People Aren't Creative for Money

Managers who dangle carrots – bonuses, raises, promotions – to encourage creative output from their teams may want to revisit their strategy. While perks are often welcome, they’re not always an effective motivator for innovation. I recently spoke with my longtime colleague, Teresa Amabile for my Leadership: A Master Class series. Teresa is the Director of Research in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School. Her research investigates how life inside organizations can influence people and their performance, specifically team creativity and innovation.

Teresa shared some of her findings on what really motivates a team member’s creativity. Here's what she said.

People can be creative for money if money is a secondary goal. If it’s a secondary motivator for them. The primary motivation for people to do their most creative work is intrinsic. It’s passion! It’s being excited about the work that you're doing. It’s under those conditions when that's the primary thing driving you that you're going to be most creative in your work.

Now, I focused initially on the importance of motivational state for creativity, and I found that under certain work conditions, even someone who was naturally very interested in doing something could have that intrinsic motivation undermined by unfavorable conditions in their work environment. I've recently come to discover that there are two other important kinds of psychological states that are necessary for creativity in addition to motivation. I call this package of psychological states Inner Work Life.

Inner Work Life is the intrinsic motivation combined with emotion. What I've discovered in my most recent research is that people are most likely to be creative when they're in a positive mood and have a pleasant, energetic affective response to the work that they're doing and to the environment in which they're doing it. Emotion is related to motivation. The two of them interact but they're not the same thing.

The third psychological state that's really important is a set of positive perceptions about the work that you're doing and the place where you're working. Is it a place that does important, good things? Do they treat its people well? And perceptions of your co-worker: are they smart? Engaging? Cooperative? Perceptions of yourself in the place where you're working. Am I valued here? Am I making a real contribution here? These motivations, emotions and perceptions can change on the basis of momentary events happening in the work environment. This package of psychological states Inner Work Life is very important for creativity.

If you're a manager who wants to support creativity, the first thing you have to understand is the importance of Inner Work Life for creativity. You probably know about Zappos, the online retailer. You may not know about their happiness philosophy. The CEO Tony Shea and the COO Alfred Linn believe that you can't have happy customers unless you have happy employees. They really credit this philosophy with the incredible success of Zappos in taking over an enormous market share.

What they do at Zappos is support the happiness of their employees by making sure that they have the support that they need to do work that matters to them, and by making sure that the working conditions are as conducive as possible to that. Whether these people are in the call center taking orders, which in many instances can be an incredibly dull, mind-deadening job, people really enjoy their work at Zappos. There are surveys showing that they enjoy their work. They are given leeway to really engage in that work. Engage with the customers in a way that most people in call centers aren't able to do, so that awareness of the importance of positive emotion to creativity in the workplace makes a big difference.

Managers can do and say things every day that will matter enormously for people's ability to be creative. My colleagues and I recently did a study looking in great detail at what supports and what undermines creativity day by day. Let me tell you a little bit about how we did this research. We decided in order to delve into the minds and hearts of people who were trying to do creative work every day, we needed access to what was really happening in their every day work lives. We asked a number of companies if we could collect daily electronic diaries from people who were trying to do creative work. People who were working on projects where creativity was not only possible, but necessary in order for the work to be done successfully.

Most of these people were doing new product development of some kind but many of them were grappling with difficult business problems of other types, like trying to solve an important client problem. We ended up looking at 238 professionals working in 26 different project teams in seven different companies in three different industries. We asked them if we could follow them with these daily diaries every day through the entire course of a project that they were doing. We ended up with nearly 12,000 daily diary entries. We've spent years analyzing what really makes the difference for people in terms of a best day - where they're able to really do creative and productive work, and they feel great about what they're doing, - and a worst day where they're really unable to engage deeply in the work, and feel very badly about what they're doing.

What we found is that of all the events that make for a really good day at work, the single most important is simply making progress in meaningful work.