PREFACE

This book will give you crucial new insights and tools for motivating workers in today’s organizations. Why do you need this book? Because today’s jobs are dramatically different from those of only a generation ago—and require much more initiative, creativity, and judgment. Today’s jobs have changed so much that employees require a different kind of motivation. Organizations have recognized that need in the last few years and have begun talking about “employee engagement.” But that term remains fairly vague and only points in a general direction. This book will give you a much clearer understanding of what employee engagement is, what powers it, and what you can do to create it.

This book comes from more than twenty years of work on intrinsic motivation—the force that drives engagement. I have interviewed engaging leaders and their followers, developed a research measure of intrinsic rewards with my colleague Walt Tymon, conducted surveys in a number of organizations, delivered workshops, written some influential journal articles, and consulted with public- and private-sector organizations. I have also learned a great deal from colleagues at the New West Institute, a firm that has used our research instrument and the first edition of this book in all of its consulting. This second edition of Intrinsic Motivation at Work draws upon all those experiences to give you the knowledge and tools you’ll need to lead for engagement.

This book is organized into four parts. Part 1 will show you what engagement looks like on the job. Basically, engaged workers actively self-manage. They commit to a meaningful purpose, apply their intelligence to choose how best to accomplish the purpose, monitor their activities to make sure they are doing them competently, check to make sure that they are actually making progress toward the purpose, and make adjustments as needed. This self-management, then, is the key way that workers add value in today’s fast-paced, global, service-oriented economy.

In part 2, you will get a clear picture of the rewards that power this kind of engagement. Active self-management requires more than economic rewards. It is energized and sustained by intrinsic rewards—psychological rewards that workers get directly from their self-managed work. The four main intrinsic rewards are a sense of meaningfulness, a sense of choice, a sense of competence, and a sense of progress. As you’ll see, these rewards not only energize and sustain self-management, they also have powerful effects on retention, development, innovation, and other key outcomes.

Workshops have shown us that it is easier to learn how to engage other people when you first learn how to monitor and manage your own intrinsic motivation. So part 3 will help you tune into your own intrinsic rewards, introduce you to the major building blocks for each intrinsic reward, and spell out actions that you can take to build those rewards for yourself.

Then part 4 will give you the tools you need to engage the people in your work team. You will learn how to determine the strengths of your team members’ intrinsic rewards, and you will learn acts of leadership that enhance each intrinsic reward. These actions go beyond familiar principles of job enrichment to emphasize the kinds of conversations and celebrations that keep people actively engaged.

A comment on style: I have tried to write this book in a fairly informal way that connects with your experience, so I’ll share a few of my own experiences and ask you to reflect on your own, especially in the later chapters. As I wrote these sections, I tried to imagine myself in a conversation with you where I could speak honestly about what I think you need to know and do to successfully engage yourself and others.

One final note: because a lot of drama is involved in the kinds of changes this book covers—in the speed and urgency with which work has changed, in the shift from command-and-control to self-management, and in the changing motivational needs and opportunities of the new work—I have used a running “Management Tale” at the beginning of each part of the book to capture this unfolding drama.