A management expert in Israel has discovered that employees who feel confident about the excellence of their tools are motivated to exert greater effort, with the result that they perform better.

Research from Prof. Dov Eden of Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Management demonstrates that while first and foremost employees must feel confident in their own abilities, they must also have confidence in the excellence of the tools available to them to accomplish their task. The definition of a “tool” may range from computer software to office products and even encompasses co-workers.

Eden’s approach was presented as a chapter in the book Work Motivation in the Context of a Globalizing Economy .

In two controlled experiments, the researchers found that groups believing that they had superior tools at their disposal were significantly more efficient.

A governmental organization that believed it was working with a superior computer system increased its information processing time by fifty percent compared to the control group, which did not increase its processing time at all.

In a second experiment, a group of physics students who believed they were studying a superior course scored five percent higher than the control group as a final grade for their course.