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Human Resource Management 2005

Back to basics: Learning about employee energy and motivation from running on my treadmill

Theresa M. Welbourne1; Steven Andrews2; Alice O. Andrews3

1 University of Michigan–Ann Arbor · 2 No Affiliation · 3 Leadership in Medicine, Inc.

open access

Abstract

In an effort to understand how to optimize employee energy at work, we borrow from the sports physiology literature to develop and test several concepts that have now been used in more than 75 large and small organizations (e.g., automobile firms, banks, hospitals, manufacturing, high technology, service businesses, financial services, and more). Our focus on employee energy led us to develop new measures and processes for our research. The resulting studies presented in this article test two hypotheses focusing on the link between employee energy, turnover, job performance, and job satisfaction. Consistent with what we know about athletic performance, we found that energy is an optimization construct and that variation in employee energy at work has detrimental consequences for performance and satisfaction.

DOI
10.1002/hrm.20040
Sources
openalex

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