Team motivation is a crucial task for success. When building a team for a project, we usually focus on hard skills. 2 frontend Reacts (senior & junior) + 3 backend python + 1 QA, led by an experienced leader is not a magic formula that would even close guarantee a project will be successful. It’s just a starting point.
Both working for different clients, and in my role as a University Professor, I’ve seen projects and teams that had great potential struggle when everyone was not motivated enough and didn’t have accountability for the work the team was doing. In order to get the best from a team we have to take into account that we are all different and are inspired by diverse things. The literature about human motivation is vast and someone can find it difficult to know where to get started. The goal of this post is to introduce some concepts and outline a framework to explore if some of the ideas are useful towards improving the way we motivate our teams.
Let’s start by trying to define what motivation is and what isn’t. Motivation is not about the things we want to accomplish, nor the reasons why we enjoy doing something. Those are our goals and motives respectively. Motivation is the inner impulse we all have and makes us act in a certain way or behavior. This energy is usually activated by our motives, in order to achieve our goals. For example, learning a new skill is my goal, my motive is to become a better professional, and motivation is what makes me take concrete actions (or not).
There are different classic motivational models such as Maslow Pyramid or Herzberg that analyze the different human motives. However, modern theories rather focus on the definition of motivation we just stated, by putting the person itself in the center of the analysis. This can be accomplished by trying to understand what drives that inner energy. Vroom Motivation Theory can provide us a framework that will help us get closer to this.
Basically, Vroom’s Expectancy Theory states that a person will behave or act in a certain way because they are motivated to select a specific behavior over others due to what they expect the result of that selected behavior will be¹. In order words, Vroom points out that we are going to act in a way that will produce the best result for us. As you may have noticed, this assumes that everyone is free and rational enough to decide what’s the best outcome for themselves (which can not always be the case, but we will avoid digging into this to keep this blog simple).
For example, imagine that I’m asked to build a realtime data feed using Apache Kafka. If I’ve never worked with it, I will be motivated to work with it as I will learn a new technology, thereby I’ll be a better developer than I used to be. Motivation (or lack of) to do something is not centered on the outcome I need to generate, but rather on what effect that task will have on me.
Before proceeding, like with any model or framework, we need to define some key concepts.
- E: Expectancy
Expectancy is the probability that, a priori, each person values he or she will be able to succeed if they put in the effort of completing a task. For example, if I’m a backend engineer and my task is to build a React component, my Expectancy will be closer to 0 than to 100 because it’s something I’ve never done before.
- I: Instrumentality
Instrumentality is what each person gets if he or she successfully completes his or her task. Here we should consider all possible consequences, and so instrumentalities are classified in three categories:
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Extrinsics: everything that is external to the person, like salary, benefits, promotion, boss recognition, office space, etc.
- Intrinsics: everything that is internal to the person, like the enjoyment of the task, learning, personal growth, etc.
- Transcendent: everything that is related to helping other people. For example, if the piece of software we are building will reduce the amount of manual work for some colleagues or clients.
- V: Valence
Valence is how much the person values the outcomes of the task or instrumentalities. This can be either positive or negative. For example, if my boss’s recognition is crucial for me, we can give a value greater than one. On the other hand, if having flexible office hours is not important for me, my valence regarding that instrumentality will be low. Even further, if I hate working from home, that can even have a negative valence.
So the equation of Vroom’s Expectancy Theory is:
Motivational Force (MF) = Expectancy (E) x Instrumentality (I) x Valence (V)
We have now established the three key components that make us feel motivated or not regarding work. Evidence shows that the diversity of projects, company needs, and every person’s singularities makes ensuring all team members’ motivation is a real complex challenge. So what’s the real impact managers can have on really motivating their teams?
It is extremely important for Managers to help employees get the results that are expected from them (Expectancy). For example by providing the required technical support. If they don’t have the required skill to do so, managers should not feel ashamed to get external help. Apart from that, managers should also make sure everyone has the tools and time required to complete the work they have been assigned. This could seem trivial, but managers get pressure everyday to complete the company goals as soon as possible. It’s their responsibility to buffer that pressure so that the team’s performance doesn’t get affected by external factors. This is a crucial task for managers.
Regarding Instrumentalities, there are some things managers can do to improve their team motivation. To be fair, managers must do all they can to their extent. There’s a lot we can develop about instrumentalities, but to keep things concise, let’s say this task involves aligning people’s interests with the ones of the company.
Firstly, it’s crucial that managers communicate with transparency and precision what are the goals and characteristics of the project the team will be working on. That way people will see from themselves what they can get from giving their best at work.
At an individual level, managers must make time to listen to each employee. Setting 1-1 meetings with each member of your team is a good way to reserve some time to connect with each person and make sure they feel they are getting something (whether it’s extrinsic, intrinsic or transcendental) in return from their effort. Doing so is not an easy task, but by knowing what types of motives (extrinsic – intrinsic – transcendent) exist, we have a guide to walk that person through. In case they feel they don’t, a manager should try to help that person see what things he or she is getting back from their effort. In my personal experience, I’ve found myself in situations where I felt I was doing a great effort in my everyday job but not getting anything back for my personal growth. That put me in a situation where it was very hard for me to get focused on my everyday tasks. However, talking about it with my manager helped me realize that there were some things I was learning from that experience that I couldn’t see. Getting aware of that made me regain the focus I had lost.
To be honest, I personally believe that there’s little a manager can do to change a person’s Instrumentality or Valence because these are tied with a person’s values and inner interests. This is why I believe that knowing your people and paying attention to each individual’s motivation is a crucial task at the stage of building a team. In most cases, we would find at least some Instrumentality that a person values for their current project or position. If we find ourselves in one of those rare cases where there’s any outcome from their effort the person values, we should be very careful that this situation doesn’t carry on for much time. Worst case scenario and this keeps going on, we should try to find a new project or place for that person. This generally comes at a cost, but we should better assume it sooner rather than having that person consider leaving our company. It is the manager’s role to make sure that there is alignment between a person’s and the company’s interests, and strengthen it.
Vroom’s Expectancy Theory has also some criticism. One of the biggest limitations is that effort is not always correlated with rewards.That’s why Porter and Lawler’s came with an improvement over Vroom’s expectancy theory. Theirs states a much more complex system that is built on top of Vroom’s theory and includes elements such as Performance and Satisfaction, but we would need another blog post to discuss this theory.
Team motivation is a leverage point² that can make our teams thrive, or fail even when everything else seems to be perfect. I hope this post can provide team leaders and managers a starting point when thinking about how to get your team motivated. It is definitely not an easy task to build and lead your people, and there’s no magic recipe for it. Vroom’s expectancy theory is not a detailed guide we can apply, but provide us with a basic tooling to get us into this journey.
References
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectancy_theory
² Peter Senge’s. (1990). The concept of Leverage Point comes from his book “The Fifth Discipline”, and states that sometimes the smallest changes or efforts are the ones that can make the biggest difference.
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