agile and team motivation based on self-determination theory - using science to understand...

Łukasz Gawlik

Manager of Software Development

Department in VSoft

Agile and team motivation based on Self-Determination Theory

Using science to understand motivation

Deci’s experiment

prof. Edward Deci

How the two groups were treated

Day 1 Day 2 Day 3

Group A No reward Reward No reward

Group B No reward No reward No reward

Self-Determination Theory - Autonomous and

Controlled motivations

Controlled motivation has

a dark side

What about salary?

Basic psychological human needs: autonomy,

competence, relatedness

Autonomy is our need to be self-directed, it is

need to have influence on our life

Agile is focused on autonomy

•Self-organizing teams

•Planning meetings

•Retrospectives

Support for autonomy

•Ask open questions and

avoid closed questions

•Be moderator

•Offer choice within the structure and understand feelings

Competence - our skills and abilities match the

difficulty of the task

Agile is focused on competence

•Coding Dojo

•Coding Retreats

•One-to-One meetings

Support for competence

•Prize the process of improvement

•Criticize problems in process

of improvement

•Show the progress

Mindset Theory

Fixed and Grow mindset

prof. Carol Dweck

Relatedness - need to be a part of something

bigger, need to feel valuable for other people

Support for relatedness

•Show the context

•Show relations between

someone’s work and other people

Summary

•Carrot and stick work in short term

and have dark side

•Autonomous motivation is more valuable

•It can be build on autonomy, competence and relatedness

•Don’t manipulate, be honest

Thank you