Building a Sustainable Model of Human Energy in Organizations: Exploring the Critical Role of Resources

Abstract

This article makes the critical role that the construct of energy plays in motivation research and reviews six literatures related to human energy in a work context: (1) conservation of resources, (2) attention restoration theory, (3) ego-depletion theory, (4) energetic activation, (5) interaction ritual chain, and (6) self-determination theory. We clarify definitions of human energy, show how they are related to constructs like flow, motivation, and resources, and show how ideas related to energy can be integrated across these literatures. We use the literatures to build and integrative model of human energy in organizations. The model captures the dynamics of human energy, demonstrates how energy can be both a scarce and an abundant resource, integrates resources and resourcing into the model, and how motivation needs to account for the creation of resources as well as the use of resources. We also use the model to provide insights into important future research in this area.

Acknowledgements

We thank Royston Greenwood for helpful comments on this article. We would also like to thank Roy Baumeister, Barbara Fredrickson, Rachel Kaplan, and Stephen Kaplan for early guidance in exploring literatures. We also thank Bret Crane, Jane Dutton, Laura Rees, and Ned Wellman for feedback. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Academy of Management Meetings.

Notes

Some literatures, such as open systems theory (Katz & Kahn, 1978), use the concept of energy metaphorically to describe the flow of money, people, information, and other resources through organizational systems, but in this paper, we focus on human energy, as this is the focus of most of the research we reviewed.

To keep the review focused on human energy in organizations, research in biology, chemistry, and physics is not included.

Typically, in a System Dynamics model, we would include a fourth variable in this causal loop to account for the speed with which resourcing is happening. Speed of resourcing refers to the amount of resources a person creates in a given time period. Variables that account for speed and acceleration are important to specify in a System Dynamics model because they account for the role of time in the model. The speed with which people put resources into use will depend on how much effort they invest in finding or creating resources that can be put to use. We can expect that the more people find and create resources, the more quickly they will be able to put resources into use. If the speed of resourcing is negative, people can lose resources. And as people find resources more quickly, they will have more resources to put to use. We do not include this variable—or other time-based ratio variables—in this model in order to keep our model as simple as possible. To conduct simulations and empirical tests of the model, however, these variables would need to be included.

This is another example of a place where a System Dynamics researcher would introduce a time-based ratio variable like acceleration of resourcing. If acceleration is accounted for, researchers can account for the effects of upper and lower limits of resources on the dynamics of a system: when few of the possible resources are in use, resources can be found and put to use at an accelerating pace (there are plenty of good reasons for writing the report and plenty of glucose to convert into action), but when most of the possible resources are already in use, finding new ones becomes harder and the pace of resourcing slows down until no resources remain.

Earlier research on mood (Russell, 1980) categorized mood along the two dimensions of (1) pleasantness/unpleasantness and (2) degree of activation or arousal. Thayer's (1989) and Watson and Tellegen's (1985) work suggested that these dimensions could be rotated 45°, leading to separate dimensions of affect or arousal. Watson et al. (1999) later amended these terms, calling them positive activation and negative activation, because it is possible to experience positive or negative affect that is not high on activation. Following typical conventions in current psychology, we use the term “activation” rather than “arousal”.

Some scholars prefer to conceive of people as having only one form of activation that is interpreted to have positive or negative valence (Elfenbein, 2007). There is long-standing debate among psychologists over how many types of activation there may be in affective experience (Lang, 1995). We follow the two-activation-system approach here because of our focus on the distinct relationship between energetic activation and physical energy (Marks, 1977) and because research has shown that energetic activation has an “undoing” impact on the effects of tense activation (Fredrickson, 1998a).