Motivation and emotion/Book/2025/Staff retention motivation

Case Study - Do-Goode and Eval Do-Goode and Eval (DGE) is a successful law firm operating all around the world. Their success is predominantly based on working for government across the globe and specialising in highly sensitive cases where timeframes are incredible short. The Partners at DGE law firm are faced with an increasingly higher turnover rate and are struggling with how to address it. They have conducted an internal review and confirmed that they are the most profitable law firm in the world and that their employees are paid well above market wages for corresponding positions in other firms. The turn over is predominantly from younger employees who come in and finish their training with the DGE but then choose to leave, often for lower paying jobs. They have brought in a organisational psychologist, Lily, to review the situation from a different perspective and come back to them with an explanation. Note: this is a fictional case study. the law firm and characters are not real and do not represent any real persons.

Modern workplaces are complex and diverse ecosystems and regardless of the chosen subject matter, each workplace that has a staffing profile higher than one must eventually turn its mind to employee retention. Failure to encourage employee retention can have significant negative impacts on organisation finances, from increased onboarding and training costs associated with hiring new employees. Poor employee retention can also affect organisational culture, from a loss of corporate knowledge decreased moral and lost relationships between employees (Van Dierendonck et al., 2016).

It is understandably critical that employers seek to motivate employees to remain within their organisation. In an increasingly polarised world this is no simple task as people are increasingly motivated by different factors, such as remuneration, alignment of values, growth and work life balance (Lee et al., 2022).

To effectively consider employee retention it is important to look at the scientific theories that underpin motivation with particular focus on those most directly linked to employment. While all psychological theories of motivation are relevant when looking at the motivations behind employee's intentions to leave or stay in an organisation, the below list are three possible focus areas for human resources practitioners and employers to focus on when trying to understand what motivates their employees.

Developed in 1985 by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, self-determination theory seeks to explain motivation by looking at people’s innate psychological needs and desires to push towards growth.

Deci and Ryan would later return to their work to expand on the specifics of psychological needs, ultimately finding three distinct groups of needs that form a key part of psychological wellbeing and function as inherent motivation. Autonomy to make decisions, Competence or the feeling of doing something well and having the satisfaction of mastery over a task, and Relatedness to be relate with and connect with other people (Ryan & Deci, 2000).

As we examine the motivations of employees in the workforce through a lens of self-determination theory, we begin to unpack some of the reasons people choose to leave or remain in their roles. In particular we can see the importance of the intrinsic motivation generated by fostering the psychological needs of employees.

In the workplace autonomy is especially important and present. Where employees are given freedom and autonomy to chose how their work will be structured they are significantly more likely to enjoy their work, which in turn plays a key role in the likelihood of employees experiencing an intrinsic motivation to remain with their current employer (Gagné & Deci, 2005).

Autonomy can also serve as a shield to some of the motivators that will encourage employees to consider leaving a job. Greguras and Diefendorff (2009) found that autonomy was a key predictor of decreased intention to leave over a longitudinal study. Likewise, autonomy over decision making has a positive impact on burnout, further improving employee commitment to an organisation Hales et al. (2021).

Like employees who experience autonomy over their work, there is increased engagement with work when workers are using their skills and experience to achieve results against challenging and meaningful work. This experience of competence plays a substantial role in generating an intrinsic motivation to remain with current employer Morin et al (2023).

Organisations must strive to foster competency in their people, through training and skill, and providing meaningful challenges for employees to apply those skills to. By doing this and by empowering managers to take the time to reinforce learnings and growth mindsets, employers can minimise employee intentions to leave an organisation (Sousa, 2025).

As you enter the workforce you will notice that often the people you work with have a large impact on how well you like the job you are doing. Positive relationships with the people around you can make tedious work more enjoyable, and negative relationships can make even the most interesting job a chore to go to.

Ryan & Deci’s work in 2000 quantified this as the need to foster relatedness to hose around us, to be valued by and connected to our immediate group of peers. In the modern workforce this translated to a sense of commitment to your organisation and reduced tendency to consider leaving (Van Den Broeck et al., 2010).

This is not a passive process where relationships develop over time and employers can take active and considered steps to help encourage employees to develop this sense of relatedness. Organisations can foster team building and collaborative approaches to work, given employees the chance to get to know new colleagues. They can develop leadership cohorts who take the genuinely value the input from employees and take the time to recognise employees in front of their peers, leading to an increased sense of connection and value across the organisation (Van Tuin et al., 2021).

Goal-orientation theory began to emerge in the mid-1900s as a focus on people’s need for achievement (McClelland, 1961). This work would be built on and solidified by the works of Nichols and Dweck in the 1980’s which would ultimately define a two-factor model that sees people orientated towards wither Mastery/Learning goals or focused on performance/achievement goals (Nicholls,1984; Dweck & Leggett,1988).

