Four Key Intrinsic Rewards that Motivate Employee and Improve Worker Productivity. Essential Intrinsic Motivation that Build Employee Engagement.

December 15, 2009 by kutenk
Filed under: Human Resources, Leadership 



Research shows that a sea change has occurred in the nature of work within the space of a single generation. People used to think of work in terms of the activities (behaviors) that workers needed to perform. Bureaucratic organizations used close supervision and elaborate rules to make sure workers performed those activities properly, and the job of workers was mostly to comply with this sort of command-and-control management. By the 1990s, however, the environment had begun to change too rapidly for bureaucratic rules and close supervision to handle. Those uncertainties overwhelmed bureaucratic organizations and forced a flattening of the hierarchy and drastic reductions in organizational rules. When this happened, work changed in fundamental ways.




Workers have had to take responsibility for handling much of the uncertainty surrounding their jobs. They are required to be more proactive and to make many of the decisions formerly made by managers.

The Essence of Today’s Work Is Self-Management
Today’s work is not simply about performing activities; it is now about workers’ directing their own activities toward organizational purposes. The worker’s role, then, has shifted from passive compliance to proactive self-management. Self-management involves a series of four steps by which today’s workers direct their work toward the accomplishment of organizational purposes:
    Committing to a meaningful work purpose
    Choosing activities that will best accomplish the purpose
    Checking to make sure they are performing those activities competently
    Checking to make sure that they are actually making progress toward accomplishing the purpose



Self-Management Requires a Different Kind of Motivation—Intrinsic Motivation
Self-management requires a deeper level of commitment than the old compliance-era work, since workers must now be committed to the purpose they are pursuing. The new work is also more psychologically demanding, involving a great deal more judgment and decision making. Although money and other extrinsic rewards remain important to workers, it is clear that the new work requires much more than that. Effective self-management depends heavily on intrinsic rewards—the psychological rewards that workers can get from self-management itself.

There are four key intrinsic rewards
    Sense of meaningfulness—the feeling that one is pursuing a worthy work purpose, one that is worth one’s time and energy
    Sense of choice—the sense that one is able to make one’s own decisions and act out of one’s own understanding of the work
    Sense of competence—the feeling that one is performing work activities well, that one is doing high-quality work
    Sense of progress—the sense that one is actually achieving the work purpose

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