1、 外文翻译 原文 Employee Motivation Material Source: Harvard Business Review Author: Nitin Nohria, Boris Groysberg， Linda-Eling Lee GETTING PEOPLE TO DO THEIR BEST WORK, even in trying circumstances, is one of managers most enduring and slippery challenges. Indeed, deciphering what motivates us as human be
2、ings is a centuries-old puzzle. Some of historys most infl uential thinkers about human behavior among them Aristotle, Adam Smith, Sigmund Freud, and Abraham Maslow have struggled to understand its nuances and have taught us a tremendous amount about why people do the things they do. Such luminaries
3、, however, didnt have the advantage of knowledge gleaned from modern brain science. Their theories were based on careful and educated investigation, to be sure, but also exclusively on direct observation. Imagine trying to infer how a car works by examining its movements (starting, stopping, acceler
4、ating, turning) without being able to take apart the engine. Fortunately,new cross-disciplinary research in fields like neuroscience, biology, and evolutionary psychology has allowed us to peek under the hood, so to speak to learn more about the human brain. Our synthesis of the research suggests th
5、at people are guided by four basic emotional needs, or drives, that are the product of our common evolutionary heritage. As set out by Paul R. Lawrence and Nitin Nohrian their 2002 book Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices, they are the drives to acquire (obtain scarce goods, including intang
6、ibles such as social status); bond (form connections with individuals and groups); comprehend (satisfy our curiosity and master the world around us); and defend (prote ct against external threats and promote justice). These drives underlie everything we do. Managers attempting to boost motivation sh
7、ould take note.Its hard to argue with the accepted wisdom backed by empirical evidence that a motivated workforce means better corporate performance. But what actions, precisely, can managers take to satisfy the four drives and, thereby, increase their employees overall motivation? We recently compl
8、eted two major studies aimed at answering that question. In one, we surveyed 385 employees of two global businesse s a financial services giant and a leading IT services fi rm. In the other, we surveyed employees from 300 Fortune 500 companies. To define overall motivation, we focused on four common
9、ly measured workplace indicators of it:engagement, satisfaction, commitment, and intention to quit. Engagement represents the energy, effort, and initiative employees bring to their jobs. Satisfaction reflects the extent to which they feel that the company meets their expectations at work and satisf
10、ies its implicit and explicit contracts with them.Commitment captures the extent to which employees engage in c orporate citizenship. Intention to quit is the best proxy for employee turnover. Both studie showed, strikingly, that an organizations ability to meet the four ndamental drives explains,on
11、 average,about 60% of employees variance on motivational indicators(previous models have explained about 30%). We also found that certain drives influence some motivational indicators more than others. Fulfilling the drive to bond has the greatest effect on employee commitment, for example, whereas
12、meeting the drive to comprehend is most closely linked with employee engagement. But a company can best improve overall motivational scores by satisfying all four drives in concert. The whole is more than the sum of its parts; a poor showing on one drive substantially diminishes the impact of high s
13、cores on the other three. When it comes to practical implications for managers, the consequences of neglecting any particular drive are clear. Bob Nardellis lackluster performance at Home Depot, for instance, can be explained in part by his relentless focus on the drive to acquire at the expense of
14、other drives. By emphasizing in dividual and store performance, he squelched the spirit of camaraderie among employees (their drive to bond) and their dedication to tech nical expertise (a manifestation of the need to comprehend and do meaningful work). He also created, as widely reported, a hostile
15、 environment that interfered with the drive to defend: Employees no longer felt they were being treated justly. When Nardelli left the company, Home Depots stock price was essentially no better than when he had arrived six years earlier. Meanwhile Lowes, a direct competitor, gained ground by taking
16、a holistic approach to satisfying employees emotional needs through its reward system, culture, management systems, and design of jobs. An organization as a whole clearly has to attend to the four fundamental emotional drives, but so must individual managers. They may be restricted by organizational
17、 norms, but employees are clever enough to know that their immediate superiors have some wiggle room. In fact, our research shows that individual managers infl uence overall motivation as much as any organizational policy does. In this article well look more closely at the drivers of employee motiva
18、tion, the levers managers can pull to address them, and the “local” strategies that can boost motivation despite organizational constraints. The Four Drives That Underlie Motivation Because the four drives are hardwired into our brains, the d egree to which they are satisfied directly affects our em
19、otionsand, by extension, our behavior. Lets look at how each one operates. 1 The drive to acquire. We are all driven to acquire scarce goods that bolster our sense of well-being. We experience delight when this drive is fulfilled, discontentment when it is thwarted. This phenomenon applies not only
20、to physical goods like food, clothing, housing, and money, but also to experiences like travel and entertainment not to mention events that improve social status, such as being promoted and getting a corner offi ce or a place on the corporate board. The drive to acquire tends to be relative (we alwa
21、ys compare what we have with what others possess) and insatiable (we always want more). That explains why people always care not just about their own compensation packages but about others as well. It also illuminates why salary caps are hard to impose. 2 The drive to bond. Many animals bond with th
22、eir parents, kinship group, or tribe, but only humans extend that connection to larger collectives such as organizations, associations, and nations. The drive to bond, when met, is associated with strong positive emotions like love and caring and, when not, with negative ones like loneliness and ano
23、mie. At work, the drive to bond accounts for the enormous boost in motivation when employees feel proud of belonging to the organization and for their loss of morale when the institution betrays them. It also explains why employees fi nd it hard to break out of divisional or functional silos: People
24、 become attached to their closest cohorts. But its true that the ability to form attachments to larger collectives sometimes leads employees to care more about the organization than about their local group within it. 3 The drive to comprehend. We want very much to make sense of the world around us,
