Retention: Keeping the Best and the Brightest
‘In this country we find it helps, from time to time, to shoot one admiral to encourage the others.’
—Voltaire, Candide
‘That is why I have resigned. In doing so, I have done what I believe to be right for my party and my country. The time has come for others to consider their own response to the tragic conflict of loyalties with which I have myself wrestled for perhaps too long.’
—Geoffery Howe, Resignation Speech to the House of Commons, November 30, 1990
11.1 Introduction
Losing the ‘right’ people for the ‘wrong’ reasons is a problem that, at best, is unnecessary and inconvenient, and at worst can cause entire systems and organisations to unravel or derail.
There are many reasons that people choose to leave or stay with an organisation, and some are entirely uncontrollable from the manager’s perspective. Yet, while some people leave for ‘personal’ reasons, many people choose to leave very specifically because of colleagues, bosses, leaders and their organisation. Most people have probably had the experience of working with people and thinking: ‘I just don’t have time for this; I don’t need this’.
It has been argued with a good deal of truth that people join organisations but leave individual managers. That is, their decision to leave is based on ‘push’ rather than ‘pull’ factors, and mainly to do with an employee’s unhappiness with the way in which they are managed. Similarly, most managers will have experienced an employee that is performing poorly, or is destructive. They can be the most challenging to work with, and sometimes are the most difficult to get rid of.
This section is framed as retention because it is primarily focused on keeping those high potentials, and getting the right people in the right position, rather than on identifying and dealing with poor performers.
There are inevitably two parties involved in retention: the organisation, which may or may not want to retain a person or group of people; and the employees who may or may not want to stay. Many organisations have some idea of a typical employment period. For some fast food restaurants they may work on six months, while for some consultancies it may be three to five years. This is the idea of a normal or optimal ‘stint’, meaning a typical period that a person chooses to work for an organisation.
Organisations often invest a lot in individuals: recruitment, training, and development. Individuals may likewise feel like they are investing their time, efforts, energy, and lives in a job or organisation. As a result both want a return on that investment. Naturally employers want to retain people they have invested in and judge to be high flyers. Equally many employers have their own ‘game plan’ and are eager to move on to maximise the training and experience.
Organisations are most concerned when they see their high potential leaving and those with less potential choosing to stay. The issue is why the best are leaving: is it push or pull? Are they being lured or enticed by other organisations eager to attract talent or are they being pushed by dissatisfaction with what they have?
11.2 Assessment for Retention
Using assessment for retention is challenging because, as with recruitment, it depends on the position, the employee, and the requirements of the organisation. A good retention strategy involves clear and measurable objectives. Once the short- and long-term objectives of employee selection and development are documented, the appropriate assessments and instruments can be selected and deployed to meet the objectives.
Using assessment for retention requires a good understanding of the different assessment tools that are available. Regular assessment is only useful when the assessor is measuring the right constructs in the appropriate way. These can be divided into three categories (which can be partially mapped onto Silzer and Church’s (2009) three dimensions of potential):
A) Stable (Foundational)
These are traits and attributes that do not change. Intelligence and personality are relatively consistent across a person’s adult life. Stable traits only need to be tested once, or at very wide intervals. Stable traits lend themselves most to formal, quantitative assessment. For example, self-report personality tests may be appropriate for recruitment, but may not be appropriate for regular assessments or performance reviews.
B) Variable (Growth)
These are attributes or preferences that can change, but are unlikely to change regularly. Job-related skills and career goals will be relatively consistent, but are likely to change in the long term. These should be assessed regularly and typically can be quantified. For example, regular performance reviews should assess performance and abilities. Daily would be too often; once every 10 years would not be frequent enough.
C) Situational
These are preferences or ideas that can change regularly. Day-to-day moods, desires, and needs may change. A person’s life circumstances can change frequently or regularly but not at predictable intervals. These are difficult to assess formally and may be difficult to quantify – but are still important. For example, regular conversations can keep a good leader informed but a daily, written report about mood and personal circumstances test would be excessive.
Then, that assessment can be used to make (in the most simplified sense) one of three retention decisions. First, keep and develop that person into future positions. Second, keep the person in their current job and maximise job performance and/or satisfaction. Third, if they are not suited to their current position or other positions in the organisation, take the necessary ethical, practical, and legal steps to help them leave the company.
