You Oughta Know Marylène Gagné

You Oughta Know: The Motivation Series

Welcome to You Oughta Know: The Motivation Series. Today’s guest is Marylène Gagné. Marylène is a Professor at the Future of Work Institute in the Faculty of Business and Law at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. The Institute promotes productive and meaningful work as essential foundations of a healthy economy and society. Marylène's research examines how organizations, through their structures, cultures, rewards, tasks, and management, affect people’s motivational orientations towards their work.

(Note, at different times during the discussion, Marylène’s office lights went out and that is what we refer to when we say, “whoops…”)

Our discussion today will focus on various types of work environments- specifically in how pay and other compensation and benefit models affect motivation, productivity, and performance. Of course, we talk about many other related topics in the context of work, as well.

SHOW NOTES:

Marylène refers to Edward Deci, one of the co-founders (along with Richard Ryan), of Self-Determination Theory (SDT). Ed and Rich spent a bulk of their careers at the University of Rochester.

During the conversation, Marylène provides a quick overview of SDT. She explains the different types of motivation one might experience according to the theory.

We discuss how organizations can reconcile the business agendas for profit and control with what SDT offers. We explore management control systems and how they can undermine the basic psychological needs. We also explore various methods leaders and managers can use to better align to needs satisfaction and ultimately, better levels of well being. We talk about how can we set a good, needs supportive culture.

We chat about the long-term benefits SDT alignment can have.

Marylène shared an historical perspective on management styles and how they have morphed as organizational structures and strategic objectives have shifted.

Marylène also discusses agency theory, and how it is in direct opposition to SDT. She provides a bit of history of that theory and the implications of its promotion— especially as it continues to get promoted in business schools.

We go deeper on the comp structures of sales organizations and whether it is even possible for sales professionals to identify and integrate the value of their work while striving to meet quotas and their other numbers.

Ultimately, we discuss the need for employees to reach that level of identification and integration of why they do what they do. In other words, supporting ways for employees to care about their work authentically.

One can summarize our discussion about how organizations should ultimately “do no harm” to their employees. That they should support the authentic, substantiative, and interesting work people can do. Organizations should have good work design in place and they should avoid doing silly, pointless efforts that employees perceive as banal, like yoga classes or stress management— rather… fix the work environment.

We talk a bit about leadership, specifically leadership development. Matt references the work of Jeffrey Pfeffer. The popular text he wrote on the topic is called Leadership BS. And he mentions Barbara Kellerman, from Harvard, who has written several popular books on the subject, Specific to Leadership Development issues is her book, Professionalizing Leadership. Both Pfeffer and Kellerman also have several academic papers supporting their work, as well. Shameless plug, Matt summarized the issues associated with Leadership Development here. https://bit.ly/3QwRPLI. It is a free download.

We talk about the impact the pandemic has had on well being. What we thought would happen, and what did happen. Marylène references Nick Bloom from Stanford, and his research on hybrid work. He wrote a paper with Ruobing Han and James Liang on how it is working out. You can find that paper here: https://www.nber.org/papers/w30292

Some of Marylène’s current research work is on the motivational effects on the workers in the gig economy. We spend some time discusses her recent work in this area. The topic of Nudging rears its head again.

The best place to find Marylène is on LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/marylène-gagné-411532/

Marylène has written extensively on the applications and research of SDT in the context of work. A recent and favorite recommendation of ours was published in 2022 in Nature Reviews Psychology. She and her co-authors wrote a wonderful piece called, Understanding and shaping the future of work with self-determination theory.

You can find it, the other co-authors, and the formal citation here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44159-022-00056-w#citeas