A SET-THEORETIC APPROACH TO LEVERAGING EMPLOYEE MOTIVATION

The research by Lawrence and Nohria (2002) and Nohria et al. (2008) made significant inroads to developing a comprehensive motivation theory. To fulfill all the four emotional drives to acquire, bond, comprehend and defend, Nohria et al. (2008) suggest that each drive is best met by a distinctive organizational lever – the reward system, culture, job design, and performance management and resource allocation processes, respectively.

However, the investigators perform conventional quantitative analysis on data derived from a survey of a financial service giant, a leading IT services firm and 300 Fortune 500 companies. The survey was developed from prior empirical researches that were based on the various employee motivation theories. Lawrence and Nohria (2002) reference empirical work from almost all the motivation theories, incorporating the representative variables for employee motivation and the organizational lever for motivation, with all the potential relevant causal conditions in their survey. The effect of each variable is assumed to have an independent capacity to influence level, intensity or probability of organizational performance in a linear and additive way. In this symmetric design, correlation and other measures of association were used to estimate the net effects assuming that the impact of a given independent variable is the same not only across other independent variables but also across other independent variables and also across all their different combinations. To estimate the net effect of a given independent variable, the researchers offset the impact of competing causal conditions by subtracting from the estimate the effect of each variable of any explained variation in the dependent variable it shares with other causal variables.

An initial step to overcoming the deterministic nature of the Lawrence and Nohria (2002) and Nohria et al. (2008) comprehensive “human drives” theory on employee motivation, organizational levers and organizational performance is to understand the “level of influence” of the organizational levers. Reward systems, job design, and performance-management and resource allocations processes are microscopically focused levers that organizations can use to fulfill each respective drive, as long as they are specified correctly. That is, the reward system, job design and performance-management and resource allocation processes must be independently and specifically aligned with each drive. When there is no alignment, these levers do not lead to the fulfillment of their respective drives. This raises the following questions in our minds: Are the relationships between these organizational levers and employees’ drives truly binary and linear as prior research suggests? Even if a lever is aligned with a human drive, how can the failure of a lever be explained? In reality, we argue that there are circumstances that cannot be completely influenced and covered by a reward system, job design, and/or performance-management and resource allocation processes especially in the long term because they are microscopically focused on specific elements of “human drives”.

Similarly, fostering collaboration, teamwork, mutual reliance and friendship among employees through culture fulfills employees’ desire to bond. Yet the same argument above about influence and coverage applies, and while a team culture may fulfill a desire to bond, so could a culture of innovation where everyone is drawn together by a discovery, or a culture of bureaucracy where rules, policies and a stable environment could encourage mutual reliance and friendship. The difference between reward system, job design, performance-management and resource allocations process and culture is that culture is throughout an organization. Very often, an organization has built its brand and reputation on a type of culture. For example, Google is built on an innovation culture while Walmart is built on a culture that competes aggressively for market share in consumer spending.

To understand how various cultures may be used as an organizational lever that facilitates employee motivation, there is a need to identify the prevailing types of organizational cultures. Using a list of effectiveness criteria that was claimed by Campbell (1977) as comprehensive in scope, Quinn and Rohrbaugh (1983) discovered that values, assumptions and interpretations cluster together via multi-dimensional scaling. The framework specifies culture in terms of two sets of competing values: (1) the dilemma over flexible and control values, and (2) the dilemma over people (internal) and organizational (external) focus. Four types of cultures transpire from these two sets of competing values: flexible cultures that emphasize an internal or external focus, and control cultures that emphasize an internal or external focus. Flexibility encourages employee empowerment and creativity, and control aid implementation of the new ideas (Khazanchi, Lewis, & Boyer, 2007). The clan culture (hereafter team culture) places a great deal of emphasis on human affiliation in a flexible structure, internal focus on cohesion and morale, and human resource development to create team spirit (Cameron, Quinn, DeGraff, & Thakor, 2006). The adhocracy culture (hereafter innovation culture) places a great deal of emphasis on change through a flexible structure, external focus that requires a readiness to grow through risk-taking, innovation, planning and adaptability, resource acquisition and cutting-edge output (Denison & Spreitzer, 1991). The hierarchy culture (hereafter bureaucratic culture) places a great deal of emphasis on structure characterized by bureaucratic mechanisms that provide clear roles and procedures that are formally defined by rules and regulations. It is internally oriented, and stresses the role of information management, communication and routines to support an orderly work environment with sufficient coordination and distribution of information to provide employees with a psychological sense of continuity and security through conformity, predictability and stability (Quinn & Kimberly, 1984). Finally, the market culture (hereafter competitive culture) places a great deal of emphasis on control mechanisms in an externally focus structure. This culture values competition, competence, and achievement (Hartnell, Ou, & Kinicki, 2011). Clear objectives, goal setting, productivity and efficiency are rewarded (Cameron & Quinn, 1999). The competing values framework (CVF) is a culture taxonomy widely used in research (Cameron et al., 2006; Ostroff, Kinicki, & Tamkins, 2003).