25、to produce theories and accounts scientific, religious, and cultural that make events comprehensible and suggest reasonable actions and responses. We are frustrated when things seem senseless, and we are invigorated, typically, by the challenge of working out answers.In the workplace, the drive to c
26、omprehend accounts for the desire to make a meaningful contribution. Employees are motivated by jobs that challenge them and enable them to grow and learn, and they are demoralized by those that seem to be monotonous or to lead to a dead end. Talented employees who feel trapped often leave their com
27、panies to find new challenges elsewhere. 4 The drive to .defend. We all naturally defend ourselves, our property and accomplishments, our family and friends, and our ideas and beliefs against external threats. This drive is rooted in the basic fi ght-or-flight response common to most animals. In hum
28、ans, it manifests itself not just as aggressive or defensive behavior, but also as a quest to create institutions that promote justice, that have clear goals and intentions, and that allow people to express their ideas and opinions. Fulfilling the drive to defend leads to feelings of security and co
29、nfi dence; not fulfilling it produces strong negative emotions like fear and resentment. The drive to defend tells us a lot about peoples resistance to change; its one reason employees can be devastated by the prospect of a merger or acquisition an especially signifi cant change even if the deal rep
30、resents the only hope for an organizations survival. So, for example, one day you might be told youre a high performer and indispensable to the companys success, and the next that you may be let go owing to a restructu ring a direct challenge, in its capriciousness, to your drive to defend. Little w
31、onder that headhunters so frequently target employees during suc h transitions, when they know that people feel vulnerable and at the mercy of managers who seem to be making arbitrary personnel decisions. Each of the four drives we have described is independent; they cannot be ordered hierarchically
32、 or substituted one for another. You cant just pay your employees a lot and hope theyll feel enthusiastic about their work in an organization where bonding is not fostered, or work seems meaningless, or people feel defenseless. Nor is it enough to help people bond as a tight-knit team when they are
33、underpaid or toiling away at deathly boring jobs. You can certainly get people to work under such circumstances they may need the money or have no other current prospects but you wont get the most out of them, and you risk losing them altogether when a better deal comes along. To fully motivate your
34、 employees, you must address all four drives. The Organizational Levers of Motivation Although fulfi lling all four of employees basic emotional drives is essential for any company, our research suggests that each drive is best met by a distinct organizational lever. The reward system. The drive to
35、acquire is most easily satisfied by an organizations reward system how effectively it discriminates between good and poor performers, ties rewards to performance, and gives the best people opportunities or advancement. When the Royal Bank of Scotland acquired NatWest, it inherited a company in which
36、 the reward system was dominated by politics, status, and employee tenure. RBS introduced a new system that held m anagers responsible for specific goals and rewarded good performance over average performance. Former NatWest employees embraced their new company to an unusual extent in the aftermath
37、of an acquisition in part because the reward system was tough but recognized individual achievement. Sonoco, a manufacturer of packaging for industrial and consumer goods,transformed itself in part by making a concerted effort to better meet the drive to acquire that is, by establishing very clear l
38、inks between performance and rewards. Historically, the company had set high business-performance targets, but incentives had done little to reward the achievement of them. In 19 95, under Cynthia Hartley, then the new vice president of human resources, Sonoco instituted a pay-for-performance system
39、, based on individual and group metrics. Employee satisfaction and engagement improved, according to results from a regularly administered internal survey. In 2005, Hewitt Associates named Sonoco one of the top 20 talent-management organizations in the United States. It was one of the few midcap com
40、panies on the list, which also included big players like 3M, GE, Johnson they have opportunities to develop new skills through managing, recruiting, and designing curricula for training new agents. As for the driv e to defend, the company takes action to improve employees quality of life. Beyond tra
41、ining and scholarships, it offers benefi ts, such as on -site child care, that enhance work/life balance. It also fosters trust through a no -layoff policy. The companys stated philosophy is to be employee-centric to take care of its people fi rst. In turn, the firm believes that employees will take
42、 care of customers. The company examples we chose for this article illustrate how particular organizational levers influence overall motivation, but Aflacs is a model case of taking actions that, in concert, fulfill all four employee drives. Our data show that a comprehensive approach like this is b
43、est. When employees report even a slight enhancement in the fulfi llment of any of the four drives, their overall motivation shows a corresponding improvement; however, major advances relative to other companies come from the aggregate effect on all four drives. This effect occurs not just because m
44、ore drives are being met but because actions taken on several fronts seem to reinforce one another the holistic approach is worth more than the sum of its constituent parts, even though working on each part adds something. Take a firm that ranks in the 50th percentile on employee motivation. When wo
45、rkers rate that companys job design (the lever that most influences the drive to comprehend) on a scale of zero to five, a one -point increase yields a 5% raw improvement in motivation and a correspondingly modest jump from the 50th to the 56th percentile. But enhance performance on all four drives,
46、 and the yield is a 21% raw improvement in motivation and big jump to the 88th percentile. (The percentile gains are shown in the exhibit “How to Make Big Strides in Employee Motivation.”) Thats a major competitive advantage for a company in terms of employee satisfaction, engagement, commitment, an
47、d reluctance to quit. The Role of the Direct Manager Our research also revealed that organizations dont have an absolute monopoly on employee motivation or on fulfilling peoples emotional drives. Employees perceptions of their immediate managers matter just as much. People recognize that a multi tud
48、e of organizational factors, some outside their supervisors control, influence their motivation, but they are discriminating when it comes to evaluating that supervisors ability to keep them motivated. Employees in our study attributed as much importance to their bosss meeting their four drives as to the organizations policies. In other words, they recognized that a manager has some control over how company processes and policies are implemented. (See the exhibit “Direct Managers Matter, Too.”) Emp