11.3 Common Problems and Issues with Retention
Individual issues, circumstance, and desires can lead people away from the organisation. Employee turnover (people leaving) is not bad in itself; people leave or change jobs for all sorts of reasons outside the company’s control. But retention problems can also be symptomatic of a dysfunctional system or leader. People leave bosses, colleagues, situations, and systems. It is always easy to point out individual reasons why people leave work, but the systemic issues are important and can be influenced. There are a few key errors and common misconceptions about retention.
Error 1: Neglecting Retention Completely
The focus of employers is typically placed on recruitment, where development is an afterthought, and retention is a footnote. The greatest initial human resource/talent management challenge is finding and attracting the right people. The importance of keeping those ‘right people’ is often overlooked (Gully and Phillips, 2012). While selection is essentially a one-off process, it has a single, clear goal with simple success criteria; retention is on-going and therefore much more challenging.
The excitement that frequently comes with a new job, seeing new possibilities and opportunities, can fade quickly when not cultivated. Or, it can be encouraged and built upon to increase capacity for high performance and high potential. Other activities like development, fair assessment, and strong leadership can be used as a tool to improve retention, a key part of the framework of keeping and developing the right people.
Retention is often and misleadingly framed as a matter of individual preference and choice. People are said to leave because they are unsuited, lazy, unskilled, unable to cope with the pressure, or had the wrong values. It is rarely said that people leave because of systemic problems in the organisation, bosses rarely admit ‘Oh dear, I managed that person very badly’, but those systemic and interpersonal factors play a significant role.
Error 2: Believing that Turnover (and Loyalty) is Generational
The belief that young people are fundamentally different from previous generations is nothing new. It is typical for people to make broad, sweeping statements about generations. Take these two examples from a few thousand years apart.
‘Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.’
(Attributed to Socrates in Patty and Johnson, 1953, p. 277).
‘They’re “Millennials” (also known as Generation Y), and many will want to wear flip-flops to work, don’t care about spelling, have zero discipline, and expect the keys to the C-Suite. Despite the fact that their managers likely raised Millennial children of their own, those managers frequently find themselves at a loss as to how to train and retain Millennial malcontents.’
(Mayhew, 2013).
Each quotation introduces the point like it is a current, new, and pressing challenge to the world. The reality though, is there is no evidence to support that the latest cohort of young people is any more disrespectful, indolent or impatient than any previous generation. Scales (2011) reviews the research, and finds no evidence that there has been any major change in the behaviour or performance of young people: ‘there is no research which would provide us with evidence that pupil behaviour is becoming worse, or better for that matter’ (p.229).
There have been large-scale changes, however, in organisational culture of work, and the commitments organisations make to hiring. The reverse issue is that of work stability and commitments to employees such as ‘zero hour contracts’. Estimates suggest between 250,000 and 1 million people in the UK have zero hour contracts (ONS, 2013; CIPD, 2013), with the most rapid increase in zero hour contracts for those between the ages of 16 and 24. A zero hour contract means the employee has an employment agreement with no guarantee of work. The zero hours refer to the amount of work the employer is required to provide for the employee. The reality may be that few young people are looking for a lifelong career with one organisation, but it is equally true that many employers have little commitment to training or retaining their employees.
Attributing blame is not helpful, but realising the employment climate is different than decades past is essential, and should not be surprising to either employees or employers. Loyalty and mutual respect is something that can develop between employees, managers, and corporations when it is deserved, but commitment and work is required on both sides.
Error 3: Assuming that if You Find the Best, They’ll Do the Rest:
A study from the Harvard Business Review (Hamori, Cao and Koyunco, 2012) found that most high performing young people with records of strong academic and workplace performance regularly and actively looked for new jobs even when they were already employed. This was primarily because of a large gap between what development opportunities employers were providing and what employee development opportunities were desired. Training, mentoring, and coaching were all highly desired but insufficiently provided (or completely omitted).
Rhetoric about the war for talent, although true and of concern, can exacerbate this problem because it creates a sense that poaching high potential talent from a competitor is a ‘tactical victory’ in the war for talent. This leads to promises about compensation, benefits, and development opportunities in the war to attract talent and can sometimes lead to certain opportunities being exaggerated. Lack of clarity communicating real benefits and opportunities along with obscurantism about the reality of the position can complicate the vicious cycle of employee’s development ambitions not being met and hoping for a new employer that can meet those demands.
