“I smashed that bug that’s been frustrating me for almost a calendar week,” a programmer typed at the end of a workday. “That may not be an event to you, but I live a very drab life, so I’m all hyped.”
The entry was written for two researchers. Teresa Amabile, a psychologist at Harvard Business School, and her husband, the developmental psychologist Steven Kramer, had asked members of project teams to answer an e-mail survey at the end of every workday for as long as their project ran, just over four months on average. It asked about the day’s emotions and moods, how motivated people were, how they saw their team and their bosses, what work they did, and which event stood out.
Twenty-six project teams in seven companies took part, 238 people in all. Their projects included inventing kitchen gadgets, managing product lines of cleaning tools and solving complex IT problems for a hotel empire. The surveys added up to nearly 12,000 diary entries.
When Amabile and Kramer compared people’s best and worst days by mood, one kind of event stood out at each end. Steps forward in the work occurred on 76% of the best-mood days, setbacks on only 13%. On the worst-mood days the picture flipped: setbacks on 67%, progress on 25%. Many of the steps were small. Of the incidents that had a minor impact on a project, 28% had a major impact on how people felt about it.
They named this the progress principle. Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation and perceptions during a workday, they concluded, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work.
They also surveyed managers. A survey went to 669 managers of varying levels from dozens of companies around the world, asking them to rank five things that can affect employees’ motivation and emotions: support for making progress in the work, recognition for good work, incentives, interpersonal support and clear goals. Only 35 of the 669 ranked progress first as a motivator. Overall the managers ranked it last of the five as a motivator, and third as an influence on emotion. Recognition came first. Recognition did lift people’s days in the diaries, the authors wrote, “But it wasn’t nearly as prominent as progress.”
They were careful about what diaries can show. “Our analyses establish correlations but do not prove causality,” they wrote in Harvard Business Review. A good mood might make progress easier, as well as the other way round. From reading thousands of entries, they judged that the causality “almost certainly” goes both ways.
In a consumer products company, a product manager’s diary followed a hand-held mixer that had taken over a year to develop, partly because the division’s management kept asking for more analysis. The team finally presented a project that management approved. Then the COO said he wanted a hard-grip handle instead, at a $5 lower retail price. “Very frustrating project,” she wrote. “I have prepared yet another proposal to show the management team tomorrow.”