Employee Motivation is Fueled
By a Brain/Behavior Connection

Management style, not expertise, is often at the root of employee motivation issues. In some ways, motivating employees is beyond the grasp of traditional management practices because it is often viewed as "fixing the employee". Over the years, managers have tried many ways to motivate employees.

Conventional wisdom in the U.S. says that incentives are a good way to create employee motivation. If we want to motivate people to achieve higher levels of performance, we may extend the lure of a bonus, a commission, or a “merit” increase in pay. If they perform badly, we may offer a bad performance review or even severance pay. But conventional wisdom about the carrot and stick approach to employee motivation, say many psychologists and others who study human behavior, is not only wrong, it is counter-productive.

What About Incentives?

Incentives insinuate that employees are withholding effort and that the only way to get them to work at 100% is to offer a bribe. The concept creates a “carrot and stick” approach to employee motivation that is a throwback to B.F. Skinner, a behavioral psychologist whose writings in the first half of this century fueled traditional management thinking. Skinner taught that human behavior could be conditioned with combinations of rewards and punishments much like you would train a dog to behave in certain ways. In fact, Skinner worked with pigeons and rats to collect his data. However, as Peter R. Scholtes, author of The Leader’s Handbook, noted wryly, “The carrot and stick approach is used to move a jackass and, as far as we know, its effectiveness is limited to that species. It is less than flattering when managers try to use an approach intended for jackasses on their employees."

In addition to the conditioned response approach to employee motivation, most of the traditional management thinking about employee motivation is based on outdated premises and myths, including:

• There are enough untrustworthy people in this world that we should create policies and procedures based on the assumption that people cannot be trusted.
• Generally, most people don’t care about doing a good job.
• Employees, with few exceptions, don’t want to work or do their fair share so we have to watch them all the time.
• People are not interested in learning or improving.

In response, we have created all kinds of ways to improve employee motivation like incentives, reorganizing, training, management by objectives, or whatever the latest fad happens to be. But as Frederick Hertzberg established in the late 1960’s, people cannot be motivated. Hertzberg termed employee motivation approaches as KITA, translated as “Kick in the Pants.” His research proved that neither positive KITA (carrots) or negative KITA (sticks) works in the long run and they can ruin relationships between the employee and his or her supervisor and the relationships between the employee and his or her peers, especially if competition is involved.

In “Educational Leadership”, behaviorist Alfie Kohn noted that rewards and punishments are both ways of manipulating behavior and that by virtue of being controlling, they are likely to be personally offensive in the long run. While we may like the reward, it is the contingency, “Do this and you will get that,” that creates its punitive status.

In his book, “Punished by Rewards,” Kohn cites 70 studies that illustrate that “extrinsic motivators are not merely ineffective over the long haul, but counterproductive with respect to the things that concern us most: desire to learn, commitment to good values, and so on.” Another group of studies, he says, “shows that when people are offered a reward for doing a task that involves some degree of problem solving or creativity – or for doing it well -- they will tend to do lower quality work than those offered no reward.”

So what’s the answer to motivating employees?

Find and root out demotivators

The second step is to take a look at anything that may be demotivating employees. While it is true that managers cannot motivate people, they certainly can demotivate them. Reliance on external motivators is, in the long run, a demotivator. Other things that demotivate include the top-down, “my-way-or-the-highway” attitude prevalent in some companies, or lack of trust, poor communication and inability to provide needed resources. Other barriers to employee motivation are processes, systems and methods that make it impossible to deliver quality work. Work to improve your systems and you may be amazed how the performance of employees also improves.

The Brain/Behavior Connection

While it has long been thought that a more humanistic approaches or methods rooted in behaviorism are far superior to the old command and control style of employee motivation, today there is scientific proof.

The evidence is rooted in an integration of neuroscience (physiology of the brain) and psychology (study of behavior) coupled with brain imaging technology that demonstrates how the brain changes physically based on how we think. If someone tells us what to do, there is little stimulation of the intelligence centers of the brain, but there may be stimulation of the emotional brain.

However, if we determine what to do on our own and focus on it, we create new linkages in the intelligence centers of the brain. In the process, the brain releases endorphins which make us feel good, reinforce our thoughts, and create powerful self-motivation.

But the opposite effect happens if the thought is pushed on us. In this respect, the brain acts like an angry teenager. Tell it what to do and it automatically pushes back. Partly this is because the natural state of the brain desires equilibrium and resists change and partly it is due to our innate desire as humans to create novel connections and work things out on our own.

The lesson for leaders is that rather than lecturing employees about performance issues and offering solutions, more effective leaders ask good questions and support employees as they work out solutions on their own. The result is that employees “own” the solutions and are much more likely to implement them than if they are handed a solution by a well meaning but over-directive manager.

Expect excellent results

Another way to encourage appropriate work behavior is for managers to expect excellent results, what some researchers are calling “the Pygmalion effect.” In George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, Eliza Doolittle explains the concept:

“You see, really and truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing and the proper way of speaking and so on), the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she is treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins because he always treats me like a flower girl and always will: but I know I can be a lady to you because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.”

In research gathered by J. Sterling Livingston, founder of the Sterling Center for Applied Managerial Leadership, the data reveals:

• What managers expect of subordinates and the way they treat them largely determines their performance and career progress.
• A unique characteristic of superior managers is the ability to create high performance expectations that subordinates can fulfill.
• Less effective managers fail to deliver similar expectations, and as a consequence, the productivity of their subordinates suffers.
• Subordinates, more often than not, appear to do what they believe they are expected to do.

Maintaining high expectations and a positive outlook are impossible to fake. The expectations have to be genuine and they generally start by expecting the most from yourself. Superior managers have confidence in their own ability to select and train subordinates.

In the end, by creating a system of management and an environment in which people are engaged in decisions about their own work, doing work that is valued and worthwhile, and working collaboratively rather than competitively, you can do away with incentive plans and performance appraisals, because the environment will ensure pride of workmanship in everybody.

Employee Motivation Through the Selection Process