Vol. 61, No. 1 — January 1980 —
The Mysteries
of Motivation
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There is a lot more to motivation than the
fabled carrot and stick, especially at a time when workers
have become more assertive. In thinking about how to motivate
the people of today, a few concepts out of the past might
not go amiss...
Motivation is a word that is commonly associated with big
business, mainly because the management scientists who deal
in the subject are usually employed or consulted by large
corporations. This is regrettable in that it tends to blur
recognition of a force that has a profound influence on the
internal workings of organizations of all kinds from the United
Nations to the corner store. Whether in a business big or
small, a school, or an association, anyone who is responsible
for other people's efforts must grapple with the intricacies
of motivation. Therefore anyone who is, or aspires to be,
responsible for other people's work should seek a basic understanding
of what it is all about.
On the surface, it could hardly be simpler. To motivate
people, the dictionaries tell us, is to cause them to act
in a certain way. This is done by furnishing them with a motive
to do your bidding. By the strictest definition, the most
elementary form of motivation would be if a hold-up man were
to stick a pistol in your face and growl: "Your money or your
life." He instantly arouses a motive in you for doing what
he wants you to - the motive of staying alive.
But motivation, in the popular understanding of the term,
is usually a more long-lasting condition. You might, for example,
train a puppy by motivating it to avoid a smack. Children
will learn that "being bad" in the eyes of their parents will
provoke a spanking, while "being good" will get them a treat
of some sort. The parents have instilled in them the dual
motive of avoiding punishment and earning rewards.
In the lexicon of management science, the system of reward
and punishment is known as the "carrot-and-stick" approach,
the carrot being dangled in front of a donkey's nose and the
stick applied smartly to his hindquarters. In this fashion
he is alternately enticed and impelled towards his master's
goal. Whether the donkey ever gets to eat the carrot in this
analogy is not made clear in management literature. We can
be sure, however, that he gets to feel the stick.
The carrot and stick were traditionally cited as the prime
motivators of the "economic man", a mythical creature much
used and abused by classical economists to further their theories
of human dynamics. "The beauty of the economic man was that
we knew exactly what he was after," the philosopher Alfred
North Whitehead once wistfully wrote. He was a timorous specimen,
terrified of taking a chance on being deprived of a living.
At the same time he was instinctively greedy, forever grasping
for as much money and property as he could possibly acquire.
In 1939 Peter Drucker, who has been hailed as the father
of modern management science, published a book called The
End of Economic Man, stating that economic self-interest
was never as mighty a force in human affairs as the classical
economists imagined. "We know nothing about motivation. All
we can do is write books about it," the same Dr. Drucker recently
said. This may be stretching a point to the limit, but Drucker's
message is essentially valid. It emphasizes just how complex
and inscrutable are the motives of the real flesh-and-blood
man and woman working today.
The modern worker clearly is motivated by much more than
the carrot of pay and advancement and the stick of discipline
and insecurity, although it would be foolish to underestimate
the continuing effectiveness of these devices. Money might
not be everything - otherwise movie stars would be the happiest
people on earth - but there is no evidence that the mass of
humanity has ceased to have a strong desire for the comfort
and possessions that money will buy. The "stick", at the very
least, is what makes us get up in the morning and go to work
even when we don't much feel like it. It is part of normal
human nature to steer clear of trouble and to want the assurance
of a steady, well-paid job.
Low-level motivators equal low-level effort
Many management experts, however, classify job and financial
security as "low-level" motivators which guarantee no more
than low-level effort. "To get people to do mediocre work,
one need only drive them, using coercive and reward
power in a manipulative way," writes James J. Cribben in his
book Effective Managerial Leadership, published by
the American Management Association in 1971. "To elicit their
top performance, one must get them to drive themselves..."
From this statement it is clear that the function of motivation
in modern management is to move workers to perform at the
very peak of their abilities. Hence a conscientious manager
should concentrate on creating and maintaining a psychological
climate which enables people to do their level best.
