The Science of Motivation By Ryan Scholz
Most managers feel that a major part of their job is to motivate people who work for them. The problem that many have is distinguishing the difference between motivation and manipulation. Managers who attempt to motivate through manipulation will actually get worse results than those managers who simply stay out of the way and let people do what comes naturally to them. Let’s start with a definition of motivation: Motivation is the internal psychological force that causes an person to move towards a achieving a goal. Read this definition several times to get the full meaning of it. Note that motivation is internally driven. People must motivate themselves. Managers don’t motivate people. Rather managers create conditions and an environment where people are self motivated. Secondly, without a goal, motivation doesn’t exist. In order for people to be motivated, there must be a sense of purpose and reason for expending the mental and
physical energy required. The goal must have meaning to the person. Psychologists have studied human motivation for years. Unfortunately, there is a disconnect between what science knows about human motivation and behavior, and what the business world does. For example, science tells us that extrinsic motivators, fear and reward, are temporary and don’t change underlying attitudes which influence behavior. Yet, many organizations rely mainly or exclusively on extrinsic motivation to stimulate higher levels of performance. In a study done by MIT, and then replicated several times since, researchers studied the impact of rewards on performance. The results in every case showed that if the task involved even a small amount of cognitive ability (thinking, creating, reasoning, problem solving, etc.), the higher the reward the worse the performance. The only time the size of the reward related to performance was for physical tasks where the
amount of physical effort expended correlated directly to performance. That is not to say that people are not motivated by money. If people feel that they are not compensated fairly, it will have an impact on their performance. Money is what Frederick Herzberg calls a hygiene factor. According to Herzberg, hygiene factors are sources of demotivation if not addressed, but in themselves do not provide motivation. The science of motivation says that higher performance will only come when people are intrinsically motivated. According to research by Dan Pink, three factors correlated with high levels of intrinsic motivation. The first is autonomy. Autonomy is having the freedom to control and direct one’s own work. Managers who want to have employees with high levels of intrinsic motivation need to let their people do the job. I have used quote by Bill Oncken many times because I think it is such a good piece of advice for any
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