Business Notes

Feel-Good Messaging Won’t Always Motivate Your Employees

By Matthew Amengual and Evan Apfelbaum

The idea that one’s actions at work contribute to the betterment of society—that they can help to protect the environment, put an end to poverty, or promote social justice—is an inspiring one. Recent research suggests that it can be a powerful motivator too. Indeed, the once-monolithic view of financial incentives as the sole way to motivate employees has been challenged by a wave of recent studies showing that linking people’s work to progressive social causes can inspire people in ways that transcend their paycheck or their bonus. Employees want to see themselves as good people and to work on behalf of organizations that positively contribute to the world. Consequently, when their actions advance a pro-social cause, they may work harder, for longer hours and even for less compensation.

It is no surprise, then, that when leaders seek to motivate their workforce by taking up win-win behaviors—ones that are good for both society and a company’s bottom line—many assume it’s best to frame such appeals in pro-social terms. Whether it’s getting employees to use less energy in the workplace or nudging delivery drivers to reduce the time their vehicles are left idling, a statement such as “Help conserve the Earth’s vital resources” would seem to be more motivational than “Help conserve our company’s vital resources.”

But is that actually correct? Sure, practical rationales for changing our behavior don’t seem as righteous or uplifting as pro-social ones. But they do, on the other hand, very clearly signal that an organization’s motives are genuine. If you claim to be driven by a desire to make society better, your employees may wonder if it is, in fact, actually true, whereas if you provide simple, practical rationales, they are unlikely to be questioned. This made us wonder: Is it better to motivate employees by inspiring them with a sense of pro-social purpose, or by communicating more humdrum but genuine-feeling reasons to change their behavior? In soon-to-be-published research, we investigated this issue by studying a change initiative at a large university. And what we found challenges conventional wisdom.

The initiative involved convincing employees to plan and coordinate orders of office supplies so that every order reached a value of at least $50, a practice we call “bundling.” This represented the kind of opportunity that most organizations relish: a way to reduce both costs and their environmental footprint. But leaders had to figure out how to communicate just why it was that they wanted employees to change their behavior. Should they extol the pro-social, environmental benefits? The instrumental cost savings? Or both?

We designed a field experiment to find out. We randomly assigned employees to view either a pro-social (“limiting pollution”), instrumental (“limiting costs”), or mixed motive (“limiting pollution and limiting costs”) rationale for caring about bundling each time they accessed the organization’s procurement system. We then evaluated changes in employee behavior by comparing a six-month pre-study period to a six-month experimental period, in the end encompassing 10,169 purchases in 556 university offices.

To our surprise, the pro-social message was actually the least effective when it came to changing employee behaviors, and the instrumental message was most effective. The mixed motive had less clear effects, but it tended to be in the middle. This result stands in stark contrast to the idea that when in doubt, organizations should tout their contributions to environmental sustainability and other pro-social goals.

To understand why we got the results we did, we conducted additional survey experiments with a separate group of people. We described the concept of bundling and then presented one group with the pro-social motive

and another group with the instrumental motive, just as in the field experiment. We asked everyone how they viewed the organization in light of its expressed motive for bundling, and whether they would be inclined to bundle if they worked there. We found that when organizations offer a pro-social rationale for a behavior that also advances their bottom line, people see the organization as less genuine, and they question whether senior managers are disclosing what they really care about. Offering a cost-savings message may not conjure inspiration or a profound sense of purpose, but to employees, it seems real and true.

And it turns out that seeming genuine matters. We find that people are more willing to change their behaviors when they believe the motives the organization claims are in fact its true motives.

This is not to say that pro-social messages are bad thing. They have many virtues outside the scope of our work. Attaching a broader pro-social purpose and meaning to work can provide inspiration and a sense of belonging and deepen one’s commitment to an organization. Even in the context of our survey experiments, we observe the power of pro-social messages to engage people—but only when people perceive them to be true. We suspect that in many organizational contexts, the notion of a purely pro-social motive would be met with some skepticism. This is important because the win-win contexts in which organizations have much to gain financially from pro-social behaviors may be the very ones in which leaders should be most wary about extolling their pro-social motives. It may be that pro-social motives may only seem genuine and prove effective in changing behavior in selective contexts, when organizations have consistently acted in ways that align with pro-social values, for example, even when costly.

These findings have direct and potentially substantial implications for organizations seeking to promote a wide range of activities that can be justified on both pro-social and instrumental grounds—whether they can make a case for seeking diversity based on social justice or performance, or for improving working conditions in supplier factories with an appeal to morality or risk reduction.

Pro-social values have the potential to inspire and motivate under certain conditions, but in many organizational contexts it may simply be more effective to acknowledge bottom-line concerns. In our university case, that meant encouraging leaders to say, “We care about limiting costs”—not a profound declaration, perhaps, but one that comes across as authentic nonetheless.

Matthew Amengual is a political scientist and associate professor at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School. Evan Apfelbaum is a social psychologist and associate professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.

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