“More people” can sometimes be the answer, but let’s face it: there’s a lot of productivity that’s currently being left on the table with employees who are disengaged–unwilling to go “the mile”, let alone “the extra mile”, so to speak.

It’s one thing to recognize there’s an issue. Yet how does a leader go about re-engaging his teams?

Ken Thomas delivers another winner with this second edition of Intrinsic Motivation at Work. Make sure you’re buying this second edition as it has been expanded since the title was first published.

One of the many things I appreciate about this book is that it’s based on extensive research, yet you don’t have to be a researcher to get value from it. It’s practical, informal, yet doesn’t sacrifice the value just to make it accessible.

I appreciate a comment Ken makes early in the book: “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. ” You may think you want this book to re-engage your teams but you’ll find it helpful in doing the same for you.

Here’s how I plan to use this book: combine the insights with the new Work Engagement Profile. This easy-to-use assessment provides objective, reliable insights on how engaged a person (or team) is, then helps chart a path to re-engaging. The combination of this book and the assessment provides all that we need as leaders to start re-engaging ourselves and our teams.

Andy Kaufman
Host of the People and Projects Podcast
Rating: 5 / 5

Rating: 5 / 5

Dr. Ken Thomas’s book, “Intrinsic Motivation at Work: What Really Drives Employee
Engagement,” is an easily readable, interesting contribution to the field of motivation. That is not always true of the contribution from academics. I found the style down-to-earth and concepts and ideas very thought-provoking.

Thomas has a history of breakthrough concepts and theory in the management area, especially conflict management, in which he is an international expert. It extends his contributions to the field of motivation–and the hot topic of employee engagement. He provides a solid conceptual framework for understanding employee engagement.

Thomas puts work engagement into a historical context. He documents changes in work from the mid 20th century to the present, showing how work today requires more judgment and self-management from employees. He breaks self-management into four essential steps: committing to a meaningful purpose, choosing the best way of accomplishing that purpose, making sure one is performing work activities competently, and ensuring that one is actually accomplishing the purpose.

The book’s core is a description of four “intrinsic rewards” employees get from today’s work and their importance in energizing and sustaining employee engagement. The four rewards are a sense of meaningfulness, choice, competence, and progress. He summarizes research findings about these intrinsic rewards–on retention, work performance, job satisfaction, professional development, reduced stress, and other outcomes.

After Thomas explains these basic concepts, the book gets into applications–helping the reader diagnose current levels of the four intrinsic rewards and providing guidelines for enhancing them through their building blocks.

I found a number of things especially helpful. One was the diagnostic framework with each of the 4 reward areas, which helps a manager pinpoint the source of low engagement.

I liked his insight into how work has changed through increasing education of the workforce and implications for motivation and retention of knowledge workers. It is this population from which high tech companies often derive their competitive advantage.

I was impressed that Thomas wasn’t talking just about simple “techniques” for motivating others. He understands that motivation and employee engagement go beyond simple behavioral attempts by organizations to influence employee commitment and contribution. When motivation is self directed, it is more powerful than attempts made by managers and organizations to motivate others through various work and high involvement strategies.

The book had major implications for the increasing amount of work done virtually. Virtual workers are more dependent on self-motivation and less subject to direction from supervisors. This can help managers and newly appointed supervisors whose direct reports are geographically dispersed.

Overall, this book is an important conceptual contribution to the field of employee motivation, which has seen limited breakthroughs in thinking during the past few decades.

Rating: 5 / 5