The problem is that of entitlement on both sides. Both employer and employee want the other to meet their demands and requirements. Employers want loyal, dedicated, reliable, and hardworking employees, but may not provide their employees any real motives to stay at the company. The employee who has been identified as high potential (or believes themselves to be high potential) is receptive to encouragement and development, but may be less receptive to criticism or putting in the effort required to develop potential into performance. Both sides have to be realistic about their expectations, and be clear about their expectations to their employee/employer. If neither can offer what the other is looking for, it is a poor fit. If either the employee or employer continually finds no one is able to meet their expectations, perhaps it is time for some self-reflection, on both parts.
The most skilled, intelligent, driven, conscientious, and desirable people are the most ‘in demand’, yet are the most able to seek a different position that fits their own high goals, or their own definition of success. High Flyers are the right people with the right stuff, and are consequently the least likely to stay in the wrong position. They know they have considerable occupational mobility.
Retention, development, and recruitment are involved in an intimate circle. Recruiting the right people increases development opportunities. Development opportunities mean retaining the right people. Retaining the right people reduces the need for recruitment. It is also important to distinguish between retention efforts for general employee retention for mastery potential, and retaining those with High Flying or leadership potential.
Retaining Mastery Potential
Retaining mastery potential is relatively straightforward. These are the people who want to excel in a single position: a brilliant physicist, top athlete, clever innovator, or creative designer. Being flexible with work schedules, good leadership, clear direction, fair reimbursement, and tailored development paths can be important to ensure those with talent/expertise, but who also want to master their current skill set and remain with the organisation. They likely want to stay in the same position, and will want to just ‘get the job done’. They are frequently technical experts wanting to do what they are best at and not take on administrative or supervisory responsibilities.
Retaining Leadership/High Flying Potential
Retaining leadership and High Flying potential is much different, and requires a much greater emphasis on adaptation. High Flyers are, by nature (and nurture), those who are most likely to search for new challenges, pursue new ideas, and be their own advocates for working in new capacities. This characteristic should be cautiously encouraged. To retain this proactive behaviour, taking on new responsibilities should be rewarded, loosely monitored, and supported.
Corporate and personal characteristics, of course, will dictate the creative and ambitious freedom that potential High Flyers should be given. The consequences of success and failure should always be in the mind for the potential High Flyer and those supervising/coaching/leading the team. While ingenuity is desirable, reckless pursuit of the new and different or unfocused dabbling may be a concern. Excessive risk taking at work, a constant focus on their own public persona, or rash thrill seeking may be a sign of something darker. Thus, retention involves being on the lookout for the desirable traits of a High Flyer, and adapting roles and responsibilities to particular skills and attributes. It also involves being on guard for characteristics that may have led to early success, but are derailment indicators.
11.4 Selecting the Right People
We already spent Chapter 9 discussing recruitment, so this section will be brief. The key message is that retention starts right from recruitment and selection. If you recruit and select the wrong people, or people who do not fit with the organisation, they will leave.
A good selection process begins by collecting relevant information about people. What are their background, skills, abilities, characteristics? What type of potential do they have and what type of development would they benefit from? What do they expect from the job? For people who get through the selection process, there should already be baseline information that can be built upon and used for future comparison information. This can be formalised data collection, such as intelligence, personality, skills, and experience.
But it is also a good place to start collecting more informal data, developing relationships. Intelligent, engaged people will have ideas, want to learn new things, and apply their skills. The good supervisor or leader should be asking themselves and/or their employees the following three questions on a regular basis.
What the Person Can Do?
This refers to skills, abilities, and individual capacity to complete various tasks and succeed in various positions. In the selection stage, assessment typically focuses on a potential employee’s ability to succeed in a particular position. Retention involves continual assessment of what a person can do, including what they can do beyond their current responsibilities. Retaining the right people involves moving people into positions where their performance will be optimal. However, when a person’s abilities are assessed, they should be well-documented, replicable, and comparable at different points in time. After a leadership change, a new leader should be able to track each employee’s skills and abilities over their career history.
What a Person Will Do?
