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Blog Post on Masterclass topic for the GPDF 2025
Managers can influence employees’ daily motivation for the work by using a number of tools. Below, I list five of them (of course, this is not a comprehensive list). In terms of their effectiveness as management tools for influencing motivation, how would you order them, with 1 being the most effective and 5 being the least effective?
- Recognition for good work (either public or private)
- Monetary incentives (compensation, benefits, bonuses, and other rewards)
- Interpersonal support (respect, camaraderie, emotional understanding, etc.)
- Support for making progress in the work (help, resources, time, etc.)
- Clear goals in the work (vision, priorities, etc.)
Several years ago, my research team and I asked this question in a survey of managers from companies around the world. Of the nearly 700 who answered, from C-suite executives to project team managers, only five percent correctly identified the #1 everyday motivator of people at work.
How do we know the #1 motivator of people at work? Over nearly 15 years, my research team collected and analyzed nearly 12,000 electronic daily diary entries from over 200 knowledge workers doing 26 projects requiring creativity in seven different companies and three industries. We sent the diary forms to each person on these project teams every work day, Monday through Friday, during the entire course of their projects – on average, about four months.
Although the diary form took only about five minutes to complete, our participants gave us a wealth of data about their psychological states that workday – 5-point scale ratings of their emotions; their perceptions of themselves, their team, and their company; and their motivation that day – the three components of what we call inner work life. Even more importantly, each diary contained a short story about the person’s day, a narrative in which they briefly described one event that stood out in their mind from the work day. We told them it could be anything at all, as long as it was relevant to their work, their team, or the team’s project.
By analyzing those daily stories against each aspect of inner work life for the day, we discovered that, not surprisingly, all five of the factors you ranked at the beginning do, indeed, increase daily motivation. However, by far, the single most important motivator was making progress in meaningful work. That’s what we call the progress principle. Unfortunately, as I noted earlier, only five percent of managers seem to be aware of it. In fact, overall, they ranked progress dead last as a motivator.
A week-long event reported by several members of the Infosuite team at DreamSuite Hotels exemplifies the progress principle. (All names are pseudonyms.) The company was being sued and Infosuite, the team responsible for maintaining and analyzing the company’s databases, was charged with compiling and analyzing the data needed to fight the suit. The timeframe was extremely tight, with $145 million at stake for the company. The work was demanding and complex, calling for considerable creativity in overcoming myriad technical problems.
Yet the team succeeded, with encouragement from top managers, support from teams across the company, great teamwork, and co-team leaders who rolled up their sleeves and worked alongside everyone else. The day the team delivered what the company needed, several people on the team, though exhausted, nonetheless expressed satisfaction – and even exhilaration – in their “event of the day” diary narratives. Marsha wrote, “It was wonderful. […] It has been one of the best days I’ve had in months!!” And her teammate Chester reported, “The sense of accomplishment we felt after interacting so greatly throughout this entire ordeal is an event in itself.”
Not surprisingly, given these narratives, the numerical self-ratings of inner work life on the diary forms were quite positive for most team members most days during this project.
Our diary analyses revealed management practices that support progress and positive inner work life – as well as management practices that undermine them. They aren’t rocket science but, as revealed by the thousands of diary narratives we collected, many managers seem as unaware of them as they are of the progress principle.
Why should managers care about supporting progress, which upholds daily motivation and other aspects of inner work life? That’s the other important discovery of our research, enabled by the regular, independent ratings we obtained of each study participant’s work quality and creativity not only from them but also from their close colleagues and supervisors: People do their best, most creative and productive work when they have positive inner work lives.
In other words, not only do employees’ inner work lives benefit from managerial practices that support everyday progress in the work, but their organizations benefit, as well.
About the author:
Teresa Amabile is Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration, Emerita, at Harvard Business School