Teresa Amabile on the science of motivation

To some, the findings of Teresa Amabile’s book, The Progress Principle, might now seem obvious. But her meticulous research and irrefutable data proved something that has helped change management approaches across business.

Words by

Mark Espiner

Illustrations by

Nigel Buchanan

How did you come to research what makes people motivated, productive, happy and creative at work?

I really appreciate that question because it allows me to go back, oh my goodness, almost 30 years now. I had done a lot of research before the mid-90s looking at creativity in organizations at a 30,000-foot level, like you’re flying in a plane and looking down at the landscape of work inside organizations without really knowing at a more detailed microscopic level what happens day by day that leads people to be motivated toward creative productivity in their work. I didn’t know how these great or awful work environments arise. I wanted to get in there at a more microscopic level. And that’s what motivated this research of using daily diaries to, in a way, try to crawl inside people’s heads and experience in as close to real time as we could, experience through their eyes, through their words – what they were experiencing every day at work.

What was your reaction to finding that a sense of progress was a key motivator?

Our most important breakthrough finding was that people’s inner work life, and hence their ability to do great work, depends most prominently, most importantly, on progress in the work – even if it’s small, seemingly small, incremental progress. That’s the progress principle. I did not expect that. Steve [Kramer, her husband and co-author] didn’t expect that. What I expected we would find was moments of being recognized or praised for your work as the most important boost to your psychological state. I was so surprised when I saw progress as the single most important event. And it wasn’t by a little – it was by a huge margin. I thought it had to be a mistake, so I insisted that we had to rerun the analyses. But it was not a mistake. So I don’t fault anyone who may have somewhat skeptical reactions because I was a little skeptical when I first saw it. I think now – to me, of course – it makes perfect sense. But at the time it didn’t.

A foot wearing a polished black dress shoe and blue pinstriped trousers steps upward onto an abstract, light blue geometric staircase.

Beyond the Paycheck

An emerita professor at Harvard Business School, Teresa Amabile has spent decades studying creativity and motivation. Her 2011 book The Progress Principle and 2024’s Retiring use a storytelling style to relate the conclusion of years of research: Money and other incentives don’t boost productivity, but a sense of progress does. This interview was conducted via the Global Peter Drucker Forum. 

“People’s inner work life, and hence their  ability to do  great work, depends most prominently on progress.”

Teresa Amabile

How did the business community react to your findings?

Their initial reaction was: "It’s obvious. Everybody knows that." And it was kind of dismissive. But I knew by reading these 12,000 diaries that managers and leaders sure didn’t act like they knew this progress principle. Their behaviors suggested that they weren’t even really paying attention to the progress their people were able to make day by day. So I tried to think about what can we do to make it clear that this is something people need to pay attention to. And that’s where we came up with the idea of doing this additional, very small study to survey almost 700 business leaders at different levels and give them a simple survey question. Here are five employee motivators. Rank order them in importance. And what we found was that progress came in dead last in the survey of nearly 700 managers. Only 5% of the respondents rated progress number one. So it’s like they were actively downgrading progress. It’s like they were actively saying, okay, this is not something that matters. Near the start of talks on this research, I often ask audiences to guess what the number one employee motivator is. After a few people give their answers, I say: "I’ll tell you about it in a few minutes. But I will tell you that none of the guesses that the people in this room have just shouted out loud are the answer." Later in the talk, when people see that progress is the number one motivator, and that only 5% of managers realize that, our findings no longer seem so obvious.

Their initial reaction was: “Well, sure, yeah, it’s obvious. Everybody knows that. Yeah, you feel great when you make progress in your work. Sure.” And it was kind of dismissive. But I knew by reading these 12,000 diaries that managers and leaders sure didn’t act like they knew this progress principle. Their behaviors suggested that they weren’t even really paying attention to the progress their people were able to make day by day. So I tried to think about what can we do to make it clear that this is something people need to pay attention to. And that’s where we came up with the idea of doing this additional, very small study to survey almost 700 business leaders at different levels and give them that simple survey question. Alright: Here are five employee motivators. Rank order them in importance. And what we found was that progress came in dead last in the survey of nearly 700 managers. Only 5% of the respondents rated progress number one. So it’s like they were actively downgrading progress. It’s like they were actively saying, okay, this is not something that matters. I ask them to guess what is the number one employee motivator. And I say, I’ll keep you on a cliffhanger for a little while – I’ll tell you about it in a few minutes. But I will tell you that none of the guesses that the people in this room have just shouted out loud are the answer. Then when people see what I show them, that yes, recognition and reward do matter, the reaction isn’t skeptical.

Has this emphasis on progress become more embedded in business practice since the book came out?

I like to believe that it’s become more prominent in the minds of managers. I see it often referenced in business articles, even sometimes without a reference to our book, which in a way kind of disappoints me. But actually, that means to me that it has become part of the general gestalt of business knowledge.

A man wearing a light blue t-shirt and dark pants leans through the triangular opening of a giant, solid blue letter A. He grips the lower edge of the cutout, looking downward.

Build your development path with the four “A”s

Alignment

Work toward a good fit between your self – your identities, values – and your life structure, everything important in your life.

