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August 26, 2022
Is Understanding Employee Psychology the Secret to
Boosting Engagement?
process.st/employee-psychology
Grace Donaldson
August 26, 2022
Human Resources
Long story short: When employees are engaged, they’re more productive (and so is your
organization).
An engaged workforce is the best foundation for a successful company but little attention
is given to what drives that engagement. That’s possibly why 85% of employees aren’t
engaged in the workplace.
A greater understanding of employee psychology will help you hack employee behavior
and get your workforce more engaged.
What is employee psychology?
Employee psychology is focused on why an employee behaves the way they do while
performing their role.
This practice categorizes employee behaviors into predictable patterns. By studying those
patterns, managers can effectively deal with both individual employees and entire teams.

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Understanding employee psychology is incredibly beneficial to companies as it provides
insight into an organization’s greatest asset (their employees). This empowers managers
to effectively deal with different employee personality types.
Employee behaviors have been classified and put into predictable patterns understood as
employee psychology. In better understanding employee psychology, managers can
identify the most effective way to deal with both individual employees and teams of
workers.
Self-Determination Theory: Why employee autonomy improves
motivation
Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory recognizes the importance of autonomy in
employee psychology.
Deci and Ryan found that our overall motivation levels decrease when we believe our
actions are directly linked to an external source. This is because we feel we’re being
controlled.
From this understanding, Self-Determination Theory claims that we will eventually begin
to lose interest in what we’re doing if we don’t have a sense of freedom in how or why
we’re doing it.
This is opposed to intrinsic motivation, which is “the desire to complete a task that comes
from an inherent curiosity and interest in the specific activity itself.”
How can you improve employee autonomy in the workplace?
The best way to make sense of autonomy is to think about it in terms of:
How your employees conduct work
When your employees conduct work
Where your employees conduct work
How autonomy influences how we work
You can’t keep your employees engaged with just a top-down approach. As Locke outlines
in his Goal-Setting Theory, employees need to be included in defining their own targets.
A good way to include this psychological theory is to work in sprints. It’s up to you and
your team to decide what time periods you want to be working with. For example, weekly,
bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly sprints, etc.
During these sprints, you can empower your team members to outline the goals they
believe they can complete to help achieve team targets.
Setting goals that align with the overall business or wider team objectives provides a
greater sense of purpose to employees.

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How autonomy influences when we work
Letting employees choose their own hours is scary. However, trust is a necessary part of
building better employee engagement.
Research has found a clear link between employees’ perceived level of flexibility and
work-life policies. When these two elements are implemented well, there’s longer
expected retention and higher engagement.
Offering flexible hours allows employees to work when they’re most productive. It also
shows that you appreciate their efforts and respect their commitments outside work.
How autonomy influences where we work
We’re big fans of remote working here at Process Street – and we take great pride in being
fully remote before it was trendy
Being able to decide where you work also forms part of supporting employee autonomy.
Some of the benefits include:
Reducing stress from commuting
Providing a better work-life balance
Promoting productivity because employees can work where they’re most
comfortable
Adopting remote work policies into your company culture offers this autonomy. It also
helps attract and retain top talent. A Gallup study has shown that remote work
opportunities play a distinctive role in an employee’s decision to join or leave a company.
How fostering developmental relationships impacts engagement
The outdated concept of “management” has been replaced by a more holistic demand for
leaders who possess the soft skills necessary to empower and enable their teams.
Leaving the carrot/stick method behind shows employees that you’re invested in their
growth and development. The more valued an employee feels by leadership, the more
loyalty and emotional investment they give in return.
Moving from a transactional to transformational leadership
In 1978, Pultizer Prize-winning historian James MacGregor Burns outlined two distinct
approaches to management.
Transactional leadership is centered around performance, organization, and supervision.
Focus is placed on specific tasks while motivation is driven by reward or punishment.
Transformational leadership involves the practice of mutual motivation: Both leaders and
their followers raise each other to higher levels of motivation through cooperation.

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4 actionable steps to achieve transformational leadership
Intellectual stimulation
Intellectual stimulation is all about encouraging people to think independently and figure
out better ways of completing tasks.
Individualized consideration
Do you know what your individual team members need?
Listening to your employees’ needs, and then coaching them towards your desired
outcome is more effective than issuing commands.
This approach requires ongoing communication and support, but it also fulfills an
individual’s need for self-development and boosts intrinsic motivation.
Idealized influence
Employees need to trust you. That means you have to live by what you preach.
“Do as I say, not as I do” just won’t cut it in today’s working environment. You don’t need
to be perfect, but there needs to be a level of consistency between what you say and do. In
essence, idealized influence is all about being a positive role model.
Inspirational motivation
Part of being a good leader is getting people invested in your vision. Strong
communication skills are key.
If people buy into your vision, they are more likely to stay motivated and believe in their
abilities.

