Mike Gotta on the role of organizational culture in the quality of peoples’ participation in work tasks:

When interviewees spoke of “culture”, their anecdotes revealed a spectrum of issues that influence the degree to which employees choose to participate in work-related activities. The role an employee has in a business activity compels him or her to perform a task and contribute certain information. However, the depth or richness of actions taken and information shared on a voluntary basis beyond what that role minimally demands can vary tremendously based on cultural influences.

Prompts like assignments, requests for information, and goals are extrinsic – external to the individual, and therefore only able to generate the minimum necessary response.

For instance, working together to put out an RFP, or respond to an RFP, can be a highly collaborative endeavor. If you are assigned to that activity – you will work together. But people don’t always do the best job they can, or should, in terms of collaborating with each other. People inside the team (or outside the team for that matter), may not fully contribute – even if they see, or are given, the opportunity. It might be for no other reason other than they simply chose not to fully engage and take action. Why?

Culture, on the other hand, is directly connected to intrinsic prompts – if the organization’s culture aligns with an employee’s internal values, motivations, and passions, that employee will feel an intrinsic desire to contribute at a higher level.

Max Bazerman of Harvard Business School addresses the potentially adverse effect of relying too much on goals instead of intrinsic motivation:

Research shows that an even stronger effect than goals is intrinsic motivation, having individuals do an activity because they find the work rewarding in and of itself. Given that goals can undermine this intrinsic value of work, sometimes the best solution is no specific stretch goal at all or at the very least mastery or learning goals (there is a growing set of research that shows “learning or mastery” goals have much more positive effects on performance and internal motivation than “performance” goals.)

I do not need someone to set a stretch goal for me. I am happy to help make HBS, Harvard, and the broader society a better place. And if I do not want externally imposed stretch goals, and believe that I do not need them, I think there are many others out there in the same condition.