Thomas Britt - Clemson University: High Engagement and High Maintenance

Steve

Hi, this is Steve Hunt with People Performance Radio. This week we spoke with Professor Thomas Britt, who's professor of psychology at Clemson University, and Thomas shared with us some really interesting research he's been doing for years looking at employee engagement, what predicts it, but even more interesting, the consequences of being a highly-engaged employee, and one of the big focuses he talked about is, the more engaged employees are, the more sensitive they are to things in their environment that don't allow them to succeed, to excel at the level, and at some degree almost, you could say, are harder to manage, because they expect more, they expect more of themselves, they also expect more of the organization they work for, and Thomas talks about the difference between challenging enablers and hindering enablers, and some other really interesting concepts that say, just because employees engage, doesn't mean that everything is great with them, and that in some ways they require maybe more care in feeding than less engaged employees, they're not worried about poor performance. So let's listen to Thomas Britt this week on People Performance Radio.

Hi, welcome to People Performance Radio. These is Steve Hunt, today we're talking with Thomas Britt, who's professor of psychology at Clemson University. Thomas, welcome to the show.

Thomas

Thank you Steve, I'm happy to be here.

Steve

So Thomas, I was reading in the Society of Industrial Organizational Psychology web page, which I'm sure everyone reads all the time, but I was reading about some research that you were doing around employee engagement and performance management, it sounded really fascinating. Can you tell us a little bit about this research that you've been doing?

Thomas

Well, this is a research program I began long ago, and it initially centered around what causes employees to become engaged in their work, and to really care about their performance, and I did work for quite some time on really what predicts high levels of employee engagement, and then I started to look at the consequences of engagement for performers and reactions to how well or poorly the employees felt they were doing, and it was in this latter area of research where some counterintuitive findings began to pop up, engagement in the organizational psychology literature is presented as this positive quality that, if you have engaged employees, that you can expect nothing but positive results, but from my perspective, what happens is when employees are engaged in their performance, and they really care about doing well, they might be especially affected by factors in the work environment that prevent them from performing optimally, so it might be the case that, if you're experiencing work overload, and you can't do any one thing well, or you're encountering severe constraints that are preventing you from performing optimally, those kinds of work conditions might affect you even more, if you're highly engaged in what you're doing than if you're disengaged. If you're already disengaged from your job, then these kinds of factors are not going to affect you as much, so it was the consequences of engagement that led me to explore those conditions under which being engaged in the work might exacerbate the effects of negative working conditions.

Steve

Interesting, so basically it sounds like if you're an employee that has high expectations, you want to do a really good job, you're increasingly sensitive to the frustrations if you're not able to do a good job, but if you're disengaged you don't care that you can't get anything done anyhow, so it doesn't bother you that you don't have the resources you need.

So, when you look at that factor that drives people's frustrations, what is it that highly engaged employees tend to get frustrated around the most—is it the people they work with, is it their manager—what is it that makes highly engaged people get frustrated?

Thomas

Well, in the way that we've measured and conceptualized employee engagement, our focus has been on engagement in job performance, so being able to perform in a superior way, and so basically any factors that inhibit the ability to perform are going to presumably be more frustrating for the highly-engaged individual, and I would say that that could be any of the factors that you mentioned, so if you're in a work environment where there is a lot of interpersonal conflict, and that's preventing the team or the organization from performing optimally, then that's going to be frustrating to you, if you're in a work context where your budget's been cut, where you're not being given appropriate supplies and equipment in order to perform well, then that's going to be frustrating for you. If you're in a job where your performance is not rewarded to the extent that you think it's rewarded, and it appears that people are being given pay raises irrespective of how well they do, then that's going to be especially frustrating, so I would say basically, any factor that has the capacity to harm performance has the capacity to be frustrating to those highly engaged workers.

Within the organizational psychology literature, there's often this distinction made between challenge stressors and hindrance stressors, so challenge stressors are those stressors where, if you put forward a lot of effort, and you double up on your motivation, you can overcome them, so stressors related to just workload or work hours, those kinds of things, highly engaged workers can probably address those kinds of stressors, and maybe even end up performing better than they thought they would, but hindrance stressors are stressors that negatively affect your ability to perform, and I would say it's these types of stressors that are especially difficult for really highly engaged workers to put up with for an extended period of time.

Steve

What do you think is the most common hindrance stressor that people run into, these highly engaged employees?

