The ABCD of Motivation August 22, 2008 Harvard study condenses motivation factors into four drives
By Nathan Adkisson
In 2002 Nitin Nohria and Paul Lawrence, two Harvard Business School professors, explained in their book Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices, that all human motivation can be parsed into drives to acquire, bond, learn, and defend.
Last month, they published a report in the Harvard Business Review modifying this model and expanding it. They renamed the "drive to learn" the "drive to comprehend" because they believe that comprehension is a more meaningful level of learning (it also allows them to call the model the "ABCD of motivation").
The report also described the "levers" that control those drives specifically in the workplace. This information may be valuable for managers seeking to achieve the highest productivity possible from their employees.
Nohria says the most unexpected part of his research was discovering that each drive is modified best by just one of the levers.
"We expected that every lever would affect all of the drives," he says. "The results were startling. You can try to create rewards that encourage innovation, and foster collaboration, but rewards that try to do all of those things get to complicated. Incentives are not the best choice to engage those other drives. You could use a screwdriver to open everything but it would be best to use it to open a screw."
The drive to acquire is controlled by the reward system In addition to wanting tangible goods, workers desire experiences like travel and entertainment and intangible social status symbols such as executive titles and positions on trustee boards. This drive is controlled by a reward system, which ideally uses incentives to differentiate performance levels.
The drive to bond is controlled by company culture Employees are more motivated when they feel a sense of belonging in an organization or group and they experience a loss of morale when that belonging is missing or their company betrays them. Successful use of the culture lever encourages teamwork, trust, and friendship.
The drive to comprehend is controlled by job design Humans want to know what is going on around them. Frustration arises when a task seems meaningless, but motivation comes from recognizing a challenge and working to solve it. Designing jobs that fulfill apparent and important roles allow the employee to understand his or her contribution to the company.
The drive to defend is controlled by performance management and resource allocation. In a workplace this drive is manifested in two ways. The first involves security—feeling safe in one's career assures us that we can take care of ourselves and our families—a positive emotion. An unexpected merger or restructuring affects this drive negatively by creating uneasiness. The other part of the defense drives comes from ideas: we want to be able to present our own opinions and follow our own goals. Environments where original voices are discouraged also lead to anxiety. Transparency and fairness in resource allocation make employees feel safe in their positions.
The studies both showed that the changing each of these levers a small amount was more effective than the radical change of one lever.
"It's not like you meet one first," Nohria says. "It's not hierarchical. You have to do all of them at once. That's an important difference from other models."
The study uses several companies as examples of drives being either properly or improperly managed. Under Bob Nardelli, the study said, concentration on the drive to acquire trumped the other drives, leading to a hostile work environment and stagnant stock prices. On the other hand, Nohria says Aflac seems to be very effective at addressing all four drives properly.
"A poor showing on one drive diminishes the impact of high scores on the other three; they cannot be ordered hierarchically or substituted one for another," the study says. "You can't just pay employees a lot and hope they'll feel enthusiastic about their work in an organization where bonding is not fostered…Nor is it enough to help people bond as a tight-knit team when they are underpaid."
The authors believe greater motivation and success await the manager who can be aware of and control all four of these drives.
"You can have employees who are enormously who are engaged and satisfied, less likely to leave the organization and will recommend it to others," he says. "We can explain 60-seventy percent of the total variance in productivity with four factors."
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