Unleash Employee Potential: Building Commitment Over Compliance in the Workplace

Brief 

Discover the key to unlocking employee motivation and productivity by fostering commitment over compliance in your organisation. Learn how dialogue, influence, and a high-accountability, high-empathy culture can transform your workplace.

 

Insight

Closing the gap between a leader’s expectations and employees’ behaviour is a common challenge in organisations. There are two methods for achieving this: enforcing compliance or building commitment. Enforcing compliance through rewards and punishments can be initially easy, but it becomes increasingly difficult and costly over time. It also stifles debate and relies on coercion, which may lead to resentment and high staff turnover.

Compliance has its place in organisational life, particularly when there is a shared consensus on expected behaviour and appropriate responses to violations. However, in many situations, there is no such consensus, and using compliance to resolve these issues can be unsustainable. Building commitment, on the other hand, encourages active engagement and internal motivation, resulting in employees who are more likely to achieve and surpass goals.

Building commitment is more complex than enforcing compliance but is better suited to managing knowledge workers in contemporary organisations. It aligns with theories of intrinsic motivation, suggesting that job satisfaction and dissatisfaction are separate scales. Committed employees are more likely to persist in the face of challenges due to their intrinsic motivation.

To build commitment, leaders must engage in open dialogue, allowing disagreements to be aired and addressed. This requires a willingness to have tough conversations and explore resistance to expectations. Influencing, rather than coercing, employees to adopt desired behaviours is key to building commitment. Leaders can utilise the principles of likeability, reciprocity, social proof, consistency, authority, and scarcity to exert influence.

Creating a high-accountability, high-empathy culture is essential for transforming shared beliefs into behavioural norms. This requires mutual esteem among members, a willingness to acknowledge norm violations, and withholding esteem as a consequence of violations. In such a culture, employees hold themselves accountable, reducing the need for leaders to police behaviour.

However, building commitment requires significant investments of time, attention, and creative energy from leaders. Many well-intentioned leaders may be unable or unwilling to make these investments, resorting to compliance instead, which works until it suddenly doesn’t.

In conclusion, fostering commitment through dialogue, influence, and a high-accountability, high-empathy culture is a more effective and sustainable approach to closing the gap between leaders’ expectations and employees’ behaviour.

 

Highlight

1. Enforcing compliance through rewards and punishments can be initially easy, but it becomes increasingly difficult and costly over time.
2. Building commitment, on the other hand, encourages active engagement and internal motivation, resulting in employees who are more likely to achieve and surpass goals.
3. To build commitment, leaders must engage in open dialogue, allowing disagreements to be aired and addressed. This requires a willingness to have tough conversations and explore resistance to expectations.

 

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Related Questions:

• What is an example of employee commitment?
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• How do you demonstrate employee commitment?