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September 14, 1998

Motivation Leads To Innovation

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It's important to note that there are two kinds of feedback: subjective and objective. Technical professionals are trained in the most objective environment in the world, the university. They're told what to read and how long it should take them to read the material. They're given all the information and formulas they need to find the correct solution to well-defined test problems and, based on their answers, are given an objective piece of feedback-a grade.

In the world of work, conditions are often quite different. Professionals have to define the problem and figure out what kinds of information, tools, and models they should use. The feedback is now based on the perceptions and values of a manager and is delivered with subjective phrases such as "Good job" or "You've done well."

Framework For Motivation
Key characteristics of job and project tasks that contribute to increased motivation among IT professionals
Skill Variety: The degree to which a job requires different types of skills and abilities. Professionals tend to be more motivated not only when they use their existing skills and abilities, but also when they can develop new skills and abilities that help them advance within their organization.
Task Identity: Professionals who feel they are truly an essential part of a project from beginning to end will perform better. They should be encouraged to communicate their contributions to the project with others in the organization.
Task Significance: The job or project component assigned to a professional should be considered by the organization as important to its business and its customers and even to society as a whole.
Autonomy: A job or project task should provide freedom, independence, and discretion in how the work is carried out. It's important, however, to clarify expectations and establish clear parameters that encourage people to make decisions and take initiatives within well-defined boundaries.
Feedback: Professionals need to be provided with clear and direct information about the effectiveness of their job performance. This should include a combination of subjective and objective feedback and evaluations.

Data: Adapted From The Handbook of Technology Management (CRC Press, 1998)
Research I've done shows feedback is the task characteristic most deficient in a technical environment. There are probably several reasons for this. First, in technical settings, we often don't know right away what good work is or whether an idea is a good one. A complete definition of what constitutes good code, for example, is hard to describe ahead of time. Second, most IT managers are not particularly comfortable or well-trained at giving feedback. Third, technical professionals aren't adept at getting feedback, nor are they especially receptive to feedback that's not extremely positive.

Framework For Diagnosis
Based on this framework of internal work motivation, IT and business line managers can evaluate the jobs of their technical professionals to determine whether any of them is relatively weak with respect to each of the five major task characteristics: skill variety, identity, significance, autonomy, and feedback.

Jobs and task assignments can be restructured, redesigned, or managed to enrich them. Fractionalized project tasks, for example, could be combined to form new jobs that would strengthen a worker's sense of inclusion in the project, and the new jobs might also require using or learning new skills.

Expectations and directions could be clarified so that technical professionals could be given the autonomy they need to make the everyday decisions that would let them carry out their work in a more timely and effective manner.

The professional's sense of job significance might even be increased if he or she has more direct and relevant contact with critical customers, rather than feeling isolated from the marketplace in which his or her company competes.

As IT and business managers gain more experience, they eventually learn one of the most important tenets of motivation: It is easier to destroy morale than to create excitement. Only by closely examining how the jobs are structured and organized along the five dimensions of task characteristics can a manager hope to foster the kind of setting in which professionals might find themselves having fun as they do their work.

Ralph Katz is professor of research, development and engineering management at the Graduate School of Business at Northeastern University in Boston, and principal research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management. He is author of the book The Human Side of Managing Technological Innovation (Oxford University Press, 1997).

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