Inner Work Life: Understanding the Subtext of Business Performance

The first comprehensive look at what employees are thinking and feeling as they go about their work, why it matters, and how managers can use this information to improve job performance.

by

Teresa M. Amabile

and

Steven J. Kramer

by

Teresa M. Amabile

and

Steven J. Kramer

From the Magazine (May 2007)

Summary.

Reprint: R0705D

Anyone in management knows that employees have their good days and their bad days—and that, for the most part, the reasons for their ups and downs are unknown. Most managers simply shrug their shoulders at this fact of work life. But does it matter, in terms of performance, if people have more good days than bad days?

Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer’s new stream of research, based on more than 12,000 diary entries logged by knowledge workers over three years, reveals the dramatic impact of employees’ inner work lives—their perceptions, emotions, and motivation levels—on several dimensions of performance. People perform better when their workday experiences include more positive emotions, stronger intrinsic motivation (passion for the work), and more favorable perceptions of their work, their team, their leaders, and their organization. What the authors also found was that managers’ behavior dramatically affects the tenor of employees’ inner work lives.

So what makes a difference to inner work life? When the authors compared the study participants’ best days to their worst days, they found that the single most important differentiator was their sense of being able to make progress in their work. The authors also observed interpersonal events working in tandem with progress events. Praise without real work progress, or at least solid efforts toward progress, had little positive impact on people’s inner work lives and could even arouse cynicism. On the other hand, good work progress without any recognition—or, worse, with criticism about trivial issues—could engender anger and sadness. Far and away, the best boosts to inner work life were episodes in which people knew they had done good work and their managers appropriately recognized that work.

The Idea in Brief

You’ve given your best employees pats on the back. You’ve injected light-hearted fun into the workplace. And you’ve provided emotional support when needed. So why aren’t your people delivering peak performance?

Perhaps you’ve neglected their inner work lives—the complex interplay between employees’ deeply private perceptions of what’s happening around them, the emotions they experience as a result of those perceptions, and their level of motivation to do good work.

When people form negative perceptions—of their manager, organization, coworkers, work, or themselves—they feel frustrated and unhappy. Motivation shrivels. Performance suffers in the short and long run. But when employees form positive perceptions, the cycle turns from vicious to virtuous.

How to promote positive perceptions? Manipulate some simple levers, say Amabile and Kramer. In particular, create conditions that enable people to get their work done, and you’ll create positive emotions, enhance motivation, and boost performance to unprecedented levels.

The Idea in Practice

Amabile and Kramer offer these suggestions for promoting positive inner work lives in your employees:

Demystify the Inner Work Life System

The interplay among employees’ perceptions, emotions, and motivation form a complex system that can fuel—or kill—performance. This system operates all day long, unseen, within every employee—and in response to every event. Steps in the system include:

1. An event happens at work—for example, a manager fails to respond to an employee’s e-mail, a worker solves a nagging technical problem, or top management announces a major layoff.

2. Each employee tries to figure out why the event happened and what its implications are.

3. If perceptions resulting from this “sense making” are negative, the person experiences feelings such as anger, sadness, and disgust. If perceptions are positive, an employee experiences positive emotions—including satisfaction, pride, and elation.

4. Positive emotions fuel people’s motivation, which in turn drives performance along four key dimensions: creativity (ability to come up with novel and useful ideas), productivity, commitment to the work, and collegiality (contributions to team cohesiveness). Not surprisingly, negative emotions corrode motivation, so performance suffers.

Activate a Virtuous Cycle in Employees’ Inner Work Lives

Typical management techniques such as praising subordinates, working collaboratively with them, and making the workplace fun or relaxing can all help establish a positive cycle in employees’ inner work lives.

But the single most important lever is to give people the sense that they can make progress in their work. Success in achieving a goal, accomplishing a task, or solving a problem—whether mundane or immense—evokes intense pleasure and even joy.

To enable your people to get their work done:

Provide direct help.

Give them adequate resources and time to do their jobs.

React to successes and failures with a learning orientation rather than a purely evaluative one.

Set clear goals—by explaining where the work is heading and why it matters to the team, the organization, and the company’s customers.

If your organization demands knowledge work from its people, then you undoubtedly appreciate the importance of sheer brainpower. You probably recruit high-intellect people and ensure they have access to good information. You probably also respect the power of incentives and use formal compensation systems to channel that intellectual energy down one path or another. But you might be overlooking another crucial driver of a knowledge worker’s performance—that person’s inner work life. People experience a constant stream of emotions, perceptions, and motivations as they react to and make sense of the events of the workday. As people arrive at their workplaces they don’t check their hearts and minds at the door. Unfortunately, because inner work life is seldom openly expressed in modern organizations, it’s all too easy for managers to pretend that private thoughts and feelings don’t matter.

A version of this article appeared in the May 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review.

TA

Teresa M. Amabile is a Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School and a coauthor of The Progress Principle. Her current research investigates how life inside organizations can influence people and their performance, as well as how people approach and experience the transition to retirement.
SK

Steven J. Kramer is an independent researcher, writer, and consultant in Wayland, Massachusetts. He is a coauthor of “Creativity Under the Gun” (HBR August 2002) and “Inner Work Life” (HBR May 2007). Their book The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work is forthcoming from Harvard Business Review Press.

Inner Work Life: Understanding the Subtext of Business Performance

The Idea in Brief

Demystify the Inner Work Life System

Activate a Virtuous Cycle in Employees’ Inner Work Lives

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