Nudge Blog & Employee Motivation in Cartoons | Psych at Work »
I just discovered this entry on the Nudge Blog (their tagline is “improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness”). It’s an illustrated/cartoonized version of Dan Pink’s talk on what motivates employees and what doesn’t and I’ve embedded it here (below). It highlights the point that money isn’t always or the only solution. I love to see intelligent research and findings explained in creative ways like this and so I just had to spotlight it here! (The Nudge Blog is also pretty awesome and I definitely recommend it!)
Women’s Perfectionism and Workplace Ambition
I read a lot about women in the workplace. The “Marci Alboher, Working the New Economy’s Blog” had a recent article debating whether women were less titled in the workplace because they were less ambitious. One of the commentators was saying that women are not less interested in success, but they are less interested in being recognized by others for their success. This seemed plausible, but I also found it less than convincing.
Wednesday, I got the following statistic from HBR (it was The Daily Stat email),
Women Are More Likely to Be Perfectionists A study of 288 employed American adults published in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology found that more women than men felt they did not meet their own high standards either at work or at home. 38% of women and 24% of men said their job performance did not meet their own standards. 30% of women felt they were failing to meet their home and family commitments at a high enough standard, compared to 17% of men. Source: Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology via BBC News
It made me think that women are less likely to want to be recognized or less likely to ask for a promotion mostly because they evaluate their own performance more harshly than their male colleagues do. This makes a lot more sense to me than most other explanations I have heard. Thanks HBR!
