Motivation is a design decision

Series「People Don't Follow the Org Chart」 · Part 10 of 13 · Part 3 · Why people put in effort
Prologue：The people who aren't on the org chart

Two companies hire similar people. A year later, one company's staff are highly motivated and the other's are coasting. Managers usually explain it as luck, or as misjudging candidates. The more likely explanation: the two companies have different org charts.

Three things

From the 1970s onward, psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan developed self-determination theory. Its conclusion: intrinsic motivation depends on three basic psychological needs being met. Autonomy, feeling that what you do is your own decision. Competence, feeling that you can do it and are getting better. Relatedness, feeling genuinely connected to the people around you. With all three present, people engage on their own; with one missing, engagement has to be propped up by external pressure.

The theory has been tested for forty years in education, healthcare, sport and the workplace, and is among the best-supported in motivation research. The dispute is mainly over external rewards: early studies found that money undermines intrinsic motivation, while later meta-analyses found it depends on how the reward is given, and performance-contingent rewards don't undermine it under some conditions. The three needs themselves are rarely questioned.

Each one maps onto a structural decision

Most companies read the theory as a behavior checklist for managers: delegate more, praise more, more team-building. None of that is wrong, but all of it uses managers' personal effort to patch structural gaps. The three needs actually correspond to three organizational design decisions, and if the structure is right, managers don't have to patch every day.

Autonomy maps onto reporting lines. How many bosses a person has, how many approval levels, which things they can decide alone: these are written on the chart, and they determine how much "I decided this" a person feels each day. Dual reporting, three-level approvals, everything going to HQ: in that structure, the most delegating manager alive can't produce autonomy. The process suffocation in the previous post damages exactly this.

Competence maps onto the grade ladder. Competence comes from "I'm getting better and I can see it." If a grade takes five years to climb, or nobody can state the criteria, there is no visible progress. The number of rungs, the criteria for each, the average time from one to the next: these are structural decisions that no amount of managerial encouragement can replace.

Relatedness maps onto team size. Genuine connection needs frequent, face-to-face, reciprocal interaction, and that has a headcount ceiling (see the Dunbar post). In a team of twenty reporting to one person, relatedness can't form, and not because the manager isn't trying.

The design decision: check each one

When drawing or redrawing an org chart, use the three as a checklist with one concrete question each.

Autonomy: name three things a person in this role can decide without asking. If you can't list three, the reporting or approval line is too tight. Competence: what are the criteria for moving from this role to the next grade, and how long does it take on average? If there's no answer, the ladder is decorative. Relatedness: how many people does this person have genuine working exchanges with each week? More than fifteen or fewer than three deserves a look.

In Japan entities the problems concentrate in the first two. HQ approval lines push autonomy to the floor, and the traditional seniority-based grade system makes competence nearly invisible: promotion by years, not by how well you do. In an organization missing both, people lean on the third, relatedness, which is why Japanese teams are often highly cohesive and not very motivated.

Back to the diagnosis

The core layer of my organizational diagnosis looks at drivers, which are these three needs in different words. In a diagnosis I hold the three against the org chart and ask which one the structure is pressing down on. Most "our people aren't motivated" engagements end not with a people problem but with one of the three structurally blocked. The inner two layers people actually leave over, in the exit-survey post, are these.

On your org chart, how many things can a front-line employee decide without asking?

In this series
Previous：Four kinds of relationships, and why pay design goes wrong
Next：Pay removes complaints. It doesn't create commitment.