While recognition might motivate an employee to power through straightforward tasks, it doesn’t help when it comes to complex projects, research published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior has found.
Participants completed a short questionnaire at the end of each working day for a fortnight. Questions covered the type of tasks they had performed that day, what type of reward or praise they received, and how motivated they felt as a result.
Analysis found that people felt more driven to complete routine tasks if they expected to receive recognition. The researchers speculated that, as the task itself was not motivating, the extra encouragement spurred them on. The reverse, however, was true for more complicated duties, as workers’ motivation dropped if they naturally expected to receive recognition.
“The key here is that a complex task in itself is motivating,” says Dr Rebecca Hewett, senior lecturer in human resource management at the University of Greenwich. “It should be more interesting and enjoyable, so managers shouldn’t really need to do anything.
“I expect that, as long as employees feel they have the relevant skills and knowledge to complete the task, it would be better to leave them to do it by themselves without trying to motivate them.”
Concentration is catching in the workplace
Nasty colds aren’t the only things that spread around the office. New research suggests that the act of concentrating at work could itself be contagious.
Belgian researchers paired participants and set them a routine concentration test. As the task was neither collaborative nor competitive, each person’s performance was not dependent on the other. By altering the concentration level required to complete the task, researchers discovered that people who were sitting next to someone who was concentrating hard would boost their own levels of focus, regardless of whether their task actually required a heightened level of alertness.
The researchers are unsure what exactly causes this effect, but speculated that it might relate to people adopting a tense posture when they concentrate hard. They also suggested that workers might secrete a particular scent when they concentrate deeply.
But before you start planning an office redesign, Kobe Desender, doctoral researcher at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, stresses that the effects are only slight and recommends that HR professionals pay more heed to previous research on motivation. “Moreover, it is unclear to what extent the effect we observed depends on the motivational state of the participants,” he says. “It could be that when people are already highly motivated, there’s no room left for effort to be contagious.”
bit.ly/contagiousconcentration
How to improve the health of your employees
Think tank The Work Foundation recently released a paper summarising the first year’s worth of discoveries from its Health at Work Policy Unit – and it makes for stark reading.
Although the majority of the findings in the paper, entitled Investing in a workforce fit for the future, are aimed at government, there’s also some food for thought for businesses. Noteworthy figures include the 140 million working days lost to sickness absence every year, the £30 billion lost in productivity through presenteeism and the 26 per cent of employees with mental health conditions who would feel uncomfortable discussing their illness with their employer.
“Earlier intervention usually means better outcomes,” says Karen Steadman, senior researcher at The Work Foundation. “One of the main barriers to early intervention is non-disclosure, and one of the main barriers to disclosure is not having a supportive working environment where staff feel able to discuss their health with their employer, and feel that they will listen to and support them.
“Organisations need to think about the work culture and environment, to see how it might harm or hinder open communication.”
Fortunately, the report does acknowledge that the health of the UK’s population is now treated as a priority issue by many key policy makers.