ADVANCES IN NEUROSCIENCE TO UNDERSTAND MOTIVATION

topic is “ Should firms include advances in Neuroscience to understand Motivation and leadership in workplace



Should firms include advances in Neuroscience to understand Motivation and leadership in workplace?

Introduction

Companies invest significant resources in training employees to develop and improve leadership skills, often with few sustainable results. The challenge of acquiring and practicing behaviors that influence, motivate and energize others to align their actions with defined business goals is well understood. Recent research reveals that we deploy a different part of the brain to assimilate and apply leadership behaviors than we use to learn cognitive or technical skills. Brain functions that orchestrate memory and emotions, called "limbic", are the key to achieving lasting change in leadership behaviors, skills and competencies. (Bass, B. M. 1985 Pp. 68)

Faculties dealing with technical and cognitive learning are related to the "neocortical" part of the brain. Studies show that traditional leadership training methods, which focus on neocortical learning, fail to touch the mental-emotional processes that need to be engaged for transformative change to occur. Teaching practices that incorporate limbic learning give participants a personal experience of the way these factors drive decision making and behavior. This provides insight into the dynamics of influence and helps master the techniques that drive motivation and alignment, through conscious experience. What makes the current leadership and organizational crisis all the more serious is the discourse-reality gap that accompanies it. Organizational leadership theories ranging from trait theories to the more current transformational leadership theories have long recognized that sustainably successful organizational functioning and leadership require a complex array of identities and skills in addition to a motivation for making profit. In fact, motivations, plural, may be key in the complicated equation of organizational functioning.

Background

Managers and those in positions of leadership in most organizations are high-IQ individuals. This is partly because of the challenging cognitive demands of the complex work environment and partly because they belong to a self-selected group. Individuals not possessing a keen edge for dealing with broad concepts rarely seek such responsibilities. So how does a leader differentiate him from others? How does an aspiring executive demonstrate her unique capabilities, when the spread of managerial competencies is narrow? Even more importantly, how do organizations develop and leverage leadership talent that leapfrogs the competition?

The primary role of managers in an organization is to convert business goals into outcomes. To that end, they divide the requirements into defined work packages or activities and arrange a formal organizational structure to perform them. The knowledge area and skills required for this exercise come under the general purview of management. Planning, budgeting, production control, marketing and human resource management are examples of skills required to manage the enterprise. Most organizations, however, have a complex and often hidden network of relationships that facilitates work that is required but is not formally defined. High performance organizations with influential leaders are able to achieve greater results by supplementing the formal structures with the passion, energy and effort of the people and ...