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challenge are much stronger than outside motivations such as money.
Plain English
Intrinsic motivations are interior, including personal challenge and
involvement. Extrinsic motivations are outside of oneself, such as financial
or career rewards.
Acknowledgement of effort supports intrinsic motivation. You are publicly
giving praise to someone for having achieved a personal goal or having
been involved in and committed to an idea.
Acknowledgement can take many forms, such as these:
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Involving People in Innovation
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" Publicly thanking people in a larger group meeting
" Making sure that a story about the achievement shows up in the
employee newsletter
" Copying the employee on a memo or e-mail to senior management
that commends his contribution
" Noting the contribution in the employee's yearly performance
review
Whatever you do, do not take credit for others' contributions. First, it's
unethical. Second, it usually gets found out. Third, your credit should
come from the fact that you manage people in a way that allows them to
be their most creative and productive.
The 30-Second Recap
" Innovation is a way for companies to stay ahead in the market and
for employees to feel vested in the company's success.
" Innovation occurs in an organization that supports risk-taking and
is willing to accept change and open communication.
" Communication involves openness about conflict and its resolution,
as well as the interchange of ideas among people with different
perspectives.
" Techniques for bringing out creativity include brainstorming and
synectics, or the use of analogy and metaphor to place the problem
outside the workplace setting.
" Never forget to acknowledge employee contributions of ideas or
solutions.
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Providing Challenge
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Lesson 12. Providing Challenge
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Providing Challenge
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In this lesson, you learn how providing challenge involves
balancing goal-directed activity and goal fulfillment to keep
employees motivated.
Think about the last time you started a new job. Everything was new, and
you might have felt overwhelmed by the challenge of taking on the
unknown. Now think about a job that you left because you had learned
everything there was to learn and were bored to tears when you came
into work every day.
These are examples of the two uncomfortable ends of the spectrum of
challenge. Neither too much nor too little of a challenge feels right. Your
job as a manager is to strike a balance for each of your employees. This
chapter tells you how.
Understanding Goal Fulfillment
Much of the time that you're working on a project, you're performing goal-
directed activity. You are actually enjoying the anticipation of
accomplishing your goal because it's tantalizingly just out of reach. Once
you accomplish your goal, you are in the goal-fulfillment phase. Often,
this phase is somehow less satisfying than the goal-directed phase
because the challenge is gone.
Plain English
Goal-directed activity involves the tasks you perform in the expectation of
reaching a goal. The Goal- fulfillment involves the attaining of a goal.
In fact, if you think about the life cycle of any endeavor, you'll see that
you usually generate much more energy toward the beginning than at the
end. That's the power of expectancy.
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Providing Challenge
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The Expectancy Theory in Action
What you experience when you're more excited at the beginning of a
project than you do when you're nearing its end is what the ex- pectancy
theory is all about. At its core, the expectancy theory claims that people's
actions are based on their expectations. Most people do things not for a
reward, but for the expectation of a reward; they put in effort because of
their hopes and dreams rather than for tangible payoffs.
Plain English
The expectancy theory states that people perform tasks in expectation of
success.
To understand the expectancy theory, consider this: Although you work
hard on a major project for 200 days out of the year, you don't get 200
rewards. You work those 200 days in the expectation of a successful
product launch or a great big bonus at the end of the project. You might
not even get a bonus, but you work because you imagine you might.
Now, the motivation gained from expectancy isn't constant; it involves
some cycles. For example, look at your favorite sports team. If the players
are in the fourth quarter and are 20 points ahead, they might just start
getting sloppy. If they're in the fourth quarter and are 20 points behind,
they might give up. The best games happen when there's a good chance
that either side might win. Then each side is deeply involved in the
anticipation of winning rather than the surety of winning or losing.
Tip
Not convinced about the expectancy theory? Just ask yourself if you've
ever left a game in the last inning. You left not because your team was
losing, but because their win was so sure that it just wasn't interesting
anymore.
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Providing Challenge
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This tendency to lose motivation as success seems imminent was docu-
mented by David McClelland and John Atkinson in the concept of what
they call a 50 percent curve. When the probability of success is near zero,
motivation is low. When probability of success approaches 50 percent,
motivation increases. Finally, when probability of success gets higher than
50 percent, motivation begins to fall off.
Challenging Employees: It's a Balancing Act
Therefore, the key to challenging employees is to make sure they are
neither too complacent in their work nor too unsure of their ability to
succeed. Success must seem possible, but not a sure thing.
Caution
There's a difference between keeping your employees on the cutting edge
of challenge and getting them edgy. Make sure they succeed often enough
to feel the good side of challenge.
Read over these tips for using expectancy theory to strike a balance
between goal-directed and goal-fulfillment activities:
" If you know that workers have passed the 50 percent probability of
success on a project, encourage them to redouble their efforts; you can
even raise the stakes a bit. Praise their efforts to date, and then define
success a little more aggressively. (Be sure, however, that if you promised
rewards at the initial success milestone, you provide them.)
" One theory states that three things must be available for
expectancy: Someone believes his efforts affect performance, believes
that performance determines outcomes, and assigns a value to those
outcomes. Pay attention to the second item: If the outcome isn't
attainable because of market factors or a lack of resources, motivation
goes out the window.
" Allow your employees to share in the larger vision of the company.
This plays to the nature of people to be motivated by what they imagine
to be possible. Then make sure they understand that their actions relate
to the success of that vision.
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Providing Challenge
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