COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLE BY WENDY LAMBOURNE OF LEGITIMATE LEADERSHIP: There is no such thing as a menial job. There is only a job without meaning. A sense of purpose or meaning comes with an understanding of what I do does for others. People come to work for all sorts of reasons which only they decide. A night watchman can come to work for the paycheck or to keep the community safe. Meaning does not come from pursuing it; it is something that ensues as an unintended consequence of a personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself. People are motivated by the ‘give’ not the ‘get’ of the job.

OUR SUMMARY OF THE ARTICLE: You don’t have to scroll for long on LinkedIn to find “inspirational” content. These may amp you up or make you feel nauseas.

But for bosses interested in how to motivate their people around them, there are better options than searching for Steve Jobs quotes.

A forthcoming paper, by Nava Ashraf and Oriana Bandiera of the London School of Economics and Virginia Minni and Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago, finds that this kind of intervention can have dramatic effects in a business setting. A subset of almost 3,000 employees at a consumer-goods firm were randomly assigned to take part in a workshop that helped participants to reflect on pivotal moments in their lives, to articulate what mattered to them and to think about how their current jobs matched their own sense of purpose.

The academics found that taking part in this exercise substantially increased the probability of exits from the firm, particularly among lower performers; increased internal job transfers; and improved the performance of those who stayed in their jobs.

A heightened sense of what is meaningful to individuals provides the best explanation for these outcomes.

Those whose jobs do not inspire them decide to leave or move; those who find that their purpose and their job are in sync put in more effort. Once they accounted for the productivity of employees who replaced the leavers, the overall impact of this experiment on the firm’s performance was positive.

Advice on how to inspire employees is often silly because it is either blindingly obvious (be good/passionate about your job, make the people on your teams feel valued, etc) or jarringly inauthentic.

But much more practical insights can be found in a forthcoming book called “Inspire”, by Adam Galinsky, an academic at Columbia Business School.

For example, vivid imagery can bring an organisation’s purpose to life. Many firms use tediously abstract words to convey their goal: “change”, “innovate”, “connect”, etc. Mr Galinsky cites an experiment by Andrew Carton of the University of Pennsylvania and his co-authors that showed the effect of more concrete language. In it, teams were asked to design toys and given a vision statement to guide their behaviour. Teams who were handed a statement with more visual language—to create toys that “…make wide-eyed kids laugh and proud parents smile”—produced more engaging toys than teams who were given something more generic.

Mr Galinsky also points to the power of counterfactual thinking to inspire a sense of meaning. In research he conducted with Laura Kray of the University of California, Berkeley and other co-authors, participants were asked to reflect on important events in their lives, such as their choice of college. Some were also asked to think about how things would have turned out if this event had not taken place. This group attributed greater meaning to the event in question, whether because they concluded fate had played a part in it or because it forced them to think through its consequences more explicitly. This type of counterfactual thinking can also be used to strengthen employees’ ties to firms: prompting people to imagine a world in which their company does not exist seems to increase a sense of attachment.

Perhaps the most striking idea in Mr Galinsky’s book is that, instead of bosses motivating people from above, individuals can do it for themselves. One example is a piece of research he conducted with Julian Pfrombeck from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and other co-authors. In this study some Swiss citizens who had newly registered with a government employment agency were asked to reflect on values that mattered to them. They were three times more likely to find a job than those who did not do the exercise.

Managers play a huge role in motivating their people. But inspiration can be bottom-up as well as top-down. Don’t just tell your team what Jobs said. Ask why their jobs matter to them.