Employees uniformly report that it is risky and foolish not to deliver products that add high value to customers, often expressing disdain for those who don't get this. Powerhouse employees are similarly pro-active about developing the high skill level needed to create such products. Most such employees experience high motivation and deliver high productivity in a disciplined emotional economy. Here is another crucial aspect of motivation that surprises most people. Most extraneous emotional risk in the workplace comes down to a single wastefully distracting emotional downside.
People automatically treat low emotional status as a basic adaptive threat.
We typically arouse ourselves to this threat with perceptions of unfairness and feeling of distrust toward those whom we perceive to have, or to be jockeying for, high emotional status. We usually respond to unfairness and distrust by engaging those strategies in our behavioral skills, which we believe will best limit our vulnerability to the unfavorable emotional status differential. However, if you have not changed the basic operation of your emotional risk economy, your people quickly drift back to the same old undisciplined behavior patterns. So, for all your trouble, your competitive position is not substantially improved in any sustained way and may even be weakened as a result of all of the resources you've diverted and upheaval you've created. The key here is to try to motivate your employees to change their wicked ways.