A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about leadership—something of a first here at Adam Smith, Esq., at least calling it out explicitly by that name—and the topic deserves revisiting and elaboration. My article took off from an HBR piece, Why You Lead Determines How Well You Lead, but it in turn relied on research done by the author and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which provided a wealth of data.
To quickly review the bidding:
- The study covered over 10,000 Army leaders from their entrance into West Point through graduation and about a decade into their careers—about 1 in 5 living graduates of West Point.
- The strength of the dataset was premised on the Army’s standardized annual performance appraisals, comparing officers’ performance to the Army’s leadership framework and gauging the individual’s capacity to lead at a higher level.
When I went back to look at the published source material research, several findings jumped out at me. From the executive summary:
Although people often assume that multiple motives for doing something will be more powerful and effective than a single motive, research suggests that different types of motives for the same action sometimes compete. More specifically, research suggests that instrumental motives, which are extrinsic to the activities at hand, can weaken internal motives, which are intrinsic to the activities at hand. … [Our] results suggest that holding multiple motives [both intrinsic and extrinsic] damages persistence
and performance in educational and occupational contexts over long periods of time.
Viewed from the perspective of the leader of, or even a manager in, a law firm, the findings are both powerful and counter-intuitive, which the authors readily admit:
Logic would suggest that if you have one reason for doing something, having two or more reasons to do the same thing
would be even better, rendering motivation more tenacious, follow-through stronger, and outcomes better. Schools and workplaces are full of systems that attempt to tap people’s internal motives to act (e.g., because engaging in the activity is the
moral, interesting, or meaningful thing to do), while also providing rewards intended to spark instrumental motives to pursue
the same acts (e.g., grades, bonuses, promotions, and so forth).
Let’s back up: A word on terminology.
“Internal,” a/k/a “intrinsic” motivations are factors driving an individual that are internal to the activity itself. A gardener wants to grow a beautiful garden, a scientist wants to advance knowledge, a novelist wants to create an enduring work of literature, a lawyer wants to structure a brilliantly designed deal.
By contrast, “external,” a/k/a “instrumental” motivations are factors whose relation to the actual activity in question are largely arbitrary. The gardener would like to be featured in a magazine, the scientist covets an award, the novelist wants to make the best-seller list, the lawyer wants (you saw this coming, admit it) to be highly compensated.
Now, the nature of human society and economic and marketplace exchange is that all activities, pursued well, tend to produce both effects. Beautiful gardens are, in a fair world, more likely to make magazine features; great scientific discoveries deserve to earn awards; literary merit deserves commercial recognition; and legal brilliance should be well remunerated.
Mixed results are not what this is about; this is about mixed motives. And mixed motives turn out not to work so well.
Here’s the data:
A reader notes in a personal email that one of the more fascinating aspects of the West Point cadet dataset under study here is that it “controls,” insofar as humanly possible, for perverse “good old boy” networking prejudices and favoring, consciously or unconsciously, those who look like you.
While not perfect (women are still a relative novelty, for example), two strong characteristics govern the probability of making commissioned-officer status which are absent in Law Land: (a) Performance reviews are routinized, standardized, and regularized across all cadets for their entire Army careers; and (b) “Ivy League”/school prestige bias is eliminated, by definition, since all are West Point grads.
This makes the revealed power of intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation even more powerful by removing or minimizing the impact of other variables.
Bruce:
I think you are on a rich vein – stewardship – with the considerations on leadership. The West Point study is about as convincing a piece of social-science statistics as I have ever seen. The p-value you cite from the PNAS work is pushing the levels of quality that Jack Welch targeted (actually about 4s, but a man’s reach etc) in adopting the Motorola 6 Sigma notions.
But I have a shadow of a problem. Is it possible that the community of Army officers and the nature of their business is sufficiently different from the community of lawyers in your target Big Law that the populations don’t match? If so, what would that mean?
I have no trouble, and some experience, with the notion that being a professional military office is a sort of vocation, not just a job. And as with other archetypal vocations, the idea that there is a vocation is tied indissolubly with notions of the nature of the community, its history and traditions, and a belief that there is a common goal. “Duty, Honor, Country” is the West Point motto. How many of out firms have a motto, and if there are nay, what is their standing?
I would love to hear from others as well as yourself, perhaps as this sequence works itself out over some time in the future, as to whether and to what extent the nature of the work in Big Law ties well with the sorts of deep underpinning that are (I think) inherent in the Officer Corps and other enterprises where stewardship is well established and honored.
Mark L.