Motivation is related to the person’s values, beliefs and drives. What a person will do varies, and a good assessment involves regular evaluation of motivation. Again, assessments of motivation may mix formal and informal assessment. Sometimes this is as simple as asking, ‘do you want to work longer hours?; do you want to take on this project?’ But the clever leader knows people will usually tell you what they will do, but not always why. Understanding the reasons behind an employee’s motivation is equally important as understanding their motivation – but not always easy to do. Matching an employee’s responsibilities with their motivations is critical for retention.
What a Person Wants to Do?
Just as motivation can change, preferences can change. As people learn new skills they may want the opportunity to practice their new skills; after people master certain skills, they may want opportunities to learn others. Often people learn from experience what they do not want to do. What people want to do varies from person to person, and over time. Some may want promotions and bonuses; others may want job stability and consistency. Continual assessment helps to keep the right person in the right position. Ask questions, watch for signs of unhappiness or enjoyment in certain tasks, and be on the lookout for unused talents.
11.5 Training and Developing the Right People
Some managers and leaders fear that the price of training people will be losing those people. There is an element of truth in this – the most skilled and experienced are the most able to find other jobs, and may be rewarded for doing so. However, when people are connected with their colleagues and leaders in the organisation, feel the values of their current organisation match their own, are engaged in their work, and believe there are further opportunities for development and advancement by remaining with their current company is, for the most part, far more desirable than switching jobs.
Talent (ability and motivation) alone is not enough to ensure competence. What is also required is appropriate learning experiences. McCall (1998) argues that ‘leadership ability can be learned, that creating a context that supports the development of talent can become a source of competitive advantage, and that the development of leaders is itself a leadership responsibility’ (p.xii). Survival of the fittest models do not translate well into good retention methods and do little to develop many of those who could be strong performers.
McCall stresses that continual growth, transition, and transformation are as important for success as ‘natural ability’. Organisations need to strengthen and polish what already exists but also bring potential into being. He also distinguished between two models:
• The Darwinian Model: which attempts to identify less/more successful executive traits, search for the latter, then give people tests/experience to polish these skills. On the job challenges reveal actual talent;
• The Agricultural Model: this attempts to identify strategic challenges that are likely to occur, search for people who can learn from the experiences, then help them to succeed. ‘Grow’ leaders instead of forcing people to fight their way to the top.
In a sense McCall argues from survival of the fittest to the development of the fittest; from being a corporate Darwinist to a managerial developer. The survival of the fittest model falls down under any serious scrutiny. Not least because attempting to translate survival of the fittest to individual performance in the workplace is a misnomer: evolution through the process of natural selection is not observable in an individual person (organism).
Survival of the fittest is not a good model for describing individual performance or values in people when we have culture, social structures, higher intelligence, and empathy (Dawkins, 2004). The Darwinian model also has repercussions for retention. A model of natural selection would mean hiring as many different people as possible, waiting for a majority to fail, and just promoting those ‘survivors’.
Developmental opportunities arise from being given new assignments (project, task force), dealing with hardships/setbacks (business failure), other people (who are role models), and ‘other events’. Clearly, people who take on continuous, realistic challenges with occasional changes of function will learn the most. International assignments and training can all enhance this process. Some organisations also choose to create and fund company schools and universities. Whether deliberate or serendipitous, organisations can provide powerful experiences that become opportunities to learn.
Ultimately the question remains about how organisations can provide the learning experiences that their potential leaders need to develop and will encourage them to stay with the company. Most companies insist that managers are accountable for results and not development, and, hence, ignore the development aspects of job assignments. Poorly planned job rotation focuses on exposure rather than task, performance, or evidence of learning. Managers need incentives, resources, and support in order to change. There should also be a framework for measuring the impact of development opportunities: some combination of the elements discussed in Section 2.
There are powerful reasons for, and arguments why, management training is not a luxury but a necessity for organisations in the new millennium. The increased global competition, as well as rapid changes in technology and the workforce, demand ever more numerous, ever more subtle, and higher level (but trainable) skills. There are inevitably greater demands on management time and the need for well informed and accurate plans and decisions. Further, the high potential people want this training. They are often motivated, interested in complex systems and ambiguous environments, and are clever enough to learn to navigate and manage them. Nobody begins fully trained and experienced. As a consequence, all organisations have to educate and train staff to improve their performance. This may be achieved by providing new and relevant knowledge and information, by teaching new skills, or by changing attitudes, values, and motives. Typically it requires a combination of all the above.
