THE BEST WAY TO MANAGE ENGINEERS: LINKING THEORY AND FIELD STUDY TO PRACTICAL ADVICE
THE BEST WAY TO MANAGE ENGINEERS: LINKING THEORY AND FIELD STUDY TO PRACTICAL ADVICE
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Issue Date
2009
Authors
Sardesai, Samira
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Abstract
This is the continuation of a study begun by Mr. Anoop Maniyan and me on how best to manage engineers in the workplace. We defined “‘best” as increases in creativity and productivity. In that study we found strong evidence that motivation is central to the outcomes we sought, there are two measures for motivation: motivators and demotivators, a decrease in demotivators is not necessarily connected to an increase in motivators (that is, motivators and demotivators are largely independent), and motivators and demotivators themselves can be subdivided into individual factors. The present study looks at a few of the individual factors, seeking to characterize the values of them, and based on those values, offer engineering managers concrete advice to increase creativity and productivity of their reports. Along the way I conducted a very small survey of software engineers at a Fortune 500 company, where I completed my summer internship, in order to validate a seminal 1964 study of engineer motivation. The results of that survey were Statistically significant but were not internally consistent and therefore did not confirm the 1964 study.