Thomas

Well, I would say, of course with the economy the way it is now, my guess would be that the most common stressor would be a lack of a sufficient budget in order to perform optimally, it could be the lack, in the current economic climate, it's unlikely that pay raises are going to be as substantial and as frequent as they once were, so you could have the case of highly engaged employees not feeling like they're being rewarded for their hard work, and related to the economic crisis, there's this broad category of stressors, in the literature referred to as "organizational constraint", so factors in the work environment that can negatively affect performance, like not having enough supplies, not having a high enough budget, not being given proper guidelines for what's expected, and those types of factors.

In addition, because people are being asked to do more with less, you have the issue of the workload of the employee increasing, and one of the things that we found is when employees perceive high work overload, so they have so much to do that they really can do any one thing well, this kind of stressable condition, what we found in our research was this kind of stressable condition was related to increases in physical symptoms for engaged employees over time, but not for disengaged employees, so those who were engaged were the ones who were likely to report the increased physical symptoms when they were experiencing this condition of not being able to do any one thing well.

Steve

So it's almost like being a highly engaged employee can be bad for your health if you're working for an organization that doesn't support your performance levels?

Thomas

That would be the argument, yes.

Steve

Wow. Now, imagine I'm a manager, and I'm sure there's a lot of managers in the situation where I'm a highly engaged manager, I've got this highly engaged team, I've brought people on to the organization that are just chomping at the bit to do the most they can in their professional area of expertise, but I work within a large organization with a lot of constraints, I don't have the resources, I don't have the budget for compensation, there's a lot of things I can't control as a manager, and I'm starting to see my employees get frustrated, because they're like, "I can't do the good job that I want to do here"—what's something a manager can control themselves, in terms of their own behavior and how they interact with their employees, that's going to help lessen that frustration of their highly engaged employee?

Thomas

Well, one of the things that we found in terms of, we've done a little bit of research examining how leadership can influence employee engagement, and reactions of those who are highly engaged, and one of the factors that appears to be the most important is leaders creating clear expectations for what's expected of employees, so if employees believe that their leader has an accurate and realistic assessment of what they're able to perform and what they're able to do, given budget decreases, or given reductions in equipment and supplies, then that can promote a higher level of engagement, so employees might believe that, if they have clear instructions as to what they're supposed to do, then at least they can strive to achieve those specific outcomes and feel good about their job performance. So one of the factors that I would say, I mean in some ways there's nothing managers can do if the employee is being asked to do more than they're capable of doing, except for, communicate that back to senior management.

Of course, the other thing, one of the ancillary issues that's come out recently in the organizational psychology literature, is reinforcing employees in ways other than financially. Often times, managers feel like, if you praise employees and let them know they're doing a good job, and that you admire the effort they're putting forth in difficult situations, sometimes there's this assumption that employees don't care about that kind of thing, that if they can't have a tangible monetary performance raise, they're not going to be happy, but actually research shows that that type of praise and that type of non-financial motivation can at times be just as effective at motivating employees as the more tangible monetary performance raises.

Steve

Do you think there's an individual difference on that, because I agree with you, and we've seen this too in my own work, that there's a lot of value, and for some employees the non-compensation stuff is almost more valuable to them, but there are other employees that are highly engaged, that are really, "OK, I'm a superstar performer", and they're getting frustrated because they're not getting the tangible resources and rewards they expect, because they're a superstar performer. Do you think there are some employees that, if a manager starts giving them praise, they're going to say, "Don't distract me with your meaningless praise—give me what I want, or what I need?"

Thomas

You know, there's obviously a huge role for individual differences in how employees are going to respond to the different types of reinforcement, and I would say, if you happen to have an employee who you know, in terms of their values, their world is really driven by the desire to acquire more wealth and to accumulate more things, then it's likely the case that praise might not be as effective for those employees, and it might be that those are the types of employees that might find themselves working for multiple companies in order to get the rewards that they desire, based upon the high expectations they have of themselves and of their employers.

One of the points that we made in the research article that, it's interesting, we haven't really tested this yet, but there's not a very strong correlation between employee engagement and organizational commitment, so there is a modest relationship, so certainly, if you're more engaged in your job performance, you're going to be more committed to the organization, but there's a weak enough relationship that you can have a situation with employees who happen to also be committed to the organization, or not committed to the organization. So in some ways, if you can do things to enhance the employees' commitment to the organization, I would believe that you could keep these engaged employees around longer, even when they were facing work conditions that were not optimal for their job performance. It's probably the case of the highly engaged employee who is low in organizational commitment that is going to rather quickly look for other sources of employment in order to be able to perform the way they'd like to.

