseverance, bravery and stamina, and should report her findings by the end of 2013.

Assess your “grittiness” with the research team’s survey.

-*How accurately does your score reflect your view of your grittiness, perseverance?

-*How do you develop grit in yourself and others?

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©Kathryn Welds

Natural Environments Enhance “Vitality” and Reduce Stress

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Vigor, enthusiasm, positive emotions, and calm energy are characteristics of “vitality,” and have been associated with improved health outcomes and stress management.

Richard Ryan

The subjective experience of “vitality” can be increased being outside, particularly in a natural environment, according to by University of Rochester’s Richard Ryan and Louis Mistretta , Netta Weinstein, now of University of Essex, McGill’s Jessey Bernstein and Kirk Warren Brown of Virginia Commonwealth University with Concordia’s Marylène Gagné.

Netta Weinstein

The team asked volunteers to complete surveys and diaries, in addition to participating in experiments comparing reactions to being outdoors vs indoors during physical activity and viewing nature scenes vs buildings on volunteers’ subjective “vitality.”

Jessey Bernstein

These five studies suggest the positive impact of being outdoors and around natural elements on subjective vitality, even when the effects of physical activities or social interactions are controlled.

Kirk Warren Brown

Most office workers can attest to the team’s findings, that visiting nature has restorative, energizing effects, and enables a fresh perspective on challenges.
Nevertheless, most office workers have difficulty leaving work in leaving climate-controlled environments for much-needed breaks.

Marylene Gagne

Weinstein and Ryan extended these findings with University of Essex’s Andrew Przybylski, and found that besides providing “vitality”, energy, and stress management, volunteers who were “immersed in natural settings” reported more caring, generous attitudes toward others.
They valued their aspirations to help and connect with others and make generous decisions more than self-interested aspirations for financial success and admiration.

Andrew Przybylski

Weinstein and team suggested that viewing and experiencing nature and natural settings increases individuals’ sense of personal autonomy to pursue interests while reducing pressures, fears, and social expectations.

These studies suggest the importance of scheduled outdoor breaks from work activities, and thoughtful urban planning that incorporates green spaces and natural environments: “…full contact with nature can have humanizing effects….to the extent our links with nature are disrupted, we may also lose some connection with each other.”

-*How do you integrate exposure to outdoor and natural setting with your work day?

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©Kathryn Welds

Cognitive Value of Handwriting in the Digital Era

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-*Is handwriting passé in the Digital Era?
-*Has keyboarding eclipsed pen and paper?

Virginia Berninger

University of Washington’s Virginia Berninger with Robert Abbott, Amy Augsburger, and Noelia Garcia argue that handwriting provides valuable cognitive training, and advantages in expressive speed, fluency, and productivity.

Robert Abbott

Berninger’s team conducted brain scans and found that the brain’s thinking, language, and “working memory” regions are more activated when handwriting letters than when typing.

This change in brain activation occurs because handwriting letters generally requires more than one sequential stroke, rather than selecting a letter key during typing, according to Berninger.

Berninger’s studies demonstrated students in grades two, four and six wrote more words more quickly and expressed more ideas when writing essays by hand versus with a keyboard.

Karin James

Karin Harman James’s research using an fMRI at Indiana University confirms the benefits of handwriting.

Isabel Gauthier

With Isabel Gauthier of Vanderbilt University, she showed alphabet letters to children before and after they received letter-learning instruction.

Participants who practiced printing by hand showed more enhanced and “adult-like” the neural activity than those who had simply looked at letters.
James suggested that adults may show similar neural activity benefits when learning a new graphically-different language, such as Mandarin, or symbol systems for mathematics, music and chemistry.

Marieke Longcamp

Université de la Méditerranée’s Marieke Longcamp, Céline Boucard, Jean-Claude Gilhodes and Jean-Luc Velay with Jean-Luc Anton, Muriel Roth, and Bruno Nazarian of Hôpital de La Timone, Marseille, France demonstrated other neural benefits of handwriting: Movements memorized when learning how to handwrite enabled adults to more effectively recognize graphic shapes and letters.

Steve Graham

Steve Graham, now of Arizona State University, with Michael Hebert, now of University of Nebraska, demonstrated that handwriting is still associated with improved classroom performance, even when most classrooms and students type on computers.

Sian Beilock

Besides enhancing academic achievement, writing can be a coping tool, according to University of Chicago’s Sian Beilock.
She reported that bright students managed test anxiety by writing about their anxieties to “off-load” them.

Jill Mateo

Beilock collaborated with Andrew Mattarella-Micke, Jill Mateo, Neil Albert and Katherine Foster of University of Chicago, and Vanderbilt University’s Marci DeCaro, Robin Thomas of Miami University, and Megan Kozak of Pace University to study students as they derived solutions to challenging math problems.

Robin Thomas

The team confirmed that those who performed well on the math problems said that they did not have math anxiety, whereas low performers said they were anxious about math performance.
A less expected finding was that both high performers and low performers had the stress hormone, cortisol, in their saliva.

Although both groups experienced measurable stress, the performance outcome was mediated by the calm or anxious “mindset,” suggesting that performance can be enhanced through managing anxiety and expectations.
Writing by hand helped participants boost performance by reducing anxiety and freeing working memory to focus on the math problems.

P. Murali Doraiswamy

Handwriting practice may be valuable for adults as well as children, according to P. Murali Doraiswamy of Duke University, who suggested that handwriting practice may be a useful treatment to stabilize cognitive losses in aging.

-*How often do you use handwriting and printing instead of typing on a keyboard?

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©Kathryn Welds

Power of “Powerless” Speech, but not Powerless Posture

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Assertive speech is assumed to signal competence and power, pre-requisites to status, power, and leadership in the U.S. workplace.

Alison Fragale

However, University of North Carolina’s Alison Fragale demonstrated that warmth trumps competence in collaborative team work groups.

Fragale studied “powerless speech,” which has been believed to make a person seem tentative, uncertain, and less likely to be promoted to expanded workplace roles.
She defined “powerless speech” as including:

Hesitation: “Well” or “Um”, as known as “clutter words”
Tag questions: “Don’t you think?”
Hedges: “Sort of” or “Maybe”
Disclaimers: “This may be a bad idea, but … “
Formal addresses:“Yes, sir” or “Yes, ma’am”

In collaboration-based work teams, “powerless” speech characteristics are significantly associated with being promoted, gaining status and power.
Interpersonal warmth and effective team skills are valued more than dominance and ambition by team members and those selecting leaders for these teams.

Paul Hersey

In contrast, “powerful” speech does not feature these characteristics, is more effective when the task or group is independent and people are expected to work alone.

Ken Blanchard

As in Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard’s Situational Leadership, Fragale concludes that communication style should be tailored to group characteristics.

Li Huang

Likewise, INSEAD’s Li Huang and Columbia’s Adam Galinsky with Lucia Guillory of Northwestern University demonstrated the impact of “powerful” body language – also called “playing big” – on perceived power.

Adam Galinsky

Although assuming “larger” postures is associated with credibility and authority, some situations benefit from assuming “smaller”, less powerful postures to establish warmth or to acknowledge another’s higher status.

Lucia Guillory

As noted in an earlier post, Women Get More Promotions With “Behavioral Flexibility”, careful self-observation and behavioral flexibility based on situational requirements are effective foundations to establish group leadership.

-*How do you monitor and adapt “powerless” speech to work situations?

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Neuronal Recordings Suggest “Free Will” Might be “Free Won’t”

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Itzhak Fried

People may think they consciously control their actions and performance, but findings from UCLA’s Itzhak Fried and Roy Mukamel with Gabriel Kreiman of Harvard challenged conventional assumptions about “conscious intention” and “free will. ”

Roy Mukamel

Fried, Mukamel, and Kreiman adopted Benjamin Libet’s procedure to assess “free will” at University of California, San Francisco, using intracranial recordings to identify neuron activity that precedes and predicts volunteers’ decision to move a finger.

Gabriel Kreiman

Volunteers, who had electrodes implanted in their brains to record early indicators of seizures, pressed a button when they chose and indicated the clock’s hand position when they decided to press the button.

Libet’s process marks the time a voluntary action occurred, and the volunteer’s report of when the decision to act was completed.
These data points enabled researchers to identify specific neurons that were active during the time around the conscious decision to act and the completed action.

Benjamin Libet

About a quarter of neurons in the frontal lobe’s supplementary motor area (responsible for motor activity coordination) and the anterior cingulate cortex (which directs attention and motivation) changed activity before volunteers said they wanted to press the button.

Spontaneous, voluntary acts were initiated in the cerebrum about 200 milliseconds before the person was consciously aware of the ‘decision’ to act, and researchers predicted with greater than 80 percent accuracy whether a movement had occurred and when the decision to make it happened.

Libet’s team suggested that unconscious brain processes, which are more rapid than conscious decision-making (“free will”), are the instigators of volitional acts.
However, these researchers also proposed that “free will” is more accurately described as “free won’t” because conscious volition can exercise “veto power” over intentions to act.

Kreiman extended this research to better understand loss of voluntary movement in Parkinson’s disease when he pre-empted volunteers’ movements after observing brain activation in the supplementary motor area and the anterior cingulate cortex.
He activated a “stop” sign on a screen in front of each volunteer before the person actually moved, and reported that his volunteers frequently said, ”That was weird. It was like you read my mind.”

Nalini Ambady

These brain studies complement Stanford professor Nalini Ambady’s work at Harvard University on “thin slicing”, or the experience of “knowing before you know.”
Also described as “intuition” or “unconscious cognitive processing,” these findings suggest that the conscious mind is the last to know when we make a decision.

-*How do you manage the discrepancy between unconscious mental processes and conscious awareness of them?

©Kathryn Welds

Equal Pay Act’s Fiftieth Anniversary: Progress but no Parity

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Equal Pay Act 1963

When U.S. President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act in 1963, women earned 59 cents for every $1 earned by a man.

Today women are up to 77 cents on the dollar, according to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chair Jacqueline Berrien.
She noted that the wage discrepancy is even larger for African American women and Latinas.

Jacqueline Berrien

Women MBAs graduating from top U.S. business schools in 2012 fared slightly better than the national average, with 2012 Stanford alumnae earning just 79 cents for every $1 earned by a male grads, according to Bloomberg Businessweek’s annual surveys of 24,716 recent MBA graduates from each year’s top 30 U.S. business schools since 2002.
Given the substantial investment of time, money, and effort in obtaining these advanced degrees, women graduates may question this Return on Investment (ROI).

Women from the MBA classes of 2012 averaged 7.3 percent less than their male counterparts with average salaries of $105,059.
This wage disparity is more than triple the 2.2 percent gap women MBAs experienced in 2012 on average earnings of $83,404.

The survey considered pay differences by industries and found women lagged behind men in pay in eight of 11 sectors in 2012, including accounting, finance, marketing, and operations.
The gap has increased across industries since 2002, even in non-finance fields like information technology and entrepreneurship.

The largest pay differential was in highly-compensated financial fields like venture capital and private equity field, where women earned only 82.5¢ for every dollar men made — about 10 ¢ less on the dollar than in 2002.
In contrast, consulting offered the closest pay parity in 2012, with women earning 99¢ for every dollar of male classmates’ salaries.

Women earned more than men in three industries: human resources, non-profits, and investment banking.
The first two industries tend to attract more women and be lower-paid than other fields.

Berrien, of the EEOC, opined that with the current backsliding in parity progress, the gender pay gap is predicted to close in another 44 years, in 2057 — provided that there is no further deterioration of pay equity advancement.

CB Insights reported that in California from January-June 2010:

89 percent of series A and seed-funded companies had all male founders, compared with only 8 percent that had founders of both genders, and just 3 percent of businesses with all female founders
82 percent of company founders were white, compared to 18 percent that were Asian or Pacific Islander

The 2013 Silicon Valley Index, compiled by economic think tank Joint Venture Silicon Valley found significant income disparities by race in addition to gender from 2009-2011:

African-American residents’ income dropped 18%, compared to a 4% decrease across the U.S.
Hispanic resident’ income decreased 5%, similar to the rest of California

Catherine Bracy

Catherine Bracy observed that the average woman in Silicon Valley, California’s “economic powerhouse”, earns 49 cents for every dollar men make in Silicon Valley, when averaging incomes of African American and Hispanic women residents.

NerdWallet analyzed data from the U.S. Census for 366 metro areas to determine the lowest pay gaps for women in small, medium, and large cities, and concluded that on balance, Silicon Valley was one of the “best places for women to work.”

Wage discrepancy in one of the U.S.’s most economically viable areas, whether around the national average or well below, demonstrates that 50 years after the Equal Pay Act, the average female worker in the U.S. is far from earning an equal wage.

Happy Anniversary, Equal Pay Act of 1963, and Many Happy Returns of the day for at least 44 years, until women’s pay may be equal across industries and geographies.

©Kathryn Welds

Harvard B-School Women “Lean Out” of the Workforce?

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First HBS Women

Women were first admitted to Harvard Business School in 1963, and 50 years later, women are not 50% of the students at HBS.
They trail at 42% for the currently-admitted class, up from the 40% at the time of this survey.

Robin Ely

Robin Ely of Harvard conducted a survey of of 3,786 women and 2,655 men HBS graduates and found that more than 70% of alumnae are in the paid workforce, and 56% work full time.

Of the 10% of alumnae ages 31 to 47 who “lean out” to care for children full time, only 3% said they planned not to return to return.

Ely argues that rather than leaning out, women are actually pushed out or pulled out of the workforce:

“…a whole set of experiences … look less like women opting out, and more like women being pushed out, by organizations that demand a 24/7 work schedule…Women are being pulled out by a culture that promulgates a compelling—some might say guilt-inducing—image of mothering that is hard to live up to while you are trying to hold a job.”

Among women working part-time, three-fourths are engaged in pro bono and volunteer efforts, suggesting that these women continue to have demanding schedules.
More than 63% of the women report regular or significant volunteer commitments, with 67% of those caring for children full-time reporting substantial volunteer activity.

Younger women with two or more children are less likely to be in the workforce than those with no children: 37% for parents vs 9% for the non-parents.

And among the younger cohort of Gen X’ers, 13% of women are working part-time, contrasted with 2% of Gen X men.

At the other end of the age-experience spectrum, another type of “age-approriate opting out” was reported by 43% of female graduates ages 48-66 no longer working full-time.
In contrast, only 28% of men in the same age range were not longer employed, reinforcing previous findings that men work both more hours per year and more years over their careers, leading to higher overall career earnings.

More than 84% of female respondents acknowledged “taking leaves or reducing work hours” hold back women from career advancement.

The second most-cited impediment to career advancement for women was “prioritizing family over work,” according to 82% of the female respondents.

Most alumnae reported organizational factors limit women’s advancement:

Lack of senior female role models
Inhospitable corporate cultures
Lack of supportive environments

Fewer than half of the women under the age of 67 report being satisfied with their professional accomplishments or opportunities for career growth.
In contrast, the majority of men agree that their work is meaningful and satisfying.

Drew Gilpin Faust

Harvard’s President Drew Gilpin Faust noted that, women are not equally represented in top leadership roles, echoing statistics showcased by HBS grad Sheryl Sandberg.
She share that women:

Comprise 4 percent of Fortune 500 Company CEOs
Lead fewer than 10 percent of America’s venture capital firms
Hold 26 percent of US full professorships
Serve in 20 percent of top US government jobs

Sheryl Sandberg

Ely believes that organizations, women, and families will benefit from recruiting and hiring women who have opted out of full-time work but now want to resume their careers, because today’s graduates can expect to live nearly a century.

This change in hiring practices can increase use of top talent while reducing the substantial regret and dissatisfaction many HBS women experienced in their career trajectories.

As one highly-educated, highly-skilled women reflected on her sense of under-utilization and under-employment in a large global organization: “I don’t want to have to go home and vacuum to feel like I’ve accomplished something.”

