The way you’re treated at your job can affect your drive. A recent study shows that motivation increases when people are treated as partners while working together with others, even if they’re physically apart.
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The study, from Stanford University, covered social cues and how they can affect the mental state of people working together as a team. After five different experiments — several weeks in length — researchers found that participants who were treated as partners or team members persisted longer on challenging tasks, expressed more interest in the enjoyment of their work, required less self-regulation to stay on their task, and became more engaged with their work. Gregory Walton, a professor of psychology at Stanford and co-author of study, explains:
“Our research found that social cues that conveyed simply that other people treat you as though you are working together on a task — rather than that you are just working on the same task but separately — can have striking effects on motivation.”
Group projects don’t have to be gruelling slog through conflicting perspectives. Treating others on your team like they are important aspects of your project can make communication and collaboration much easier.
Cues of working together fuel intrinsic motivation [Journal of Experimental Social Psychology via Stanford News]
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