In a world of constant stimulation, it appears people are less and less motivated at work. Gallup’s 2024 ‘State of the Global Workplace’ report found that only 21% of employees feel actively engaged and motivated at work. Gone are the days when the motivation to work was ‘having a job,’ and few employees give tons of extra effort simply because the boss tells them to. In the context of changing workplace power dynamics, stricter governance, and increasing legislative requirements, applying the wrong type of pressure to drive performance can lead to significant reputational, financial, and legal risk. Motivating teams in a way that enhances psychosocial safety is one of the biggest challenges for leaders.
Stimulation, or what is known as ‘arousal’ in psychology, is a concept people tend to think about in a particular context, but that context is rarely business performance. Stimulation essentially refers to someone’s energy level, whether they are in a high or low energy state. This can be extrapolated to indicate motivation levels, but they’re not exactly the same. While everyone knows what it’s like to be under-stimulated or unmotivated at work, few recognize that we can also be over-stimulated and over-motivated.
The old saying, ‘everything in moderation’ is particularly applicable to stimulation and motivation – if people are under-stimulated or under-motivated, they drift into boredom, distraction, and stimulus-seeking behaviours. Conversely, when they are overly stimulated or overly motivated, this can create a nervous energy that decreases their focus and attention, limiting what they can think about, how they think about it, and how much they focus on essential tasks. The organizations and leaders who understand, measure, and have specific strategies to manage stimulation as a psychosocial risk and opportunity have a distinct competitive advantage
Understanding stimulation
Stimulation and motivation levels have long been identified as critical to business performance. In 1908, the Yerkes–Dodson law highlighted the relationship between pressure and performance, and in his book ‘Flow’, Csikszentmihalyi outlined the concept of a ‘flow state’ where people are at their best when the challenge of a task is proportional to the capability of the individual to perform that task. More recently, Smith developed the concept of ‘optimal stimulation’ – the level of mental stimulation at which physical performance and learning are maximized. All of these are about performance optimization at a certain point between maximum and minimum energy levels.
There are countless books and articles about work needing to be meaningful and not overly repetitive. This is in no small part about reducing psychological risk, yet it is also about performance. Highly repetitive tasks are far more likely to leave people under-stimulated, leading them to engage in stimulus-seeking behaviours. Annoying other people is inherently stimulating, but it can negatively impact interpersonal and team dynamics.
While overstimulation or being overly motivated doesn’t sound bad, it is a big challenge many businesses face for one simple reason: being successful means solving problems for customers, colleagues, or the community. A problem is, by definition, a problem because it has not yet been solved, and finding solutions requires a journey into the unknown. This is the essence of the ‘problem-solving paradox’ – solving problems raises people’s stimulation, yet raised stimulation can prevent people from staying focused on problems and solutions.
Solving business problems requires mental focus and flexibility – thinking ‘outside the box’ to find innovative solutions while staying ‘inside the box’ focused on the problem rather than distracted by other things. The right level of stimulation and motivation enhances focused and flexible thinking. If someone becomes overly stimulated, this decreases their mental flexibility as they narrow their options in an unconscious attempt to reduce their stimulation. Yet by narrowing those options, they simultaneously undermine their ability to create a new solution.
You would think businesses would work hard to avoid under-stimulating tasks that lead to boredom and inhibit problem-solving. Still, in their quest to engineer consistent and scalable ways of working that drive profitability, businesses often create monotonous, repetitive workplace processes and operating rhythms. Ironically, their quest for efficiency and effectiveness often dilutes their ability to create a high-performance culture.
Measuring stimulation
Most businesses are trying to get a handle on their people's motivation, measuring employee advocacy, engagement, satisfaction, and even happiness. Many only indicate if the team feels like they are performing, rather than measuring what is enabling performance. To get a handle on whether the team is primed to perform, businesses must measure their people's stress and distress levels and how this impacts their confidence when applying their skills at work. The level of stress and distress experienced by the team will be directly related to the level of stimulation and other psychosocial risk factors such as anxiety, conformity, and ambiguity. Still, stimulation is perhaps the toughest for leaders to measure and manage.
Stimulation is different from anxiety, conformity, and ambiguity, where low levels are generally good for performance and high levels impede performance – very few people function better with lots of anxiety or ambiguity. Stimulation is more complex as it requires getting people ‘in the zone’ with the right stimulation level relative to the situations and challenges they face. While the optimal level is variable and contextual, what can be measured is how well a leader reads and adapts to people and situations to moderate the level of stimulation, creating and sustaining the right level to create the right level of energy to perform. To learn more about measuring a leader’s impact in critical psychosocial safety risk areas, check out https://tgsleadership.com/knowledge-hub/psychosocial-risk-factors-asca.
Strategies to manage stimulation
First and foremost, it is important to recognize that to manage the stimulation levels of their team effectively, leaders need the innate personality to deal with their own stimulation, anxiety, and ambiguity so they can focus on solving problems for their people, driving performance and results without burning people out. This allows them to avoid the mistakes made by ineffective and toxic leaders who can create more problems than they solve.
In an effort to get people thinking outside the box, some leaders push and pressure their teams to make this happen. The problem with this is that overstimulated people simply can’t do this because staying ‘in the box’, focused on what is known, is what they do unconsciously to lower their energy levels. Overstimulated teams tend to replicate rather than innovate, reproducing and repackaging the same solutions they’ve tried before.
There are a variety of techniques effective leaders use to manage stimulation. One technique is changing the criteria for success to raise the team's confidence. When they experience more success, their level of stimulation lowers as their belief in their own skill rises and the fear of the unknown decreases – they are cool, calm, and collected when problems arise. As a simple example, a leader might choose to measure the team on metrics more in their control, shifting the focus to inputs and activity rather than outputs and results. This is one of the keys to unlocking a high-performance culture. Focusing people on building their skills and knowledge to enable better problem solving can also enhance confidence.
Another technique is to lower the consequences of failure. Often, the fear of failure and consequences adds to overstimulation in teams. Effective leaders instill a culture of ‘it’s ok to not know and ask for help’, or ‘fail fast and learn’,where failure is genuinely seen as a positive step in the learning journey. Organizations with these cultures lower the perceived risk of failing, which lowers stimulation and improves problem-solving. This approach is often referred to as agile working and fostering a culture of vulnerability. This challenges businesses and leaders accustomed to old-school management techniques where failure is something to be feared and avoided at any cost – people become so focused on avoiding the consequences that thinking and energy are diverted away from solving the problem.
In a world of compounding problems and constant stimulation, leaders need to be even better at balancing driving results without burning people out. To survive and thrive in turbulent times, leaders need a unique blend of personality, virtues, and motivation to manage stimulation and other psychosocial risk factors. Boards, CEOs, WHS experts, Recruiters, and People & Culture teams need to accurately measure how leaders really think and behave so they mitigate the legislative and commercial risk of poor psychosocial safety in the business.
To find out more about how your organization can measure and improve your leaders’ impact on stimulation and other psychosocial risk factors, talk to us: http://tgsleadership.com