Mastery and learning goals are typically journey focused, the learning and development are just as much a part of the satisfaction as the achievement itself and failure is often perceived and a opportunity to rethink or learn, rather than a blocker to success. In contrast performance goals are laser focused on the outcome, what matters to these people is either a desire to outperform their colleagues or to avoid underperformance, with failure viewed as unacceptable (Stasielowicz, 2019).

In the contexts of the workplace it can be, understanding your workforces goal orientation and how to align work to it can be a powerful tool in generating employee retention but also in developing workplace culture.

These are intrinsic motivations and as such are powerful tools for employers to harness in maintaining employee retention. They can foster this mindset by creating a workplace culture and leadership team who place emphasised value on the process of development during work tasks. Employers will also need to accept that failure is a natural part of this process and ensure that employees who experience failure during a challenging task are not punished but rather encouraged to try again and consider alternative approaches (Steindórsdóttir et al., 2020).

Employers do need to understand that when working with people who have a mastery goal orientation, a fixation on the end result has the potential to drive employees away and increase employee turnover (Dysvik & Kuvaas, 2010).

Employees in environments such as this experience increased job satisfaction and commitment to their employers. In the long term these employees often report feeling psychologically safe in the workplace and are better able to adapt to new disruptive circumstances, all of which leads to a lower intention to leave and lower employee turnover for the employer (Solberg et al., 2021; Van Dam et al., 2020).

Performance goal orientation is often broken further down into performance-approach, where people feel a strong need to outperform others, and performance-avoidance, where people are motivated to avoid performing worse than others. Both these forms are often associated with high initial outputs for employers but mid to long term deficits and risks which can increase staff turnover (Pohlan & Steffes, 2024).

Performance orientation has a tendency to foster unhealthy and competitive environments, impacting on the psychological need for relatedness that employees feel. While these competitive environments may see ‘high performers’ rise to the top, they often become dissatisfied and leave if the perceived rewards for their work is not inline with the achievement (Pohlan & Steffes, 2024).

With roots in the works of Atkinson in the mid 1950’s and expanded on in the early 1980’s by Eccles and colleagues, expectancy-value theory suggests a calculation that sees motivation equal a person’s expectancy times their value. The likely hood that any person will choose to participate or engage is based on their expected success rate and the value that individual places on the engagement (Atkinson, 1957; Eccles et al.,1983).

People’s expectancies are an individual assessment, with past experience and the difficulty of the task, real or perceived, having an impact on how a person gauges their likelihood of success and level of achievement should they pursue the task. Similarly, the value they place on any given task is equally individual based on their own intrinsic motivators (see Goal-orientation theory and Self-determination theory), the sacrifices the person will have to make such as time and effort, as well as extrinsic motivations or what will be gained from achieving the task (Eccles & Wigfield, 2002).

This is displayed in several levels within a workplace. Expectancy-value theory will have played a role in how people choose their profession, and it will play a role in how they choose to engage at their current workplace. For employers it is important to avoid low expectancy where employees feel underprepared for a job and also to avoid low value, where employees may perceive that rewards are not commensurate with effort or there is no pathway to promotion or development (Reinharth & Wahba, 1975).

Employees will likely experience greater job satisfaction when they have a high expectancy of success combined with employers can influence this by providing appropriate training which prepares them for discrete tasks and pathways for career development so that they can see the value in the work they do for their careers.

Case Study - Continued Looking at the psychological theories underpinning motivation Lily has made the following assessment of the situation at DGE. 1. The younger employees are increaqsingly motivated less by remuneration and more by workplace culture and flexibility. 2. DGE’s work on sensitive cases for various governments is lucrative, but there is increased distrust in government across the world. This has meant that younger people are leaving to find work more aligned to their values. 3. The nature of short turn around and constant work does not leave room for the flexibility that employees crave.

Flexibility is the option for work to be undertaken in a non-standard or typical way, such as a compressed time period ( working 10 days of hours compressed into 9 working days), flexible hours where you might work an additional hour today and finish early tomorrow, and remote working where you work from home or another option that is not the typical workplace for your organisation.

Taking a flexible approach to work hours and locations means that employers are giving their employees the opportunity to manage their workloads in a way that works for them, this also helps to trust and responsibility in the workforce. It promotes a more diverse workforce, allowing employers to recruit and retain the skills of employees with disabilities or caring responsibilities that would mean they need to work different hours to accommodate their needs. These options also allow for employees to take different approached to managing their own exhaustion and burn out, particularly in environments where there are large peaks and troughs in the work. This can drastically improve work-life balance and employee moral which in turn has improves employee retention (Jiejing et al., 2024).

These benefits must be carefully considered against some of the negatives. Not all workplaces allow for the flexibility that employees may crave, for example in a high security environment you may not be able to work remotely and in a rostered shift environment you may not be allotted the flexibility of compressed hours. Implementing flexibility as an option in these circumstances can lead to confusion which could negatively impact overall employee retention.

Flexibility ultimately comes down to empowering employees have autonomy and to make choices about how they achieve the work they are set. This ties nicely into the competence component of self-determination theory. As a lever tied to intrinsic motivation and one that fulfills a basic psychological need, this is very potent tool in an employer’s kit to improve employee retention (Laguerre & Barnes-Farrell, 2024).