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Management support is about showing people you care
Supportive managers should actively mentor their team members.
In 1985, Kathy Kram, now Professor Emeritus of Organizational Behavior at Questrom
School of Business, proposed the concept of “developmental relationships,” an approach
to mentorship based on mutual support.
Instead of the traditional mentor/mentee dynamic, Kram advocates a two-way exchange.
These relationships should be built on effective coaching and counseling, which ultimately
results in a more robust level of management support.
Traditional mentors are often much more useful for people in the early stages of their
careers, whereas developmental relationships can last the duration. Kram’s study showed
that in some cases, developmental relationships lasted almost 30 years!
Handing down instructions and expecting people to do exactly what you say might be one
way to manage people, but it’s not the same as management support.
Modern forms of management, like People Operations, are all about using empathy and
emotional intelligence to build better relationships with your employees. When done
right, people are more willing to invest in their work, which results in better overall:
Motivation
Engagement
Performance
Why employees need meaningful work
In the world of organizational psychology, the concept of meaningfulness encompasses
two things:
The connection we feel toward a task’s purpose
The extent that we feel our work is valued/valuable
Psychological meaningfulness
Psychological meaningfulness occurs when we feel we’re contributing to something bigger
than ourselves
According to William Kahn’s Theory of Employee Engagement, there are three
ingredients required for meaningful work:
Tasks: How challenging, varied, and clearly specified tasks are considered to be
Roles: The prestige or attractiveness of the role
Relationships: The interpersonal relationships and encounters we have with our
co-workers

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By completing tasks that align with both our skills and values, we are made to feel that we
have the opportunity to do what we do best every day. This reinforces our sense of
competence and increases engagement.
How to improve psychological meaningfulness for your employees
The first step is to look at the tasks themselves. It’s essential to have a two-way
conversation with people in your team to provide the right level of challenge and
enjoyment.
You won’t be able to completely accommodate everyone every time, but you can create a
balance between the positive and negative.
Job sharing and agile teams are examples of things you can do to give employees more
freedom to work on projects and areas they enjoy most.
Next, connect those tasks with the bigger picture.
Take the case when John F. Kennedy visited NASA and asked a janitor what his job was.
The man’s response was, “I’m helping send a man to the moon.”
He understood that even seemingly minor tasks played a vital role in the overall
effectiveness of the entire organization.
Why is psychological safety important in the workplace?
You have an exciting idea for a project. What do you do now?
Here are your two options:
1. Share your idea with your team to bring it to life.
2. Keep it to yourself due to fear of rejection.

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The choice you ultimately make depends on how comfortable you feel expressing yourself
within the team. This is known as psychological safety and it comes down to the
confidence employees have in their existing work culture to:
Ask for help
Admit when they don’t know something
Take risks
All of this is done without being afraid of facing negative repercussions.
From studying high-performing teams for two years, Google found that psychological
safety made up one of the five vital elements needed to make a successful team.
William Kahn first made the link between psychological safety and engagement in his
1990 paper Psychological Conditions for Personal Engagement and Disengagement at
Work.
Kahn defined engagement as a worker’s ability to harness their “complete self” at work. In
his research, he identified the three psychological conditions needed for engagement:
Meaningfulness, availability, and safety.
Without these three elements, he believed employees will never be able to become
engaged and reach their full potential.
William Kahn’s “The Ostrich Effect”
Kahn’s “Ostrich Effect” highlighted what possible outcomes might occur when there’s a
lack of psychological safety in the workplace.
While studying work conditions across US-based offices, he found a real-world example of
this:
“There were the engineers and product designers who barely spoke to one another but could
not say why. I found the answer: a misunderstanding between their respective Vice
Presidents had mushroomed into divisional conflict.”
Social factors can reinforce these negative engagement outcomes (and impact
psychological safety). These social factors specifically noted by Kahn are:
The disconnect between managers and teams
Failures in communication lines
Imbalances in power

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How to create a sense of psychological safety in the workplace
You have many options to help offer a safe environment for employees to express
themselves and their opinions.
1. Encourage insightful debate within the team
Team leaders can moderate discussions within their teams that encourage employees to
voice their opinions.
It’s important for managers to monitor these discussions to make sure they aren’t
dominated by some at the expense of others.
2. Embrace collaboration and avoid conflict
You can’t completely avoid conflicts in the workplace. But you can control the way you
react to it.
Avoid creating a fight-or-flight atmosphere by diffusing the situation. By addressing the
situation through respectful discussion, the conflict becomes a collaboration that can
result in a win for all parties.
3. Make receiving feedback from employees easy
Some employees are more introverted than others. And having these introverts in your
team is great for diversity (among other things).
To get the most out of these employees, it’s best to provide your team with various
communication channels to raise any concerns they might have without putting them in
the spotlight.
Confidential surveys and feedback boxes are excellent ways to get employees to voice their
opinions in a way that’s comfortable for them to do so.

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Letting employees do what they do best
“Without a sense of freedom in how (or why) we approach a task, we will eventually begin
to lose interest.”
Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory.
This is the essence of employee motivation and engagement. Providing a supportive
culture that gives employees freedom over their work will drive engagement.
But with freedom comes responsibility. That means your employees take greater
responsibility for the work they’re turning over – and they see how important their effort
is to help achieve the overall business goals.
Just like that, your employee engagement is pushed to the max.
What do you believe is the best way to make your employees feel supported and valued?
Let us know in the comments.
Grace Donaldson
Grace is a content writer with a thirst for knowledge and coffee. You'll find her reading in
a small cafè or singing at a rundown jazz bar when she's not overconsuming coffee or
compartmentalizing her thoughts into a blog post.
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