The purpose of training is to enhance skill and knowledge. Good training can, and should, provide a focus for aligning the capabilities of the workforce with the company strategy. It can also ensure that workforce skill levels are up to, or even better than, national or industry levels. Good training can be a powerful individual motivator and a good catalyst for change.
11.6 Employee Support
People need to be supported at a range of levels not just to feel satisfied at work, but to get their job done properly. The culture of an organisation influences support at all levels: a highly competitive or mistrustful culture means people are less willing to share ideas and information and help colleagues out. When people feel they are working against the organisation or their leaders, the work can feel like a constant battle which dampens motivation and lowers job satisfaction.
Colleague Support
People, quite simply, need to be able to work together. Challenging relationships with colleagues are one of the main reasons people choose not to remain in their job (Gully and Phillips, 2012). It is not the reason, but it is an important one. No matter how enjoyable or engaging a job is, no matter how good the leadership is, other people can make the job a joy or a misery. Conversely great colleagues who are interested, passionate, and talented can be worth staying with.
Supervisor or Leader Support
The supervisor or team leader needs to actively and visibly support those they are working with. The behaviour of employees’ direct supervisors has one of the greatest impacts on job satisfaction, and poor supervision is one of the most common reasons employees leave. All supervisors or team leaders should be trained to do a few important, but relatively straightforward, key things (Gully and Phillips, 2012):
Have personal contact and be present: Just being there, asking questions, and having meaningful conversations are essential for supporting employees. It is important for knowing what is going on, developing a positive working relationship, and showing involvement and interest in the work. Even the highest levels of leadership should meet with people across the organisation, not just the senior leadership team. A good leader can motivate many people, but will also learn much more by having conversations and asking good questions at the top and bottom of the pyramid.
Gain and earn trust: Being present and involved in the work people are doing is important, but not if being present means standing and watching silently. The objective of being present is not surveillance, but about asking questions about what people are doing, if things are going well, and relating to employees and the work they are doing. Many people will bring issues and concerns to their supervisor if they have established trust. Employees who can trust their supervisor or team leader will be more honest about their problems, challenges, ambitions, and goals, but it requires effort and honesty, and must be mutual.
Be available: Better supervisors are those who are present, who have personal contact, and who will hear the stories that help them make better decisions. It is a professional relationship; neither a best friend, nor a blog, nor a psychiatrist, but someone who is available and listening when there is something important. When an opportunity or a challenge arises, the supervisor should be available (when important), confidential (where appropriate), and will act (when necessary).
Organisational support: The policies, procedures, the organisational culture and values affect supervisor and colleague support, and has a direct effect on how likely a person is to stay with the organisation. Complex and byzantine procedures frustrate people or beliefs; that senior leaders or the company disdain front-line employees, for example, increases people’s intention to leave.
Provide equitable rewards and appropriate consequences: This is a responsibility shared by the manager, company policy, and possibly an HR department. People need to be treated, compensated, and disciplined equitably and fairly. As we will discuss in the next section of this chapter, people have keen senses of what they believe to be fair and unfair, and it will drastically affect their motivation, performance, and, in turn, desire to leave or stay. First, people should be compensated in similar ways for similar types of work and responsibility. Large pay disparities make people uncomfortable or angry, and more likely to look for work elsewhere. Favouritism, promotions, rewards, or punishments that are not visibly or clearly linked to performance heighten a sense of injustice, and people who see themselves outside the group of favourites quickly become unsatisfied. If the group of favourites appears to align with ethnicity, gender, class, or other attributes, a concern about unfairness can quickly change into a legal issue.
11.7 Equity and the Perception of Fairness
People are deeply sensitive to equity. As soon as they detect a system or manager as being unfair they leave. Equity describes the proximity or gap between what a person believes is fair, and what actually happens. A prime example from the workplace is the gap between needs for equity and perceptions about fair treatment.
Perceptions about equity and fairness can be one of the greatest motivators of ‘revenge’ behaviour. One of the authors knew a very intelligent young woman who worked briefly in a large American retail chain as a cashier. She felt that she (along with most other staff) were consistently mistreated and mismanaged. She found herself, ‘accidentally’, giving back extra change to customers who were kind or polite. She quickly learned the systems, processes, and how to avoid getting caught. It was not a matter of stealing, or personal gain, but a small act of rebellion. She was motivated to sabotage the company (in a relatively minor way), clever enough not to get caught, and motived to ‘reward’ the good behaviour she saw, or the kindness of strangers. It’s an interesting case of money going astray, but redistributed to many instead of pocketed for personal profit.
