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What Makes People Tick at Work: The Science of Motivation
Foundations of Leadership · Chapter 9: Core ModuleSection 9.5 · lesson 63 of 9013 min · free with a free account
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In this lesson
Why the same incentive produces effort in one team and indifference in the next.
- Separate content theories from process theories
- Apply Maslow, Herzberg and McClelland to a real role
- Diagnose an incentive with expectancy, equity and goal-setting
- Use self-determination theory without crowding out what works
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Core Module
What Makes People Tick at Work
Why does one team member volunteer for difficult assignments, while another of similar capability coasts? Why do incentives that work spectacularly in one setting produce indifference in the next? Why does a praise-saturated culture sometimes produce less effort than quiet acknowledgement? Those questions belong to the study of motivation. The psychological forces determining the direction, intensity and persistence of behaviour. It is not one phenomenon. It is a layered set of processes, investigated from several different angles. We will take the theories in two families, and then put them back together into something usable. The goal is not to crown a winner. It is to know which framework answers which question.
Three Components
Motivated Is Not One Question
Start by breaking motivation into its three components, because they behave independently. Direction is where effort is applied. Intensity is how much effort goes in. And persistence is how long that effort is sustained. All three matter, and they genuinely come apart in practice. A worker can apply intense effort in entirely the wrong direction, or sustain effort at low intensity for months. Or produce brief high-intensity bursts that fade before the task is finished. So the question, is this person motivated, cannot be answered until you say which component you mean. Two more distinctions before the theories. Intrinsic motivation means doing something because the activity itself is satisfying. Extrinsic motivation means doing it for an outcome outside the activity. Pay, recognition, avoiding punishment. And motivation is both a disposition that varies between people, and a state shaped by the situation. Management mostly works on the situation, because that is the part it can actually change.
Maslow
The Most Cited Model, and Its Evidence Problem
The content theories ask what people want. And the most cited of them is Maslow's hierarchy, from nineteen forty-three. It arranges human needs into five layers. Physiological, safety, belonging, esteem, and self-actualisation. And it holds that lower needs must be satisfied before higher needs become motivationally active. The intuitive appeal is enormous. It has been used for everything from job design to product strategy. The empirical record is more mixed, and you should know that if you are going to cite it. The strict ordering of the levels has not been confirmed by careful research. Individuals routinely pursue higher needs while lower ones remain unmet. And cultures vary in the relative emphasis they place on the levels. Maslow himself, in later work, treated the hierarchy as far more flexible than the simplified pyramid suggests. The part that has aged best is the distinction between deficiency needs and growth needs. The lower four stop motivating once satisfied. The top one keeps motivating beyond satisfaction.
Herzberg
Absence of Negatives Is Not Presence of Positives
Frederick Herzberg, writing in nineteen fifty-nine, made a cut that is genuinely counter-intuitive. Job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction are not opposite ends of a single dimension. They are produced by different factors entirely. Hygiene factors are pay, working conditions, supervision, and company policy. When inadequate, they produce dissatisfaction. When adequate, they produce nothing - they keep workers from being unhappy, without making them happy. Motivators are achievement, recognition, the work itself, responsibility, advancement and growth. When present, they produce satisfaction. When absent, they do not produce dissatisfaction. The practical implication is striking, and most organisations get it backwards. Improving pay or conditions tends to reduce complaint, without increasing engagement. The levers for engagement lie in the design of the work itself. Herzberg's model has been challenged on methodological grounds. The underlying insight has held. The absence of negatives is not the same thing as the presence of positives.
McClelland
Needs People Acquire, Not Needs Everyone Shares
David McClelland, in nineteen sixty-one, shifted the question from universal needs to variable ones. He argued that these needs are largely acquired rather than innate. And that they differ substantially from person to person. Three needs get the emphasis. The need for achievement is the desire to accomplish challenging goals. Here is the counter-intuitive part. High achievement types do not seek the hardest possible task. They seek moderate challenge with clear feedback, because that is where accomplishment is legible. The need for affiliation is the desire for warm relationships and acceptance. People high in it tend to avoid roles that require coercion. And the need for power is the desire to influence others, which draws people toward positions of influence. The implications for selection and role design are direct. Matching work to the dominant motivational profile beats treating motivation as uniform across the team.
Vroom
Three Terms, Multiplied Not Added
Now the process theories, which ask how the wanting turns into behaviour. Victor Vroom, in nineteen sixty-four, framed the worker as a calculator. Motivational force is the product of three separate perceptions. Expectancy. Will my effort actually produce the performance? Instrumentality. Will that performance actually produce the reward? And valence. Do I value the reward that is on offer? The crucial word is product. The terms are multiplied, not added. Which means if any one of them is zero, motivation is zero. That has a sharp practical consequence for incentive design. An incentive system has to be diagnosed component by component. A worker who does not believe effort produces performance will not respond to a bigger bonus. Neither will one who does not trust that performance gets rewarded, or who does not want the reward.
