Managers unknowingly drain meaning from a job
In a study of knowledge workers and what motivates them to perform at peak creative levels, Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer, looked at what motivates workers – and what de-motivates or drains workers.
Amabile, the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, and a creativity researcher, and Kramer, an independent researcher and author, have been studying creativity and its link to meaningful work for over 15 years.
They have found that “progress” toward successfully completing a project contributes significantly to a worker’s inner life, supporting highly creative, productive solutions and outputs. However, even the smallest of setbacks have a powerful effect - more powerful than even positive events.
In other words, if workers feel internally drained of productivity and motivation, then creative output suffers.
Here are their findings on how managers “strip” work of its meaning:
- Dismissing the importance of a worker’s contributions, work, or ideas. If workers perceive that managers or team leaders are ignoring suggestions or ideas, or dismissing contributions as trivial or unimportant, the meaning a worker finds in his or her job rapidly declines.
- Frequent and abrupt reassignments of work. Continually changing work assignments, especially before a worker has the chance to complete a project, destroys a sense of ownership. Projects that go unfinished or fail to reach the market because management cancels them seriously impact a worker’s sense of meaning – leading to reductions in overall innovation and creativity.
- Frequently shifting priorities or the framework for how a project should be completed. It’s extremely de-motivating for workers to spend considerable time and effort on a project only to have the project completely change in scope and content.
- Failing to keep workers informed. Basically, continuous and honest communication between management and employees, and between employees and customers, where applicable, remains one of the best ways to keep workers feeling an inner sense of meaning regarding their work.
* From “The Power of Small Wins,” Harvard Business Review, May 2011, Vol. 89 Issue 5.