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2005 Early Researcher Awards WinnersAdam Grant and Kyle Smith Adam Grant
My research introduces a different approach to work redesign. Rather than redesigning tasks, it is possible to enhance motivation by changing the relational architecture of the work. I propose that employees can be motivated to invest additional time and energy in jobs and tasks that are relationally architected to provide opportunities for contact with the people who benefit from the work (see Grant, in press, Academy of Management Review). My students and I conducted two randomized, controlled experiments that tested this hypothesis and examined the mechanisms underlying it. Experiment 1 was a longitudinal field experiment in a fundraising organization. Although a significant portion of the donations raised by callers was channeled directly toward undergraduate student scholarships, callers did not have the opportunity to interact with these student beneficiaries. We divided callers into three conditions to examine whether contact with these student beneficiaries would enhance caller motivation. Callers in the interpersonal contact condition had the opportunity to interact for ten minutes with a student scholarship winner. For the callers in the two control conditions, one condition read a letter from the student, and the other condition did not have any exposure to the student. One month later, over the course of one week, callers who met the student spent significantly more time on the phone and secured more donation money than their control condition counterparts. Further, the persistence and performance of the callers in the control conditions did not change, whereas callers who met the student spent 142% more minutes on the phone, and secured 171% more money, than they had before the intervention. Merely interacting with a beneficiary of their work substantially enhanced caller motivation, as observed in their persistence and job performance. In Experiment 2, we moved to the laboratory to examine the boundary conditions for this effect and the psychological mechanisms underlying it. We asked undergraduates to edit peers’ job application cover letters, and varied contact with beneficiaries and the impact of the task on beneficiaries (the degree to which the editing made a significant difference in their lives). Contact with beneficiaries and task impact interacted to increase persistence. These effects were mediated by increases in perceived impact on, and affective commitment to, beneficiaries. In summary, many employees do work that makes a positive difference in other people's lives, but lack the opportunity to have contact with their beneficiaries. This research suggests that even minimal, brief opportunities for contact with beneficiaries can enhance employee motivation. I am grateful to be a beneficiary of the APA Early Research Award, and look forward to additional research connecting employees in diverse jobs and organizations to the beneficiaries of their work. Kyle Smith
In addition to this work, Smith has a number of noteworthy accomplishments including a prestigious NIH training grant. He has also presented his research at the annual Society for Neuroscience conference and his work has been published in a leading journal in the field, The Journal of Neuroscience. His advisor, Dr. Kent Berridge describes Smith as a “truly outstanding graduate student researcher” and “valued colleague”. His accomplishments exceed those of most graduate students, which is why he is so deserving of this award. Undoubtedly, Smith is well on his way to becoming an important player in the quest to bridge neuroscience and psychology.
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In recent years, scholars have devoted extensive attention to increasing employee motivation by redesigning work tasks. However, these efforts are costly and time-consuming, and the extent to which tasks can be redesigned is often limited by the requirements and expectations of customers, clients, and suppliers. Accordingly, work redesign interventions often have mixed effects and unintended consequences.
Kyle Smith is this year’s winner of the APA Science Student Council Early Research Award in Basic Science. Smith is currently a fourth year graduate student at the University of Michigan in the laboratory of Dr. Kent Berridge. His research focuses on how brain systems generate sensations of pleasure and desire. The work for which he won the award is entitled “The Ventral Pallidum and Hedonic Reward: Neurochemical Maps of Sucrose ‘Liking’ and Eating.” In this study, Smith developed a novel microinjection and mapping procedure to identify the regions in the ventral pallidum that control eating behavior and enhance taste “liking” in rats. He did this by injecting specific chemicals into the brain and measuring taste reactivity, motivated behaviors, and neuronal activity. He found that some signals cause reward to be more pleasurable or "liked" and also more desirable or "wanted, while others cause "wanting" without causing "liking." His work has provided important insight into the mechanisms that underlie natural reward systems and has important implications for a number of social problems, including eating disorders and drug addiction. Smith’s work has been well received in the scientific community, prompting one journal reviewer to say that his study “may be the most careful microinjection study ever done.” Smith’s future work will look at how different brain areas interact to influence liking and wanting, as well as, the neural code underlying these effects.