Organizational policy can increase firms’ profitability, competitiveness, and innovation by deploying top talent across generations and genders, and this HBS study points to one source of potential talent.

-*What actions should individual women and organizations implement to increase the utilization of skilled women’s talents in the workplace?

Women’s Post-Business School Work-Life Issues

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Innovators’s Personality Characteristics and Shibumi Principles Drive Innovation

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Øyvind Martinsen

BI Norwegian Business School’s Øyvind Martinsen identified components of creative personalities as key attributes for innovative problem solving in business organizations.

Martinsen’s study of 481 people included two groups of students in creative fields: advertising and performing artists, and a control group of lecturers and managers.

He found that creative individuals differed from the control groups in several dimensions:

Have an active imagination, “associative orientation”, an “experimental attitude”
Value originality, are comfortable rebelling against rules, standards, and systems
Demonstrate high motivation to succeed
Become absorbed in creative work
Are ambitious: Desire recognition, fame
Adapt, reimagine, rebrand, and flex to meet current demands and realities
Express anxiety, worry, volatile emotions
Demonstrate less concern, friendliness and sensitivity to others
Tend to be more critical of others

Martinsen says that a less creative individuals can increase this capacity when their work environments encourage rule-bending and free thought, so organizations can modify policies and practices to convey acceptance of exploration.

Employees are often urged to take chances by innovating solutions, but sometimes these incubation efforts may not result in a commercial success — and organizations may not “forgive” the investment of time and money in speculative efforts.

University of Washington’s Ryan Fehr with Michele Gelfand of University of Maryland suggest that organizations should establish the conditions for innovation and for accepting that experimentation may provide “lessons learned” even when efforts cannot be brought to market.

Ryan Fehr

Their research investigated “forgiving organizations” that expand the individual practice of workplace compassion and mindfulness to an institutional level.

Michele Gelfand

Fehr and Gelfand propose a “sensemaking” organizational model based on restorative justice, temperance, and compassion to cultivate the climate of fearless innovation and confident exploration in high-support organizations, which benefit from process and product breakthroughs and related financial rewards.

Matthew May

Matthew May explored a multi-faced exemplar of innovation, Shibumi, imperfectly defined as “effortless effectiveness”, simply-expressed complexity, flawed perfection.

Baldassarre Castiglione

Shibumi shares some qualities with Baldassare Castiglione’s idea of “sprezzatura,” or making “whatever one does or says seem effortless, and almost unpremeditate,” Shibumi, says May, is typically achieved through an innovation-change management sequence of:

Commitment
Preparation
Struggle
Breakthrough
Transformation

Trevanian

Film scholar Rodney William Whitaker, who wrote under the pseudonym Trevanian, opined that “Shibumi has to do with great refinement underlying commonplace appearances,” and architect Sarah Susanka observed that “…shibumi evolves out of a process of complexity, though none of this complexity shows in the result…to meet a particular design challenge.”

Sarah Susanka

May illustrated examples of familiar Japanese management principles including Hoshin (goal alignment) and Kaizen (continuous improvement), with less familiar principles:

Kata (patterns of effective behavior)
Genchi genbutsu (observation)
Hansei (reflection).

Innovation and creative problem-solving in any field can benefit from attention to Shibumi’s seven principles:

Austerity – Less is more
“Koko” suggests restraint, sparseness, and intentional omission, and ‘Is/isn’t analysis” provides the focus and clarity to exclude elements beyond a designated scope

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Antoine de Saint Exupery captured this principle in his view that “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

In another book, May offered 4 Ss of “elegant”, innovative, and austere solutions:

“Symmetry” to help solve problems of structure, order, and aesthetics
“Seduction” for creative engagement
“Subtraction” for problems of economy
“Sustainability” for a process or solution that is both repeatable and lasting

