Editorial
Organizational leaders value employee engagement, high performance and the well-being of employees. Yet, it is not always clear how to bring about these valued outcomes, especially when strategic ambitions exceed available resources.
One strategy I’ve pinpointed, drawn from research in my field of social psychology, is to honor the psychological needs of the individual contributors.
What does this mean exactly?
According to self-determination theory, humans have three core psychological needs: competence, autonomy and relatedness. When these three needs are met, people are able — and internally motivated — to sustain high levels of performance and engagement.
Why It Works
The importance of autonomy-supportive work environments is backed by decades of research conducted by motivation experts Edward Deci, Richard Ryan and others. For example, intervention studies find that when managers undergo training in how to support team members’ autonomy, the managers’ autonomy-supportive behavior positively impacts employee motivation, behavior and emotions.
Another study found that managers’ autonomy-supportive behaviors at the beginning of an organizational change period — acknowledging the employees’ perspectives and offering choices — positively predicted employee acceptance of change over a 13-month period.
Given many people spend hours per day engaged in collaborative work, it’s worth considering how leaders can bolster these psychological needs when designing workplace collaborations. We’ll consider each of the three psychological needs in turn.
Related Article: Want Your Organization to Collaborate More? Social Psychology Can Help
Need 1: Competence
When the psychological need for competence is met, individuals possess mastery, knowledge and skills. In short, they feel confident and capable. They know they are able to meet the challenges afforded by their work and believe they will be able to accomplish their goals. If you’re an organizational leader who oversees collaborative work, here are four strategies you can deploy to help satisfy team members’ competence needs:
- Generate a list of the competencies the team will need in order to excel at the work at hand. Then, honestly assess both whether the team as a whole possesses the needed competencies and whether each person on the team shines in one or more of the needed competencies, allowing them to contribute meaningfully to the shared work.
- Invite people to flag when they notice gaps in the team’s expertise and know-how.
- Help everyone access professional development to shore up those areas where they may be missing know-how.
- Augment the expertise on the team by onboarding external capacity, if even for a short period of time. This could mean bringing in someone from elsewhere in the organization or engaging an external expert.
Need 2: Autonomy
When the psychological need for autonomy is met, individuals have control over their own behavior. They feel fully vested in the goals of the work; they know they have choices in what they do and how they do it; and they know their managers take their questions and input seriously. To help satisfy this need within the context of collaborative work, leaders can:
- Provide individuals options in terms of what projects they’re on and even what role they play on a given project.
- Co-create the shared goals for the project to ensure deep understanding and buy-in of those goals and their importance to the company, the client and others.
- Turn the reins over to the individuals on the team to figure out how they’ll structure their work to achieve those goals.
- Nurture a culture where questions are expected and seeing things differently is encouraged.
Related Article: 7 Tips for Centering Effective Collaboration Amid Rapid Growth
Need 3: Relatedness
When the psychological need for relatedness is met, individuals feel connected to others at work. They feel part of the social fabric and feel they can talk with others about the things that matter most. Here are five ideas to feed this need on collaborative teams:
- Team members may know each other’s titles, but may not have a solid sense of what everyone actually does or how their work relates to that of others. Hold time to talk about what each person does, what they value, how they work, the variables they optimize for and how. Explore the interconnections among the different roles.
- Enable experiences that empower connection. For example, provide funds for people to go out for coffee together, to take a challenging short course together or to try a new place for lunch.
- Provide time and space for people to get to know each other as individuals. Reciprocal self-disclosure has been shown to increase mutuality, or the psychological sense of sharing a social identity with another person. Model using the minutes before the meeting starts to ask someone about their weekend or to share a worry that’s been on your mind.
- Humor helps people connect, so pass around a funny meme (workplace appropriate!) or call back a funny moment from a previous meeting.
- Celebrate the team’s big and small wins.
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Building competence, providing autonomy and nurturing relatedness drives engagement, performance and well-being. Think carefully about how to support these core human needs in order to drive the very outcomes you most want to see on your collaborative teams and in your organization.
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