As the title of Dr. Cribben's book implies, this can only
be done through leadership. A leader is able to draw forth
a willing effort from his followers and make them want to
do their utmost for him. The antithesis of leadership is dictatorship,
in which an unwilling effort is forced out of people by the
crude application of power. An involuntary effort is likely
to be less effective than one given voluntarily. And it should
be borne in mind that dictatorships invariably produce rebels
devoted to their demise.
It's not the satisfaction that drives, but the desire
Theories abound about how leaders should go about getting
people to drive themselves, but no one disputes the fundamental
notion that "high-level" motivation resulting in high-level
performance must come from within an individual. It is the
sum of a person's aspirations, values, self-esteem and sensibilities.
So it is a person's own property, to be given or withheld
depending on how he or she feels about a job.
It can, however, be given unconsciously if working conditions
correspond with the needs that dwell within a person's psyche.
In his classic work Motivation and Personality, A.
H. Maslow divided the range of a normal person's needs into
five broad categories which have to do with basic creature
comfort, security, the social instinct, ego gratification,
and living up to one's image of oneself. Maslow pointed out
that the satisfaction of these needs should not be mistaken
for motivation; rather it is the drive to obtain or sustain
the satisfaction. When you consider that some of the most
dedicated people in history have been motivated by storing
up rewards in heaven, you can see his point.
The first three categories are easy enough to understand.
People naturally want the necessities of life; they want comfortable
and secure working conditions and fair compensation; they
want to feel that they belong to a group of supportive people
and be part of something bigger than themselves.
The needs that come under the heading of ego gratification
are more difficult to fathom. They involve a desire for recognition,
status, and opportunities to demonstrate extraordinary competence.
In practice these needs may not be readily apparent to the
individual worker's boss.
A person's "self-actualization" needs may also be overlooked:
these call for challenges to one's abilities, opportunities
to exercise creativity, and a degree of personal autonomy.
Obviously, neither these nor ego gratification needs can be
met exclusively within the working environment. Still, they
can have a strong effect for good or ill on a person's attitude
towards a job.
No one has an entirely equal complement of Maslow's five
varieties of needs. Whether a worker cares more about money
than ego gratification, or more about self-expression than
creature comforts, depends very largely on his or her temperament
and background. Also, the intensity of one need or another
within an individual will vary according to circumstances.
To take the plainest example, people become more preoccupied
with security as they grow older.
All of which means that any attempt to motivate a person
to do his or her best work must be tailor-made to the needs
of the individual personality. Because of this, the person
most responsible for a person's motivation on the job is his
or her immediate boss.
When people motivate each other, the working climate becomes
ideal
The top management of an organization can go some way towards
meeting creature comfort and security needs, and in offering
incentives for good performance. But the more private and
particular elements of motivation must be dealt with on a
personal level between the superior and subordinate day-by-day.
Some managers and supervisors will draw the line at this
point, protesting that they are not psychiatrists or wet nurses,
and that they have far more practical and pressing matters
to worry about. But the fact is that they cannot escape the
influence of motivation, or of its opposite, demotivation.
The motivation of each individual in a work team is what goes
to make up its morale - and bad morale can spell grief to
the leader of any team.
The results of surveys of workers' attitudes in recent years
underline the importance of motivation on the ground level.
They show that present-day employees place a strong emphasis
on challenge, opportunity, and recognition of performance;
and that they are more willing than their counterparts of
a generation ago to quit a job that does not offer these things.
An old-line manager or supervisor might write them off as
spoiled brats or prima donnas. But by failing to take account
of their personal priorities, he or she could very well have
to live with the consequences of a high turnover, which include
having to function on a more or less permanent basis with
a half-trained staff.
On the other hand, bosses who make a serious effort to understand
their subordinates become better-motivated themselves, because
they come closer to fulfilling their own ego and self-expression
needs in the process. Motivation must, in fact, work two ways,
because superiors must be open to their subordinates' influence
if they expect the subordinates to be open to theirs. The
cross-motivation that comes from healthy superior-subordinate
relationships gives rise to an ideal working climate, not
only for the people directly concerned, but for the organization
as a whole.
