Autonomous Creation and the Incentives That Drive Us

Autonomous Creation and the Incentives that Drive Us.

Franklin De La Cruz

Florida Institute of Technology

 On June 04, 2015 Hitachi Data System completed its acquisition of Pentaho, an open source data integration software developer for approximately $500 million dollars. If someone would have told Quentin Gallivan the company CEO that his small startup would fetch such a high price tag 8 years after its inception he would tell you that it should have been done in five. There was something uniquely different about a company that based its culture on this idea of knowledge sharing and community. From its software to its corporate culture every aspect of this company relies on the premise that given autonomy and purpose people will produce extraordinary results. At least that was my impression of the company on my first day. The atmosphere from its lounge areas decked out with flat screen TV’s and video game consoles to its fully stocked tiki bar called the therapy room one gets that impression that little to no work is done here. During my tenure, here I have found the opposite to be true as this group of employees are some of the most hardworking self-driven people I have ever had the opportunity to work with.

The whole idea of allowing employees to be autonomous could be considered contradictory to the concept of management but in practice it has proven key in job engagement. “Research indicates that when employees have greater levels of autonomy, their personality traits have a stronger impact on job performance” (Malarkodi, Uma, and Mahendran, 2012). The freedom to choose how you want to accomplish a task or even when to do it gives the employee control over their work. With control comes a sense of accountability because now you are working on your own terms. Per Malarkodi et al. (2012) the motivating effects are only realized after workers are given enough autonomy (p. 1384). Autonomy is part of the culture in Pentaho being that they built their product on open source software which is only possible by autonomous people sharing their knowledge and intellectual property. Micromanagement is blasphemy at Pentaho and for good reason as its engineers and employees preform best when given the freedom to do so. At Pentaho micromanagement is considered a bad word and it is rare that a manager will hover over an employee to get them to complete a task.

So, with the freedom to work as one pleases what do employees do? They get to work mastering their prospective skill sets. Mastery of ones’ skills along with doing something for a purpose tends to motivate employees a lot more than incentives or punishment. “Mastery, is not just about salary but also about providing the world with a valuable and personal contribution that gives a strong sense of personal meaningfulness” (Ventegodt et al., 2008). People that find value in their work and strive for mastery are also prefer autonomy and purpose in their work lives. All the professionals at the company have a deep sense of pride when it comes to their work and stay at work late of their own free will when they are fully engaged in a task. I have worked on weekends and evenings sometimes not because there was a project deadline or a mandate but because I was working on a new system or process that I wanted to master.