Equity theory suggests people compare themselves socially with others, making a quantity judgement (more, less, equal) on two factors, outcomes (benefits, rewards) and input (effort, ability). Outcomes are what workers believe they take out of their work such as pay, prestige, satisfaction, accomplishment, or accolades. Input is what people believe they put into their job, such as hours of work, effort, social capital, or qualifications and experience they bring to the job. However, perceptions of equity are based on what people believe the inputs and outcomes are, not what they necessarily are. Equity theory is entirely about subjective matters, not to be confused with employment equity which can be objectively quantified (e.g. equal pay for equal performance).
Figure 11.1 Perceived Weight of Equality vs. Inequality
One way of thinking of equity and the results of equity as a motivator is that when people believe there is an imbalance (see Figure 11.1 above) they have essentially six options or potential reactions to perceived inequality:
• change their input (e.g. exert less or more effort);
• change their outcome (e.g. provide performance bonus that is tied to input);
• modify perceptions of self (e.g. ‘I used to think I worked the hardest, but I never realised how much time and energy my supervisor put in’);
• modify perceptions of others (e.g. ‘No amount of money is worth it for such a tireless and thankless job’);
• choose a referent (e.g. ‘I earn less than most of my friends, but I’m paid more than most of my colleagues’);
• leave the field (e.g. quit the job; take early retirement).
An analogous set of behavioural and psychological reactions can be identified for overpayment inequity. Specifically, employees who lower their own outcomes by not taking advantage of company-provided fringe benefits may be seen as redressing an overpayment inequity.
The concept of justice and fairness which is at the heart of equity theory is a powerful motivator for everyone. People have a keen sense of fairness (even when their perceptions do not match up to reality). People are motivated to match their inputs with their outcomes, whether it’s working harder to earn a pay raise, working harder to see the results of their charitable work, slacking off, or even thieving to personally rebalance the system of input and outcomes.
Those with high potential may have particularly keen senses of equity. High Flyers will be willing to put in greater time, energy, and effort into their work. They will try to maximise their input and expect commensurate outcomes in return, in the form of specialised training, acknowledgement, advancement, or financial compensation. Those with the intellectual tools and high potential characteristics can also be the most able to lean on either side of the input/outcomes balance in the way they see fit when they perceive injustice.
11.8 Expectancy and the Management of Expectations
Expectancy is the rational area that links what is expected to happen to what actually happens. With proper initiation and onboarding practices, people will start their jobs with clear expectations about the company, and their role in it. That is why clear communication and development pathways are so important. If the organisation fails to communicate, people will form their own expectancies which may be unrelated to the job at hand. Expectancy theory suggests people are only motivated to behave in a certain way if:
1. They believe their actions will lead to a certain, desirable outcome;
2. They believe that outcome will be rewarded;
3. They believe the reward is valuable to them.
If any of these three beliefs cease, so will the motivation and hence, the behaviour. To motivate others, the theory suggests that leaders need to clarify expectations, link rewards very clearly to performance, and give rewards that are most valued.
An employee may believe that a great deal of effort will result in getting much accomplished, whereas others believe there are other tasks in which hard work will have little effect on how much gets done. For example, an employee operating a faulty piece of equipment may have a very low expectancy that his or her efforts will lead to high levels of performance, and hence probably would not continue to exert much effort.
It is also possible that even if an employee works hard and performs at a high level, motivation may falter if that performance is not suitably rewarded by the organisation. So, if a worker is extremely productive, he or she may be poorly motivated to perform if the top level of pay has already been reached, or if people take the performance for granted. If behaviour is not explicitly or implicitly rewarded, people are unlikely to repeat it.
Even if employees receive rewards based on their performance, they may be poorly motivated if so-called ‘rewards’ have a low valence (personal relevance) to them. Someone who does not care about the rewards offered by the organisation would not be motivated to attempt to attain them. Awards and accolades are not useful to those who are just ‘in it for the money’. Thus, the organisation must determine what their employees value, and find out the best way to provide it to them in return for good performance.