Adams
The Comparison Is Doing the Work
Stacy Adams, in nineteen sixty-five, pointed at something the calculator model leaves out. Other people. Workers compare the ratio of their outcomes to their inputs. Outcomes being pay, recognition and opportunity. Inputs being effort, skill and time. And they compare that ratio against the ratio for relevant others. Colleagues. Peers in other firms. Or their own situation in the past. Where the ratios match, the worker experiences equity, and motivation is sustained. Where they diverge, the worker experiences inequity, and adjusts behaviour to restore the balance. Under-reward typically produces reduced effort, hostility, or exit. Over-reward is studied more rarely, and sometimes produces increased effort. The implication for management is uncomfortable but well established. The absolute level of reward matters less than the perceived fairness of its distribution. And the comparison group is not fixed, which means the comparison frame is itself something to manage.
Locke
The Best-Evidenced Theory, and Its Failure Modes
Edwin Locke, in nineteen sixty-eight, added the most empirically robust finding in the whole field. Specific and challenging goals produce higher performance than vague or easy ones. With two conditions. The worker has to accept the goal, and has to receive feedback on progress. That has been confirmed across hundreds of studies and dozens of work contexts. The OKR systems used across technology firms rest directly on this foundation. And yet goal-setting has produced some of the most spectacular failures in management practice. Goals that are excessively narrow push people to optimise the metric, at the expense of the unmeasured work. Teaching to the test, in other words. Unrealistic goals produce stress, gaming, or quiet abandonment. And goals that conflict with ethical norms produce the worst outcomes in the literature. Sales incentive systems that generated fraud. Manufacturing quotas that generated safety lapses. Regulatory targets that generated creative accounting. So the discipline includes balanced metrics, ethical guardrails, and an explicit account of what will not be optimised.
Three Needs
What Sustained Intrinsic Motivation Requires
Self-Determination Theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan from the mid nineteen-eighties, is now the dominant framework for intrinsic motivation. It identifies three basic psychological needs. Autonomy is acting from genuine interest, rather than under external pressure. Competence is feeling effective in your interaction with the environment. Relatedness is feeling connected to, and cared for by, other people. The important structural claim is that all three must be supported. A deficit in any one of them undermines the other two. Which is why a highly autonomous role can still feel demotivating, if the person feels isolated. Or why a warm team can still drain people, if nobody feels competent at the work. Notice how different this is from a reward-based account. None of the three needs is something you can pay someone to have. They are properties of how the work itself is arranged.
Crowding Out
The Reward That Removes the Reason
Which leads to the most striking practical claim in the theory, and the best evidenced. External rewards, applied to behaviour that was originally intrinsically motivated, can undermine that motivation. The effect has a name. Crowding out, or overjustification. Rewarding people for an activity they already find satisfying often produces less of it later, once the reward is withdrawn. A software firm learned this expensively. It introduced a quarterly bonus tied to the number of bugs each engineer resolved. In the first quarter, resolution numbers rose sharply, and the programme was declared a success. Engineers filed more trivial bugs into the queue, so they could be resolved quickly. Difficult bugs that needed real investigation were systematically deferred, or reassigned. And engineers reported that the satisfaction of solving hard problems was draining away. Resolution numbers fell. Engagement returned to its earlier level, and code quality recovered. The conclusion is not that rewards are bad. Where an activity is intrinsically dull, they work as expected. Where the activity is meaningful, rewards corrode motivation if they are perceived as controlling rather than informational.
Reinforcement
Consequences, and What This Account Leaves Out
A third tradition explains behaviour through its consequences, drawing on the operant work of B F Skinner. Behaviour followed by desirable consequences tends to be repeated. Behaviour followed by undesirable ones, or by no expected reward, tends to fade. There are four operations, and people mix up two of them constantly. Positive reinforcement increases frequency by adding something the worker values. Negative reinforcement also increases frequency, but by removing something aversive. Punishment decreases frequency by introducing something aversive. And extinction decreases frequency by withholding an expected reward. The schedule of delivery matters more than most managers expect. Continuous reinforcement produces fast learning that extinguishes quickly once it stops. Intermittent reinforcement produces slower learning that persists much longer. The criticisms have real substance. It omits cognition, the social meaning of consequences, and the difference between coerced and freely given effort. As the whole story it works poorly. As one component of a broader account, it works well.
Consolidate
Five Questions Before You Say Try Harder
Practising managers do not have to choose between these theories. They have to know when each applies. So here is a diagnostic. When someone's motivation appears to have dropped, run five questions. First, has something changed in their role, or in their life? Content theories warn that the relevant need-state may have shifted. Second, do they still believe their effort produces results? Expectancy locates motivational failure in the perception that effort is fruitless. Third, do they believe results are still rewarded? Instrumentality erodes quietly during reorganisations, and nobody announces it. Fourth, do they still value the reward on offer? Valence is the most personal term, and the least often checked. Fifth, has something happened to autonomy, competence, or relatedness? A deficit in any one of those drains intrinsic engagement, whatever the incentives say. