Given the structure of a school district’s services, the human element involved in providing superior performance cannot be overestimated. To deliver a positive experience to stakeholders, school districts rely on motivated, engaged, and enthusiastic employees.
Motivation is a big topic. Managing it is not just about executing standard human resource transactions such as payroll and benefits. Building motivation ultimately depends on how adept leaders and managers are at pulling a wide array of organizational levers in the right way.
To develop a more powerful set of motivation tactics, district leaders and managers must first dispel some common misconceptions. One prevalent fallacy puts motivation beyond the reach of managers by claiming that motivation is an individually determined quality. In academic circles, this problem is often referred to as a “dispositionist bias,” because it characterizes motivation as something that results from individuals’ intrinsic dispositions. Ascribing behavior to the nature of a given individual, we struggle to adapt policies to a broad range of personality differences. In the conventional model of motivation, we assume that personality dictates attitudes that in turn dictate behavior.
A more compelling approach to managing attitudes and fostering motivation concentrates on the many levers influencing behavior that can be more directly controlled. Essentially reversing the logic of the conventional model, this alternate model of motivation begins with a view that organizational context matters and can shape behavior and attitudes.i
To break down the idea of “context” a bit more, it is useful to distinguish between morale and motivation:ii These concepts are not new, but many DMC members feel they are equally enlightening in today’s workplace as they were when first published about forty years ago.
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Morale or “Hygiene” Factors |
Motivation Factors |
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Morale flows from working conditions, salary, status, security, policies, and administration. They are necessary, but not sufficient, for a motivated workforce. While they do not lead to greater motivation, they do assuage dissatisfaction.
Motivation factors are more intrinsic and intangible, including achievement, recognition, responsibility, interest, advancement, and growth. Provided a base of favorable morale factors, motivation factors are what drive employee satisfaction and performance.
While each group of factors is important in its own right, the ideal situation for employee motivation must integrate both.
The upside of this classification is that it clarifies many areas that have a high impact on employee motivation and that are in fact readily manageable. On the motivation side, the factors that are most frequently cited as the source of satisfaction are achievement and recognition. On the morale side, the factors most often identified as the cause of dissatisfaction are administrative policies and supervision. All of these factors with larger-than-average effects are to a significant extent manageable. Salary, so widely viewed as the decisive factor for motivation, was documented to have much smaller effects on either satisfaction or dissatisfaction.iii These findings should free us to focus on more responsive, more manageable areas.
Once leaders and managers see beyond the individual disposition bias and recognize motivation as manageable, they should still watch out for two other common misconceptions that can undermine their ability to get an accurate view of their workplace.
One error is often called the Extrinsic Incentives Bias. This occurs when individuals perceive a misalignment between what incentivizes them to produce and what they think incentivizes their colleagues. A good example of this came from a Harris survey of prospective lawyers. Asked to identify their primary motivation for choosing a legal career, 64% of the respondents cited the “intellectual stimulation.” When answering for their peers instead of themselves, however, the same respondents ranked “financial rewards” as the number-one factor.iv
Another popular trap skews in the opposite direction. The Self-serving Bias results when people rate themselves more highly on categories they believe to be admirable. This bias tends to overstate the importance of desirable motivation factors and understate the significance of real morale factors.
To develop a better understanding of what motivates school employees and to test for the presence of either or both of the extrinsic and self-serving biases, districts should consider exercises in which participants rank the importance of different motivational factors for themselves as well as for other administrators and teachers.v We have found insights from such exercises to be very enlightening for district policy debates.
Research has recorded various attributes that help explain variations in teacher satisfaction levels. A few common conclusions stand true across the studies. Elementary school teachers are more satisfied than secondary school teachers. Independent school teachers are more satisfied than public school teachers. Within each finding, teachers in central city districts have higher rates of low satisfaction and lower rates of high satisfaction than do teachers in the urban fringe and in small town and rural areas.vi
These results may be informative, but they underscore factors like longevity, location, and school type that are largely fixed and therefore useless to a manager. The challenge is to identify drivers of satisfaction that can be managed.
Our next briefs will discuss drivers of satisfaction, both compensation and non-compensation-based, that can be managed.
i Burton, M.I.T./Sloan, 2003.
ii Herzberg, 1968.
iii Herzberg, 1968.
iv Harris, 2003.
v Factors adapted from Heath, 1999.
vi Schools and Staffing Survey, National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, 1997.