According to expectancy valence theory, job performance is a combination of abilities and skills, effort, and role perceptions. If individuals have clear role perceptions, if they possess the necessary skills and abilities, and if they are motivated to exert sufficient efforts, the model suggests that they will perform well.
One important recommendation is to clarify people’s expectancies that their effort will lead to performance. Motivation may be enhanced by training employees to do their jobs more efficiently, thereby achieving higher levels of achievement for their efforts. Where possible, therefore, a manager should make the desired performance level attainable. It is important to make it clear to people what is expected of them and to make it possible for them to attain that particular level.
A second practical suggestion from expectancy theory is to clearly link valued rewards to performance. Managers should enhance their employees’ beliefs about instrumentality (see Chapter 6); that is, make it clear to them exactly what job behaviours will lead to what rewards. Further, the introduction of sensitive and fair performance-related pay systems enhances this. Expectancy theory specifies that it would be effective. Performance increases can result from carefully implemented merit systems (management–performance systems).
One most obvious practical suggestion from expectancy theory is to reward people with things they want. The reward must be valued by employees for it to be a good motivator. It is a mistake to assume that all employees want the same rewards. Values are in part personality dependent. Some might prefer a pay rise, and others might prefer additional vacation days, improved insurance benefits, or day-care facilities for children, free health insurance, a car, or an impressive job title. With this in mind, more and more companies are instituting cafeteria-style benefit plans: incentive systems through which the employee selects their fringe benefits from a menu of available alternatives. The success of these plans suggests, unsurprisingly, giving people what they want is a powerful motivator.
Expectancy has clear implications for the manager. Certainly at selection and induction a person’s expectations need to be established. The need to believe that hard work, not luck, is important at work; that effort will be rewarded in terms of things that are valuable for them. Equally expectations need to be realistic. It is too tempting as a recruiter and selector to promise more than one can deliver. Soured, unfulfilled promises and expectations are frequently the first step on the road to revenge.
11.9 Engagement
Up to one quarter of high potential employees in large American companies intend to ‘jump ship’ within a year and one-fifth believe their personal aspirations are different from what the company has planned for them (Martin and Schmidt, 2010).
Work engagement is critical for reducing turnover, while improving many other outcomes. Schaufeli, Bakker,and Salanova (2006) describe work engagement as the opposite of burnout. Engagement is a positive state of mind where one feels energised, interested, and absorbed in their work, while being mentally resilient and feeling a sense of meaningfulness. Those who are engaged feel as if time passes quickly at work, and look forward to their work.
Engagement is related to many other important factors at work, from increased job satisfaction, greater organisational commitment, to fewer sick days. In a study of multidisciplinary medical teams, MacRae (2010) measured the work engagement, organisational commitment, and mapped the flows of communication. Each team member was mapped as a node within a network. The research found that higher work engagement and organisational commitment were more central to the communication networks. Those who are highly engaged in their work perform better, and tend to become central members of the group.
Engagement manifests as personal energy and vigour. It has a few important components:
The first is physical energy. Older people have less energy than younger people. Sick people have less energy than well people. Sleep deprived people are less energetic than the well-rested.
The second is psychological energy. This has been conceived of in different ways. The Freudians conceived a psychic energy: a force that drives us to want and do things we barely understand. Thus we can be driven to rational, irrational, bizarre behaviours because of these unconscious libidinous springs.
Personality factors are related to energy. Extroverts appear more (socially) energetic, but burn up easily with their impulsivity and impatience. Introverts have a much slower burning fuse and are able to sustain longer periods of attentiveness under conditions of poor arousal. Neurotics waste their energy. They burn it up on the irrelevant and the imaginary. They can easily become anxious, then depressed, by small things. They fritter away their additional nervous energy rather than conserve it for the long haul or the really important issues. Paradoxically then, they appear to have more energy than their stable opposites, but waste it on worry and they end up exhausted.
Third, there is intellectual energy. The bright have more intellectual energy: more curiosity, more openness-to-new-experience. They use their energy more efficiently. Indeed one definition of intelligence is about energy efficient brain processing. Shirom (2011) defined engagement as physical strength, emotional energy, and intellectual liveliness. He argues that genetic, physiological, and psychological factors manifest vigour, which in turn is related to job performance and satisfaction, as well as physical and mental health. He sees vigour as a personal resource, like optimism and self-efficacy related to energy and the way it can be directed in the workplace. His argument is that vigour predicts interaction with others at work, leadership style as well as group processes and the use of organisational resources to be successful at work.
