The first comprehensive look at what employees are thinking and feeling as they go about their work, why it matters, and how managers can use this information to improve job performance

Inner Work Life
Understanding the Subtext of Business Performance

by Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer

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72 Harvard Business Review
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May 2007

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hbr.org

Leigh Wells

knowledge work from its people, then you undoubtedly appreciate the importance of sheer brainpower. You probably recruit high-intellect people and ensure they have access to good information. You probably also respect the power of incentives and use formal compensation systems to channel that intellectual energy down one path or another. But you might be overlooking another crucial driver of a knowledge worker’s performance – that person’s inner work life. People experience a
F YOUR ORGANIZATION DEMANDS

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Harvard Business Review 73

Inner Work Life: Understanding the Subtext of Business Performance

constant stream of emotions, perceptions, and motivations as they react to and make sense of the events of the workday. As people arrive at their workplaces they don’t check their hearts and minds at the door. Unfortunately, because inner work life is seldom openly expressed in modern organizations, it’s all too easy for managers to pretend that private thoughts and feelings don’t matter. As psychologists, we became fascinated a decade ago with day-to-day work life. But our research into inner work life goes well beyond intellectual curiosity about the complex operations of emotions, perceptions, and motivations. It addresses the very pragmatic managerial question of how these dynamics affect work performance. To examine this question, we constructed a research project that would give us a window into the inner work lives of a broad population of knowledge