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Employee performance is affected by a constant interplay of perceptions, emotions and motivations which is triggered by workday events and goes largely unnoticed by managers.
Inner Work life is Key to Unlocking Performance Enhancements
Author: Lee Smith
Some time ago Harvard Business Review published an article entitled ‘Inner Work Life: Understanding the Subtext of Business Performance’. If you’re interested in the psychology of work – and of communication – it’s well worth reading. Its authors, Harvard professor Teresa M. Amabile and researcher and writer, Steven J. Kramer, have undertaken in-depth research looking at what employees are thinking and feeling while they are at work, why it matters and how managers can use this information to improve performance. The pair recruited nearly 250 professionals from a variety of organisations, who between them represented 26 individual project teams. They then asked each person to complete a daily diary entry and, through the duration of the project, collected more than 12,000 of these in a standardised format. Their mission was to discover the hidden dynamics of work life – specifically employee’s emotions, perceptions and motivations - and to uncover its impact on performance. The results underline the phenomenal influence line managers can have on inner work life and, by implication, on organisational performance. So what happens inside the mind of an employee? The researchers argue that employee performance is affected by a constant interplay of perceptions, emotions and motivations which is triggered by workday events and goes largely unnoticed by managers. Perception – or employee sense making – can be about the work itself (its meaning, value and what needs to be done), the self (the individual’s role, confidence, status, etc), the team and the organisation. Emotions – reactions to workday events – are easier: happiness, pride, warmth, love, sadness, anger, frustration, fear. These two elements drive an employee’s motivation to work. This study reinforces the findings of recent research in neuroscience, which has shown a strong linkage between emotion and cognition. The brain is a system which, rather than processing inputs in a series of compartments, does so in a complex, interconnected, holistic way. The research shows that people perform better when their experiences at work include more positive emotions, stronger intrinsic motivation and more favourable perceptions of their work, team, leaders and organisation. There’s much more to this study that could be covered here – like the finding that employees were over 50% more likely to have creative ideas on the days they reported positive emotions than they were on other days. Indeed, emotion was found to have a significant impact on creativity, productivity, commitment and collegiality. The article concludes that great managers do two fundamental things – they enable their people to move forward in their work and they treat them with dignity and respect. Specifically, they provide help and support, commit adequate resources, set and communicate clear goals and paint a compelling picture of the future. They say thank you, they avoid pointless criticism about trivial issues and they treat people as human beings.
Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/ask-an-expert-articles/inner-work-life-is-key-to-unlocking-performance-enhancements-1400251.html
About the Author:
Lee Smith is co-founder and director of Gatehouse, an internal communication agency, consultancy on internal communications , internal comms, employee communication, research, audit, internal communication jobs , change management and employee engagement.