The feeling of engagement can be described as flow. Over 15 years ago a Transylvanian psychologist called Csíkszentmiháyi wrote a book called Flow. People feel best when engrossed in some challenging activity. During flow they lose track of time because the work is enjoyable, feel more capable, more sensitive and more self-confident even though the activities may be challenging. The activity is its own reward: intrinsically motivating. Flow lifts mood and banishes distraction and creeping dispiritedness. So what are the preconditions of flow?
Csíkszentmihályi identified the following factors as accompanying an experience of flow:
1. Clear goals, expectations, and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one’s skill set and abilities. The challenge level and skill level should both be high;
2. Concentrating, a strong focus on a specific field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it);
3. A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness. Being and doing lose the distinction;
4. Distorted sense of time, one’s subjective experience of time is altered. The activity is more important than the time it is taking;
5. Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behaviour can be adjusted as needed);
6. Balance between ability level and challenge, the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult; ‘The Goldilocks Zone’;
7. A sense of personal control over the situation or activity;
8. The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action;
9. A lack of awareness of bodily needs (to the extent that one can reach a point of great hunger or fatigue without realising it);
10. Absorption into the activity, narrowing of the focus of awareness down to the activity itself, action awareness merging.
Vallerand et al. (2008) see flow as the consequence of (harmonious) passion. Thus for flow to be experienced at work a person needs a clear goal in mind, reasonable expectations of completing satisfactorily the goal in mind, the ability to concentrate, being given regular and specific feedback on their performance, and having the appropriate skills to complete the task.
Many of the key points for development apply to engagement. Development is critical for ongoing engagement. People need opportunities and challenges to learn new things, and apply what they have learned to job situations.
11.10 Passion at Work
There seems abundant evidence that the intrinsically motivated, harmoniously passionate person at work experiences vigour, flow, and wellbeing. The question is how to pick the right people and adopt the optimal management style and corporate culture to maximise it. The literature on intrinsic motivation, passion and flow all suggest similar ideas. These include:
Challenge: Goals need to be set by both worker and supervisor that involve an optimal amount of difficulty/challenge in attaining them. People do best when working on meaningful goals where tasks are of intermediate difficulty. They should be stretching goals and seen as part of a development plan. Thus let people set personally meaningful goals and targets which relate to their self-esteem. Give them feedback so that they can see how they are doing.
Curiosity: Activities that stimulate an employee’s attention and interest are best. This means introducing novelty and stimulating questioning that takes them beyond their present skills and knowledge. Changes and challenges stimulate curiosity. The idea is to foster a sense of wonder. It is about job enrichment.
Control: Allowing employees to have a choice in what happens. This sense of, and actual autonomy is most important. Leadership roles, even temporary ones, create a higher sense of engagement and recognition. People at work need to understand cause-and-effect relationships. They need to know and believe that their effort and outcomes have real and powerful effects. But most importantly they must be able to freely choose what and how they learn.
Fun and Fantasy: Using imagination and games to promote learning in the workplace. The idea is to turn work into play.
Competition: Comparing the performance from one employee to another more as a source of feedback than in the spirit of trying to win a competition. This can however have negative consequences if it reduces co-operation.
Co-operation: Encouraging employees to help each other to achieve goals. This means working in self-organised teams. People enjoy helping as much as being helped. Co-operation improves interpersonal skills.
Recognition: Celebrating employees’ accomplishments and successes. This means recognising employees for a job well done, and praise for doing a great job. Where possible, praise should be public; gather your team together for a moment and celebrate an accomplishment. Spend your day looking for and recognising great performance.
11.11 Conclusion
Self-evidently people stay with an organisation when they are happy: happy with the way they are managed and rewarded. They stay with organisations and the people in them which they like, respect, and trust. They stay in organisations where they see a future for themselves and a way of achieving their ambitions.
It is often healthy for a high flyer to ‘move on’; to gain experience in different organisations and different sectors. Whilst many managers seem particularly reluctant to ‘let go’ a highly productive ‘high flyer’, sometimes that transition is inevitable. It is best for both parties to leave amicably, feeling mutually well treated. The leaving high flyers can act as goodwill ambassadors for an organisation and may even choose to return.