In my previous article, Good Insights On Managing Knowledge Workers, I concluded that "Empowering an employee is the only way to harness the talent that the company has and is a very challenging feat."  However, this is only the first step in the process.  Since posting that entry, I have been researching the psychology of motivation.

In psychology, the process of learning new behaviors or responses as a result of their consequences is called conditioning.  I believe that the average employee has been conditioned to follow orders, to keep quiet, and do the minimum amount of work.  Through their experiences at previous jobs or projects, employees have picked up an attitude that prevents them from accepting empowerment even if given full authority to make their own decisions.

The first job of a project manager in this situation is to condition the employee to respond positively to empowerment.  The PM has to encourage positive behaviors and diminish the negative ones.  There are four commonly accepted methods of reinforcement to do just that:

• Positive Reinforcement. Something positive provided after a response in order to increase the probability of that response occurring in the future. For example, recognizing that an employee has stayed late last night and saying "thank you."  The most common types of positive reinforcement or praise and rewards, and most of us have experienced this as both the giver and receiver.
• Negative Reinforcement. Think of negative reinforcement as taking something negative away in order to increase a response. For example, nagging the employee to fill out his weekly timesheet on time until they start doing it automatically. The elimination of this negative stimulus is reinforcing and will likely increase the chances that the employee will fill out their timesheet next week.
• Punishment. Punishment refers to adding something aversive in order to decrease a behavior. The most common example of this is disciplining an employee for being late. The reason we do this is because the employee begins to associate being punished with the negative behavior. The punishment is not liked and therefore to avoid it, he or she will stop behaving in that manner.
• Extinction. When you remove something in order to decrease a behavior, this is called extinction. You are taking something away so that a response is decreased.  An example of this is removing an employees internet access to discourage them from playing games during work time.

Being aware of how our actions reinforce behaviors is something that project managers need to keep in mind.  Have you ever let an employee slide with a poor excuse in a status meeting?  If you have, you just used positive reinforcement with an undesired behavior.