The Science Behind What Motivates Us to Get Up for Work Every Day

I admit that I’ve never been able to work that way.  There is one thing that always came first and most importantly for me: How am I feeling today? I found that it can easily happen to think of emotions as something that gets in the way of work. When I grew, I often heard that they obstruct reasoning and rationality, but I feel that we as humans can’t shut off our humanness when we come to work.

Feelings provide important feedback during our workday. It doesn’t make sense to pretend that it’s best or even possible to keep our emotions and work separate, treating our capacity for emotion and thought as weakness. I wanted to look into whether there was anything besides a gut feeling to my suspicions behind keeping the head and the heart separate in business.

Feelings provide important feedback during our workday. It doesn’t make sense to pretend that it’s best or even possible to keep our emotions and work separate, treating our capacity for emotion and thought as weakness. I wanted to look into whether there was anything besides a gut feeling to my suspicions behind keeping the head and the heart separate in business.

It turns out, quite a lot. Emotions play a leading role in how to succeed in business because they influence how much you try and this is widely misunderstood by bosses and managers.

Psychologists Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer interviewed over 600 managers and found a shocking result. 95 percent of managers misunderstood what motivates employees. They thought what motivates employees was making money, getting raises and bonuses. 

In fact, after analyzing over 12,000 employee diary entries, they discovered that the number one work motivator was emotion, not financial incentive: it’s the feeling of making progress every day toward a meaningful goal. In Fact, Dan Pink found that actually the exact oposite is true:

“The larger the monetary reward, the poorer the performance. – money doesn’t motivate us, at all, instead emotions do.”

In the famous expriment by Dr. Edward Deci clarified again whether emotional feedback or money would engagement with work.  People were sitting in a room and tried to solve a puzzle while Deci measured how much time they put in, before giving up.  For Group A, he offered a cash reward for successfully solving the puzzle, and as you might expect, those people spent almost twice as much time trying to solve the puzzle as those people in Group B who weren’t offered a prize.

A surprising thing happened the next day, when Deci told Group A that there wasn’t enough money to pay them this time around: Group A lost interest in the puzzle.  Group B, on the other hand, having never been offered money in exchange for working on the puzzles, worked on the puzzles longer and longer in each consecutive session and maintained a higher level of sustained interest than Group A. So if it not money what else really motivates us?

Pink explains further that there are in fact just 3 very simple things that drive nearly each and everyone of us to work hard:

• Autonomy : Our desire to direct our own lives. In short: “You probably want to do something interesting, let me get out of your way!”
• Mastery : Our urge to get better at stuff.
• Purpose : The feeling and intention that we can make a difference in the world.

If these three things play nicely together, Amabile and Kramercalled this the somewhat obvious “inner work life balance” and emphasize its importance to how well we work. Inner work life is what’s going on in your head in response to workday events that affects your performance.

These components: motivation, emotions, and perceptions of how the above three things work together feed each other. So ultimately our emotional processes impact our motivation to work. They end up being the main influencer of our performance.

Deci’s experiment showed that payment actually undermined intrinsic motivation because such external rewards thwart our “three psychological needs- to feel autonomous, to feel competent and to feel related to others.” As he told BBC, “You need thinkers, problem solvers, people who can be creative and using money to motivate them will not get you that.”

Amabile and Kramer tell us this:

So how does our brain deal with emotion and connect it to such practical results like motivation and productivity? Well, the ironic part is that the parts of the brain that deal with emotions are actually connected to those that deal with cognition . Richard J. Davidson explains how emotional and cognitive functions interrelate. To get all “brainy” with this:

Emotions are wired straight into our thinking and cognitive functions such as memory, attention, and reasoning.