An interesting article in strategy + business discusses the fact that the employee experiences workplace first & foremost as a social system. The brain equates the social needs of the employee, equal to the survival needs (unlike the Maslow's hierarchy). Social and physical pain produce similar pain responses.
Neuroscience has proved that the response to threat is far more lang lasting /potent , than is the response to reward. And threats bring down the productivity dramatically.
The other significant discovery is that the human mind is completely plastic and you can of course teach the old dog new tricks. Five qualities emphasized to enable an employee to minimize the threat response and trigger the reward response are status, certainity, automonous, relatedness and fairness.Worth a read. Please visit the link