Awareness

Develop a sense of the self you are now – not who you used to be – and how the dynamics in your life structure are affecting you.

Agency

If your life structure isn’t satisfactory, or viable for the longer term, exercise agency and make the needed changes.

Adaptability

The truth is that many things are out of our control. So, when we don’t have agency, we need to accept and adapt.

Tell me a bit more about journaling. It was a key tool in your book — so have you continued using it yourself or applied it in other ways?

When we were finishing this book, I said: “Steve, we’ve seen the power of journaling.” So many of our 238 participants told us: “This has been an incredibly useful exercise for me these past months. I feel that I’ve become more aware of what helps and hinders my own work.”

And a few of them even asked us: "Can you continue sending me these diary forms every day?" We didn’t have the infrastructure to do that, but we encouraged them to do it on their own. Since then, I’ve been keeping a daily journal myself and find it very helpful. I have had one MBA student who started journaling when she took my course at Harvard Business School and who then became very prominent in business several years ago. She said she found it so useful that she’s never going to give it up. She credited the journaling with being able to start her entrepreneurial business, which became an international sensation. She came back years after she graduated and told me that she credited her journaling, which she found so useful, and which she kept up. I think she’s still journaling and it’s now about 20 years since she took the course.

In the book we provide journaling guides for leaders. We also provide a checklist which we hope they will use.

What advice would you give C-suite executives about connecting strategic vision to day-to-day progress?

I’d advise people in the C-suite of any company to devote at least 5% of their attention over the course of a month, or a year, to what’s happening in the trenches, on the ground, on the front lines – whatever expression you want to use. Because those are the people who are tasked with carrying out your beautiful strategy. It doesn’t matter how insightful and innovative and breakthrough your strategy is if it is not effectively implemented. And ultimately, it’s your workforce that’s implementing your strategy. So you need to have ways of understanding what is facilitating or hindering their progress in carrying out the strategy and what is facilitating or hindering their well-being in the workplace. Because if they have poor well-being, if they have poor inner work life, they are not going to be able to do their best work.

I’d advise people in the C-suite of any company to devote at least 5% of their attention over the course of a month, or a year, to what’s happening in the trenches, on the ground, on the front lines – whatever expression you want to use. Because those are the people who are tasked with carrying out your beautiful strategy. It doesn’t matter how insightful and innovative and breakthrough your strategy is if it is not effectively implemented. And ultimately, it’s your workforce that’s implementing your strategy. So you need to have ways of understanding what is facilitating their progress in carrying out the strategy, what is tangibly facilitating it and what’s facilitating their well-being in the workplace. Because if they have poor well-being, if they have poor inner work life, they are not going to be able to do their best work.

“It doesn’t matter how insightful and innovative and breakthrough your strategy is if it is not effectively implemented.”

Teresa Amabile

The power of a small win

The most ordinary, incremental progress can increase engagement and boost happiness. Clear goals, respect and recognition are some of the factors that set the tone to turn the completion of even a small job into a meaningful motivator.

If you were doing this research today, with AI helping you perhaps, how would you change things?

I want to say something about the historical time period in which we did this research: I do not believe that we could get people in business to fill out these diaries now. We just couldn’t because people have so much coming at them every day. We would not get 75% rates of response if we did this today. I believe that AI could be extremely helpful if we were analyzing the data today in a few ways. One way would just be categorizing the events. But beyond that, I hope we wouldn’t rely more than that on AI, because I believe that our human brains were necessary to creatively interpret what we were seeing, what patterns were emerging, and to be able to understand the emotionality in what people said, how they said it. I don’t think AI is nearly at the point that it could do that effectively.

From progress you moved on to the topic of retirement. Why did you choose that as your next research subject?

The interest in retirement did actually arise from the progress principle research. Because after we published the book, after we had kind of wrapped up that project, I found myself wondering: “Okay, if progress in meaningful work is so important to people’s psychological well-being day by day during their careers, what happens when that meaningful work goes away? What happens psychologically when it ends? And how do people deal with that?” So it was that motivating question – “what happens when meaningful work ends?” – that drove me to want to deeply research retiring as a transition.

So, is there a right way to retire?

No. There is no single right way. To tell you the truth, I was kind of hoping we’d find some secret recipe, the silver bullet. And that was a silly expectation. We found that there are multiple approaches to having a smooth transition into a satisfying retirement life. But there was one clear commonality. Everyone who retires from a career has to engage in four tasks to complete their retirement transition. The first is deciding when and how to retire. The second is detaching from work. Not just tangibly but most importantly, psychologically detaching from your work. The third is building a provisional retirement life for yourself by exploring and experimenting with new places to be, new activities, new groups. And then there is the fourth task, which is consolidating a more or less stable retirement life from those provisional elements that seem to work best for you.

Mark Espiner

About the author

As a journalist, author and cultural commentator, Mark Espiner has reported on music and the arts for the Guardian, the Sunday Times, BBC Radio 3, the Evening Standard, Time Out and the Financial Times. He wrote a regular column for Berlin’s Tagesspiegel and also worked as a cultural commentator for Deutsche Welle.