Each type of culture is viewed as an organizational lever to fulfill the drives that motivate employees, thereby overcoming the binary and linear limitations as well as the incomplete coverage of specifying narrow levers using a reward system, job design, and performance-management and resource-allocation processes. For example, introducing some characteristics of an innovation culture may be sufficient to provide meaning to fulfill the drive to comprehend whereas, adopting some characteristics of a bureaucratic culture may provide the appropriate level of fairness and transparency to fulfill the drive to defend. Consequently, culture has a deeper level of influence because of the various types. This macroscopic property gives the many types of culture the potential to be organizational levers that subsumes the narrow levers to motivate employees over the long term.

Given the variety of cultures, we therefore pose the research question: What cultural levers best motivate employees to create organizational value? Prior research on organizational culture and value suggest that a configurationally approach may be necessary to better understand the patterns between the antecedent conditions and outcomes within a type of culture rather the net effects of a specified culture on value (Hartnell et al., 2011). Therefore, we advocate that researchers use a set-theoretic approach to provide “causal recipes” of cultural conditions sufficient for motivating employees to create organizational value. Set-theoretic analysis focuses on uniformities and near uniformities of a set of conditions (variables), rather than on general patterns of association. Our understanding of employee motivation, organizational levers of motivation and organizational performance may be advanced by adopting this alternative approach over conventional quantitative analysis.

References

• Cameron, K. S., Quinn, R. E., DeGraff, J., & Thakor, A. V. (2006). Competing values leadership: Creating values in organizations. Edward Elgar Publishing.
• Campbell, J. P. (1977). On the nature of organizational effectiveness. In P. S. Goodman, & J. M. Pennings (Eds.), New perspectives on organizational effectiveness. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
• Denison, D. R., & Spreitzer, G. M. (1991). Organizational culture and organizational development: A competing values approach. Research in Organizational Change and Development, 5(1), 1–21.
• Hartnell, C. A., Ou, A. Y., & Kinicki, A. (2011). Organizational culture and organizational effectiveness: A meta-analytic investigation of the competing values framework’s theoretical suppositions. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96(4), 677–694.
• Khazanchi, S., Lewis, M. W., & Boyer, K. K. (2007). Innovation-supportive culture: The impact of organizational values on process innovation. Journal of Operations Management, 25(4), 871–884.
• Lawrence, P. R., & Nohria, N. (2002). Driven: How human nature shapes our choices. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
• Nohria, N., Groysberg, B., & Lee, L. (2008). Employee motivation: A powerful new model. Harvard Business Review, 86(7/8), 78–83.
• Ostroff, C., Kinicki, A. J., & Tamkins, M. M. (2003). Organizational culture and climate. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
• Quinn, R. E., & Rohrbaugh, J. (1983). A spatial model of effectiveness criteria: Towards a competing values approach to organizational analysis. Management Science, 29(3), 363–377.
• Quinn, R. E., & Kimberly, J. R. (1984). Managing organizational transitions. Homewood, IL: Dow Jones-Irwin.