My Nov. 9 Yahoo!Finance column looks at a Towers Perrin study that finds just one in five workers feels engaged. The Gallup Organization puts the number of engaged slightly higher, at about 30 percent. What’s the workplace experience like for that minority?  

Clearly, better than for most people.  Gallup’s James Harter, Frank Schmidt and Theodore Hayes, in an analysis of 198,000 employees in nearly 8,000 business units of 36 large companies, found that engaged workers: 

-know what’s expected of them;

-have what they need to do their work;

-feel fulfilled in their work;

-have regular opportunities to do what they do best;

-perceive that they are part of something significant;

and have opportunities to learn and develop. That would imply that engagement and success at work depend significantly on the organization – the clarity it has in organizing work groups and goals; the resources it provides to achieve those goals; the opportunities it offers for workers to grow; and the leadership the organization shows.   While Towers Perrin studies suggest the organization does the heavy lifting in engaging workers, other research suggest nature, not nurture, plays a more significant role. David Myers, a professor at Hope College in Michigan and author of “The Pursuit of Happiness,” emailed me a portion of a psychology textbook he is working on, which offers intriguing studies on the role of personal motivation and discipline in success. 

One study tracked 1,528 California children whose intelligence test scores ranked in the top 1 percent. Forty years later, when researchers compared those who were most and least successful professionally, they found a motivational difference. “Those most successful were more ambitious, energetic, and persistent,” Myers writes. “As children, they had more active hobbies. As adults, they participated in more groups and favored being a sports participant to being a spectator.”

Moreover, in other studies of both high school and college students, self-discipline has been a better predictor of school performance, attendance, and graduation honors than intelligence scores. (See this link for a paper by researchers Angela Duckworth and Martin  Seligman from 2005.)  

These people are masters of their destiny – they set very specific goals and time frames to achieve them; they have both a psychological and physical sense of control. “Compared to those who’ve learned a sense of helplessness, those with an ‘internal locus of control’ do better in school, cope better with stress, and live with greater well-being,” Myers writes. “Deprived of control over one’s life—an experience studied in prisoners, nursing home patients, and people living under totalitarian regimes—people suffer lower morale and poorer health.”  

And the self-disciplined, not surprisingly, tend to give 110 percent to their work. As the old saw goes, you get to Carnegie Hall by practice, practice, practice. “By their early twenties, top violinists have accumulated some 10,000 lifetime practice hours,” writes Myers, “double the practice time of other violin students aiming to be teachers (Ericsson & others, 1993, 2001).” Nobel laureate and psychologist Herbert Simon estimates that world-class experts in a field typically have invested at least decade of hard work—say, 40 hours a week for 50 weeks a year. What distinguishes extremely successful individuals from their equally talented peers, is grit—passionate dedication to an ambitious, long-term goal, according to Myers.   

• The Rules of Engagement on the Job
• Finding Optimal Focus, and Happiness, At Work
• More Factors that Affect Wealth-Building
• The Ogre
• Financial Companies Exploit the Elderly and Poor – Again

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