The Dark Side Of Employee Motivation

It lurks, too.

It seems in the past five years like ideas around employee engagement and employee motivation have become more widely-discussed. In reality, I think most senior-level leaders could give approximately 0.12 craps about it and mostly lip-service it, which is why it tends to fail. Remember: the highest people in a given company tend to get more from their bonuses than their base, and their bonuses are never going to be contingent on “employee motivation.” Of course, having motivated employees would probably make your productivity higher and your revenues higher, but no one thinks that way. Business is all product and process; people are the third tier, and the third tier gets just about the least amount of attention possible. Once-a-year reviews still around in The Knowledge Economy, anyone?

But as topics like “employee engagement” and “employee motivation” have become the purview of thought leaders (gag me with a spoon), we’ve almost come to accept these terms as universally good. They’re not. Good managers who create engaged employees? Those motivated, engaged employees often leave too — and then you’re losing your best people, not your worst ones. And when we push hard for employee motivation and engagement, we probably burn a lot of people out in the process.

The point is: employee motivation has a dark side. And now we have some research on that topic too!

Employee motivation: Two studies

This is from Harvard Business Review on “pushing employees to go the extra mile.” That’s a terrible term in most companies. It’s classic managerial BS where some manager thinks “I gotta slave-drive these rank-and-files to get them productive!” That’s almost entirely wrong, but the attitude has persisted for decades and I doubt me writing a blog is going to change it, so let’s gloss that over for now.

There’s two studies mentioned in this article. The first one takes place in eastern China. It’s 82 work teams. The measurement is around employee motivation — specifically, what happens when leadership teams try to push or persuade employees to be motivated?

The second study is done in the U.S. with 180 work teams. It measures the same concepts. The exact term is “motivated organizational citizenship inside and outside of work.” Cool.

China and the U.S. are different business cultures, so logically this will end up differently. Right? Hmmm. Let’s check the results.

Employee motivation: What did these studies tell us?