Remuneration and benefits refers to the refers to the pay package you receive as well as any financial benefits that may come along side that, such as a company vehicle, free parking or a bonus structure.

There are two primary ways the remuneration and benefits impact employee retention. Firstly, the amount of the remuneration, in particular as it compares to the industry standard. Secondly, the way employers approach remuneration can be a large part of signaling their values as a company and the culture they want to foster.

Remuneration rates compared to the industry standard has a complex interaction with employee retention. It is easy for employers to assume that it is a simple equation and that so long as they pay above the average then employees will have financial stability and will be unlikely to leave. The reality is that the amount of remuneration acts as a negative motivator, where it has little impact on reducing employee intention to leave where it is high, but can cause a large increase in intention to leave where the rates are below industry average. Ultimately this suggest that remuneration and benefits are important, but that high pay will not overcome other organisational challenges that might be causing employees to consider leaving (M. Lee et al., 2025).

The approach the employer takes to remuneration structures, and especially the transparency around it can be a lever towards signaling the values of the organisation and fostering their desired workplace culture. By having openness around they can foster trust in their employees and show that they want an environment where people share information to achieve greater outcomes (Ting, 1997).

Remuneration and benefits align with the expectancy-value theory as a primary way in which employers can ensure address the value the employees are seeking for sacrificing their time and energy. It should however be noted that this is an extrinsic motivator and will never be as powerful a lever as others that address intrinsic motivations in the employees.

Workplace culture refers to the shared values of a workplace, the principles they stand for as an organisation and the norms and behaviours that the workforce expect and tolerate. Every decision an employer makes will have an impact on the workplace culture and culture itself is increasingly becoming the primary factor that determines employee intention to leave (M. Lee et al., 2025).

Careful curation of an organisation's culture is potentially the single most effective tool in ensuring employee retention.

Workplace culture plays both a direct and indirect role in impacting employee retention.

Both prospective and current employees are actively choosing workplace culture as a primary factor in deciding where they want to work. They seek workplaces where the values and ethics align with their own as a method of career (M. Lee et al., 2025). When considering how to leverage this as a tool employers must ensure that they are genuine in the culture they want to develop and that there is clarity on this culture within their current workforce (Yergler, 2012). For examples an organisation that makes firearms would most likely not be able to foster a culture of disarmament and to try to force this culture could cause a dissonance amongst the people who have chosen to work there. Where there are discourse and confusion around organisation culture this is highly likely to have a negative impact on employee retention.

Indirectly culture plays a moderating role on other factors in the workplace. This can be seen in the examples touched on under remuneration and benefits, where higher pay rates may have substantially less impact on an employee with poor cultural alignment.  

Workplace culture touches on all psychological theories related to motivation, as ultimately it is the motivations of the employer and employees that make up this culture. Of our key theories it most strongly aligns to both self-determination theory and goal-orientation theory.

From a self-determination theory perspective the culture has a significant role to play in determining if employees feel that their needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness are met.

Under goal-orientation we know that the culture of the workplace is a large indicator of the type of employees that work there. Where employers prefer results at all costs, we are likely to see performance goal oriented people and employers with a preference towards development are likely to attract mastery orientated employees.

It is critical that human resources professionals and employers carefully consider how they encourage their workforce to come to work each day and how they foster connection to the organisation. failure to properly address employee retention runs the risk of wasted financial investment in employees as well as corporate amnesia, where employees are not staying long enough to develop corporate knowledge or learn from key events.

While extrinsic motivators like remuneration or benefits will always have a necessary place in a modern capitalist society, we are increasingly moving to a world where the workforce places a significant value on their time and wellbeing. To be successful at retaining staff, employers need to look at how to move from extrinsic motivators to intrinsic, at how to connect current and incoming employees to company on a far deeper level by fulfilling their psychological needs.

It is also clear that these will be a continually moving goal posts. As each new generation enters the workforce, employers will need to remain abreast of current and emerging changes to both the key psychological theories behind motivation and the specific trends of desired motivators that these younger workers bring with them.

This will need to be carefully balanced with maintaining an understanding of what motivates your existing workforce. Pivoting too quickly to a new approach in favour of existing methods could have the undesirable impact of alienating your existing workers and thus increasing the turnover rate amongst your experiences employees.

• Working from home and mental health (Book chapter, 2025)
• Employee recognition and work motivation (Book chapter, 2024)
• Self determination theory (Wikipedia)
• Goal-orientation theory (Wikipedia)
• Expectancy-value theory (Wikipedia)
• Motivation (Wikipedia)
• Motivation (Wikipedia)
• Edward Deci (Wikipedia)
• Richard Ryan (Wikipedia)
• Carol Dweck (Wikipedia)

Provide external links to highly relevant resources such as podcasts and videos, news articles, and professional sites. Use sentence casing. For example:

• Six top tips for writing a great essay (University of Melbourne)
• The importance of structure (skillsyouneed.com)