The secret life of work teams

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2007

As a manager you have more power than you think—but not necessarily the kind you usually think about.

Workplace performance is closely tied to people's "inner work life"—employees' day-to-day perceptions, emotions and motivation—according to psychologist and Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile and researcher Steven Kramer. And managers influence all three.

"It may stun you, if you are a manager, to learn what power you hold," they write in the May 2007 edition of Harvard Business Review. "Your behavior as a manager dramatically shapes your employees' inner work lives." In a three-year study, the authors tracked the day-to-day performance and state of mind of 238 professionals from 26 project teams, via diary entries.

They found that "in settings where people must work collaboratively to solve vexing problems, high performance depends on...creativity, productivity, commitment, and collegiality"—all of which are influenced by one's inner work life.

The most important managerial behaviors involve two fundamental things: enabling people to move forward in their work and treating them decently as human beings.

"People perform better when their workday experiences include more positive emotions, stronger intrinsic motivation...and more favorable perception of their work, their team, their leader and their organization," the authors report.

What can you do to accentuate the positive? Plenty, say the authors. However, "the most important managerial behaviors don't involve giving people daily pats on the back or attempting to inject lighthearted fun into the workplace. Rather, they involve two fundamental things: enabling people to move forward in their work and treating them decently as human beings." The study suggests several ways to do this:

• Provide direct help, rather than hindrance
• Provide adequate time and resources
• Respond to successes and setbacks with a learning orientation (versus a purely evaluative orientation)
• Clarify where the work is heading and why it matters

Laying out clear goals, providing a larger sense of importance, and facilitating progress is key. "The frustration of spinning one's wheels sours inner work life, leading to lower motivation; people facing seemingly random choices will be less inspired to act on any of them....[Furthermore], "people trying to make sense of why higher–ups would not do more to facilitate progress draw their own conclusions—perhaps that their work is unimportant or that their bosses are either willfully undermining them or hopelessly incompetent."

Finally, the authors note, people want to perform—and want to be recognized for performance. The two must go hand in hand. "Praise without real work progress, or at least solid efforts toward progress, had little positive impact on people's inner work lives and could even arouse cynicism," they found. "Far and away, the best boosts to inner work life were episodes in which people knew they had done good work and managers appropriately recognized that work."