The downside of managers relying too heavily on ‘intrinsically motivated’ workers
Managers tend to give more work to employees they perceive as being more intrinsically motivated under the “naive belief” that those workers will enjoy the extra work, new Northeastern research shows.
A decade ago, when working as a junior analyst in a Chicago marketing firm, Sangah Bae was winding down her workday, hoping to make a happy hour with her colleagues. At 4:30 p.m., her manager rushed to her desk, with a request to do just one more thing before she wrapped up for the day.
“She threw me this report that I needed to get done before I headed out, and for sure it wasn’t going to be done in half an hour,” she said.
Despite the sinking feeling of not making it to the bar on time, Bae started on her boss’ request. Bae really enjoyed her job, felt like she was making meaningful contributions through the work she did and had consistently gone above and beyond, which she had hoped her bosses made note of for future opportunities.
Now, however, she was worried that that enthusiasm was landing her extra work. She completed the report, and arrived at happy hour a little late.
Fast forward ten years and Bae is now a professor of management and organizational development at Northeastern University.
She has focused her research on better understanding the kinds of workplace dynamics she was subject to and has now published new research in Organization Science that backs up that hunch she had all those years ago.
By conducting a series of research studies with more than 4,300 participants from a range of different industries, Bae and her co-author found that managers do in fact tend to give more work to employees they perceive as being more intrinsically motivated – or those they think derive meaning and enjoyment from their jobs.
These managers seem to operate under the “naive belief” that such workers will enjoy the extra work, the study found.
On the surface, it may make some sense for managers to give more work to this group, Bae said in an interview with Northeastern Global News, because these workers may be unlikely to object to the extra work.
But that way of managing can have profound effects, mainly that an organization’s best employees could become overburdened and overly stressed, she said.
In the first study, the researchers had a randomized group of managers who had two direct reports fill out a questionnaire. By having managers answer questions such as whether the employee found the work interesting, had fun at the job and also if the manager would personally like to see that employee succeed, the researchers were able to get a sense of those employees’ overall level of motivation and interest in their work.
The managers were then asked to assign those employees tasks outside their typical job description, such as “filing paperwork, planning an office party, and serving on a committee.”
What Bae and her co-author found was that 55% of managers tended to allocated those tasks to the employee they perceived as being more intrinsically motivated, even accounting for age, gender, work experience, and work performance.
In a follow up lab study, the researchers recruited a randomized group of 100 people, and sorted them into groups of three.
One of those people was named a manager and the other two were the employees. The two employees had to complete as many data entry tasks as they could in eight minutes, as whoever performed the best within that timeframe would get a $5 bonus. Employees were also asked about their enthusiasm for completing the tasks and how engaging they thought the tasks were, and their responses were used to calculate their intrinsic motivation.
During those eight minutes, the manager also had to assign an additional task to one of the employees, one that would take the employee away from the primary task and impact their ability to receive the bonus.
Seventy-four percent of managers assigned the task to the employee with a higher intrinsic motivation score, even though they knew it would impact that employee’s chances of getting the bonus, the researchers found.
“Because managers chose to give this task to employees who were higher in intrinsic motivation, many of these employees actually lost out on their chance to win bonuses,” Bae said, noting that only about 30% of the intrinsically motivated employees received the bonus.
The researchers attribute this to what they call “motive oversimplification” on the part of management, the logic fallacy that overly simplifies where employees get their motivation from, which they explored more in the other experiments conducted as part of the study. Those experiments examined some of the assumptions managers make about their employees, the negative downstream effects of those assumptions, and potential ways to counter those effects.
Managers “may assume that employees who enjoy their main work will also enjoy additional tasks and that such enjoyment will protect them from burnout,” the researchers wrote.
However, the evidence points to the contrary, Bae noted, highlighting that one of the most surprising insights from the paper was the gap between managers’ perceived impact these extra tasks might have on employee satisfaction compared to what those employees themselves said.
Where managers reported just a 0.2 point reduction in job satisfaction because of extra work, intrinsically motivated employees actually reported an entire point drop, the study found.
One way managers can distribute work more equally is by keeping a running tally of additional assignments and who was assigned to complete them, the researchers explained. Online dashboards and task management systems could also be implemented into workspaces to notify managers when they are overburdening some employees with extra tasks.
Managers could also take training programs on motivational misperceptions, the researchers write. That would be helpful in closing the “gap between employees’ reality and managers’ belief,” the researchers write.
Bae emphasizes that managers are not typically operating with bad intentions when assigning more work to employees they see as more motivated. A lot of time they are just operating under pressure.
“When managers have to give additional work to their employees when they didn’t know something was coming down the pipeline, they go for the easy cue, the person they can rely on,” she said.
But that can add up over time.
“The employee that is your shortcut, that is your go-to person who seems to be engaged and loving their work, might actually be quietly being burned out,” Bae said.
