What Leaders Get Wrong About Employee Motivation

Since managers started managing, they have questioned how to motivate employees to be productive and do good work -- and, for most, their answers are still shaped by assumptions formed long ago. While modern leaders understand that the best performance comes from intrinsically motivated, highly engaged employees, many still use traditional management practices that assume people won't work hard unless they are incentivized and monitored to make sure they deliver. Underlying that inconsistency are two theories with very different assumptions about how humans are motivated, each with significant implications for management, organizational structure, culture, and outcomes. In our recent paper in the Journal of Management Studies, we compare agency theory and self-determination theory -- both highly influential in research, business education, and practice. We suggest that agency theory has dominated