In other words, cross-motivation keeps everybody happy.
And when we get right down to the core of the matter, that
is what motivation is all about. The philosopher William James
identified its nucleus long before the term ever entered the
vocabulary. He wrote: "If we were to ask the question, 'What
is life's chief concern?' one of the answers we should receive
would be: 'It is happiness.' How to gain, how to keep, how
to recover happiness is in fact the secret motive of all we
do, and all we are willing to endure."
The boss's own happiness may depend on how his people feel
A line manager or foreman may consider it ridiculously beyond
his purview to have to worry about whether the people working
under him are happy or not. But in the long run - unless he
is sadistic or masochistic or both - his own happiness in
his job is bound to be affected by how they feel.
Only a positive effort to make them contented in their work
will bring the kind of motivation that ensures he exceeds
his objectives and boosts his organization's productivity.
The most successful leaders are always those who pay most
attention to the people who follow them. If a leader cares
about what happens to his followers, his followers will care
about what happens to him.
The shop floor or the office may not seem like the appropriate
place to spread happiness, but work is certainly an element
in the state of a person's emotions. Some people hate their
jobs, and are to be pitied for it; most, however, are relatively
satisfied with their work if only for the money it brings.
Even people who regard work as a necessary evil will admit
on close questioning that their work and all that is associated
with it affords them a measure of happiness that they might
not otherwise experience. Psychologists stress that work is
a major source of self-esteem.
The principles can be stated in simple,
old-fashioned terms
If a person's work per se adds to his or her happiness,
then the job in itself becomes the ultimate motivator. But
for this to be so, the work must be valued, and recognized
as such. For the manager or supervisor, this implies a continuing
effort to accentuate the importance of what the subordinate
is doing in the overall context of the organization. It is
noteworthy in this regard that the most fiendish punishments
the military mind can devise entail having a prisoner do something
entirely useless, like scrubbing his cell floor with a toothbrush
or painting a pile of rocks.
There are various ways to build motivation into a job which
may be found in the voluminous literature on the subject.
Anyone seriously interested in motivation should, of course,
refer to the books that have been written about it, which
are too numerous to mention here. Writings on motivation tend
to suffer from the professional jargon which psychologists
and management experts employ in their attempts to be explicit.
The principles can, however, be stated in quite ordinary old-fashioned
terms.
First of all, motivation is a matter of human understanding
- of the superior understanding the subordinate. If and when
that state is achieved, it becomes a process of encouraging
people to go as far as possible towards meeting their aspirations
- in plainer language, their hopes and dreams. This requires
giving them an opportunity to show what they can do. Their
efforts must then be recognized and rewarded to the extent
that this is possible within the system. They must be made
to feel wanted within that system. This is done by making
them aware of how their efforts contribute to the whole.
It comes down to treating people with respect for their
individuality and consideration for their feelings. It means
caring about others - about their personal well-being. It
means giving them a chance to show what they can do even if
that is sometimes inconvenient. It means encouraging and helping
them to meet their full potential in their careers.
When you think about it, motivation is not much different
from friendship. A friend attempts to understand you, and
to help you as far as possible to achieve your aims. A friend
is concerned about your happiness, and tries within the limits
of his or her ability to make you happy. A friend is someone
who supports you and knows that he or she can count on your
support in return.
Above all, a friend is someone who will go out of his or
her way to do things for you. The motive for this is nothing
more than the knowledge that you would do the same for him
or her. And so it is with mutual motivation in the plant or
office. The bosses who are most concerned about their subordinates
get the most out of them in the form of high-quality work.
Published by RBC Financial Group. All editions from the RBC
Letter collection are available on our web site at www.rbc.com/responsibility/letter.
Our e-mail address is: rbcletter@rbc.com.
Publié aussi en francais.
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