What does it mean to support relatedness?
Here is the next blog post in our series about what makes us motivated, and what you as a leader can do through your leadership to create the right conditions for high motivation in your team.
All people have three basic psychological needs that we as leaders need to work with to create the right conditions for the staff to feel and perform well: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
Relatedness means that we have a need for safe and stable relationships to feel and perform well. It means that we trust each other in our team, where there are people who care about and respect each other.
In this blog post, you as a leader get concrete tips on behavior that promote the need for relatedness, and we also give examples on behavior that counteract relatedness, thereby reducing employee engagement as well.
Leadership behavior that promotes relatedness
Leadership behavior promoting relatedness means that you as a leader create the right conditions for high trust in your team, and that the coworkers in the team are enabled to build relationships with each other where they respect and like each other.
Here are concrete examples of leader behavior that promote relatedness:
- Be honest
- Be open with the information that you can be open with
- Care about your coworkers for real, not just how they perform but also how they feel
- Respect your coworkers and their opinions
- Show appreciation for the person - not just the performance
- Listen to and see all your coworkers
Behavior that is negative for the need for relatedness
Here are examples of leadership that damages the need for relatedness, and thereby reducing employee engagement as well as the performance in your team:
- Saying one thing and doing another
- Favoring coworkers
- Acting without respect
- Only focusing on the result and not the person 'that is what they are employed for and paid to do'
- Being a bad listener
- Not sharing information