Steve

So I think it's really fascinating, you're looking at engagement, what I'm hearing is that a lot of companies, they do engagement surveys and are saying, look, just because an employee has high engagement, that is good in telling you, this is probably an employee that's trying their darndest to do the best job they possibly can, but just because they have high engagement does not mean they're going to stay with this company, if we aren't treating them right from their perspective, and recognize that treating them right, for some it's compensation, for some it's resources, for some it's recognition, but you have to understand that, but having a high engagement score of itself doesn't mean everything's great.

Thomas

I think that's true, I think that what the research shows is, in general, engagement is linked to positive outcomes, but if you believe that, when you have engaged employees, that you can leave them alone and not necessarily pay a lot of attention to them, and they'll just go the extra mile for the organization without being properly managed, and I think that that probably is not the case.

Steve

It almost sounds like you need a different management philosophy for highly engaged employees than moderately engaged employees.

I guess that's the last question, are there situation where it's maybe good to not be super high engaged?—whereas actually as an organization is saying, in some cases it's probably OK to have employees that are in a middle range of engagement?

Thomas

I would say that, my guess would be that if you happen to, if employees are doing jobs or performing tasks where the criteria for successful performance are very clearly laid out, and it's rather easy to determine whether performance expectations are being met, then high levels of engagement might not be critical. If they're in a job where those criteria are not very clear, you need the employees to kind of go above and beyond what's required of them, and there's a fair amount of innovation that's expected. Then I would say you probably are going to be in trouble, if you have a workforce that is not highly engaged, it doesn't have those individuals who are constantly looking to excel and improve upon their current status of knowledge and ability.

Steve

So it's almost, maybe I can make a comparison, it's like if you have some jobs, there's a lot of value in having people just being consistent stable performers, and there probably isn't a lot of opportunity for them to excel, you're really looking for consistency, a super high engaged employee is likely to get frustrated in that sort of job, because it's not allowing them to get the resources, do new things, be really innovative, they're not likely to stay, so there are probably some jobs where you need to think, "What do we want?—do we want super high energy, high performing people that are chomping at the bit to always do the next thing? Or do we want somebody who's just going to show up to work every day and do what we ask?” "

Thomas

I think that's accurate, but then it's an interesting challenge about, a lot of it depends on your view of human nature, and your view of the employee, you've got certain theories, but there's new models of thriving at work that kind of makes the assumption that all individuals have this almost innate need to want to feel like they're developing, that they're heading on a trajectory where they're acquiring new skills, and developing new abilities in the context of work. But of course we can go back to Hackman & Oldham's job characteristics model from the '70s, where they noted that some employees don't have this high growth need strength, where they need to have their work imbued with all this extra meaning, they're there to do the job for a pay check, and then they cut it off at the end of the day, and if an employee truly has that mentality, then it's questionable whether interventions designed to increase engagement are really going to have much of an effect on them, but of course I would argue that it remains to be seen if that's the case, or if even employees who appear to be at work simply to perform in order to get the pay check, can their engagement be enhanced, and therefore their performance be increased beyond where it currently is?

Steve

I would agree, I think there's employees, people like to do a good job, and there's always opportunities to do a better job, but I think that you have to think about where you need to focus on that, not every job necessarily requires somebody who is totally 100% focused on, "This is all I care about in life, is this job".

Thomas

Right, I think that's true.

Steve

Well Tom, thank you so much for performing on People Performance Radio, I'd like to get you back some time to talk about the predictors of engagement, we talked a lot about the consequences, and I think some unexpected consequences, that engagement is good but it's not universally good. Can you share where your research is, just tell us and we'll put a link, but where is your most recent research if people want to look at the actual articles, where would they find them?

Thomas

Well, we currently have an article under review that addresses some of what I talked about with organizational constraints; there's a book chapter in a book that is edited by Deborah Nelson and Carrie Cooper, called "The Positive Organizational Behavior", and that's a 2007 article, or 2007 book, and we have a chapter summarizing a lot of our research in that book. We also have a 2005 article in Personality and Social Psychology bulletin that has the data showing that highly engaged employees respond more negatively to work overload than those who are less engaged, and a lot of my early thinking on this was briefly summarized in a Harvard Business Review forethought piece in 2003, that talked about this issue of highly engaged workers not being able to achieve the level of performance that they desire, and so the negative consequences of that.

Steve

Fascinating, great, well we'll put references to those articles on our web page for the podcast, and Thomas, thank you so much for appearing on People Performance Radio.

Thomas

It's been a pleasure to be here, thank you Steve.

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