Simplicity
“Kanso” signals the “enoughness” of streamlined utility, based on prioritization, understatement, and order for the central purpose.
Naturalness
“Shizen” points to the paradox of intentional artlessness, or balancing nature’s randomness and patterns with intentional curation.
Subtlety
“Yugen” refers to the tension between stagnation of precision in contrast with nature’s growth.
One example is Steve Jobs building anticipation through restrained information release.
Asymmetric Imperfection
Fukinsei points to the symmetry of nature through its counterpoint: Asymmetrical and incomplete representations that encourage the viewer’s participation to “complete the incomplete.”
Gestalt researchers and artists demonstrated increased visual impact when participants co-create and collaborate in the innovation effort.
Change Routine Thinking and Actions
Datsuzoku suggests a break from routine, such as adopting free-spirited Carnival demeanor at the annual masked Fasching in German-speaking countries.
Breaking patterns enables breakthrough innovation and creative resourcefulness.
Active Stillness, Dynamic Tranquility
Seijaku is serenity in the midst of activity and provides context of datsuzoku, transcendence of conventional ideas and traditional usage, leading to surprise, astonishment, and freedom to create.
“Doing nothing” in mindfulness practice can be provide unconscious incubation for eventual creative syntheses to solve complex design issues, and increase self-awareness, focus, and attention.
Individuals who wish to become more creative even in more confining organizations have reported success by adopting mindfulness meditation based on conscious breathing.
In addition mindfulness practice can enhance resilience to accept critique in the creative process.

-*How do you establish the individual and organizational conditions for innovations?
-*How do organizations become “forgiving”?

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Productivity and Work Motivation Affected by Meaning, Challenge, Mastery, Ownership

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Small gestures and verbalizations by managers and organizations can have a large impact on employee productivity, motivation, engagement, and retention – for better or worse.

Dan Ariely

Dan Ariely’s research at Duke University showed the small changes in task design dramatically increase or diminish persistence, satisfaction, and commitment to tasks.

The good news is that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying ‘uh huh,’ [you] dramatically improve people’s motivations…. The bad news is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes. …,” according to Ariely.

Ariely’s lab experiments found that volunteers valued and liked their work product more when they worked hard and managed obstacles to produce it.
In addition, most people believed, often inaccurately, that other observers shared their positive view of their work product,

His research concluded that people seek meaning, challenge, and ownership in their work, and that these elements can increase work motivation and persistence.

Viktor Frankl

Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankel articulated this existential perspective in his examination of the critical role that meaning played in the enabling survivors of concentration camp prisoners in Man’s Search for Meaning.

In the less extreme circumstances of the workplace, finding and assigning meaning to work efforts enables people to persist in complex tasks to achieve satisfaction in mastering challenges.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Harvard’s Rosabeth Moss Kanter concurred that both meaning and mastery are productivity drivers, and to these she added a social dimension, membership, and a distant runner-up, money.

Frederick Herzberg

In contrast, one of the early though leaders in business management, psychologist Frederick Herzberg, developed a classic formulation of motivational factors contrasted with “hygiene factors.”

His two-factor theory of motivation did not include meaning or money as driving job satisfaction or productivity.

Shawn Achor, formerly of Harvard, argues that happiness is the most important work productivity lever.

Shawn Achor

To support his contention, he cited research findings that happy workforces increase an organization’s sales by 37 percent, productivity by 31 percent and accuracy on tasks by 19 percent.

Whether you work for mainly for meaning, money, or other motivations, you may agree that an ideal workplace and manager would foster all of these contributors to employee engagement and productivity.

-*What is the most important work motivator for you?
-*How have you seen managers increase employee engagement and performance through words and actions?

Kathryn Welds, PhD | Curated Research + Commentary

Consulting Organizsational Psychologist | Change Consultant | Leadership+Career Coach

Monthly Archives: June 2013

“Grit” Rivals IQ and EQ to Achieve Goals

Natural Environments Enhance “Vitality” and Reduce Stress

Cognitive Value of Handwriting in the Digital Era

Power of “Powerless” Speech, but not Powerless Posture

Neuronal Recordings Suggest “Free Will” Might be “Free Won’t”

Equal Pay Act’s Fiftieth Anniversary: Progress but no Parity

Harvard B-School Women “Lean Out” of the Workforce?

Innovators’s Personality Characteristics and Shibumi Principles Drive Innovation

Productivity and Work Motivation Affected by Meaning, Challenge, Mastery, Ownership

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