While at work people experience a constant stream of emotions, perceptions and motivations, which combined make up their inner work life.

Because private thoughts and feelings are seldom expressed at work, it’s easy for managers to pretend that they don’t matter. Yet inner work life has a major effect on performance. Every moment that they are performing a job, employees are working under the influence of their inner work lives.

Neuroscience has found that emotion and cognition are tightly intertwined. Areas of the brain associated with decision-making and rational thought have direct links to areas associated with feelings.

When something happens at work it triggers a series of processes. People try to figure out why the event happened and what its implications are. As events unfold, people form perceptions about colleagues, the organisation, work and themselves. They experience emotions – mild states of satisfaction or irritation or intense feelings of pride or frustration. These affect their motivation in the moment and their performance that day.

The effects of emotion on work are clear. If people are angry or sad about their work, they won’t care about doing it well. If they are happy and excited they will leap to the task and put great effort into it. The same goes for perception. If people perceive a clear path forward with little ambiguity about what will constitute progress, motivation levels rise.

People perform better when their workday experiences include more positive emotions, stronger intrinsic motivation (a passion for the work) and more favourable perceptions of their team, leaders and organisation.

Positive emotion is also linked to higher creativity. The more positive a person’s mood on a given day, the more creative thinking he or she does the next day. People are more creative when they perceive their organisations as collaborative, open to new ideas and willing to reward work. They are less creative when they perceive political infighting, internal competition or an aversion to new ideas or to risk taking.

People also perform better when motivated by the interest, enjoyment and challenge of the work itself, not by external pressures or rewards. This applies to creativity and other elements of performance such as productivity and commitment.

The biggest differentiator between people’s best and worst days is their sense of progress. Achieving a goal often evokes great pleasure. The best boost comes when good work is recognised.

Inner work lives matter deeply. As the proportion of time claimed by work rises, inner work life becomes a bigger component of life itself.

Summarised from Inner Work Life, by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, in Rotman, (Winter 2008).

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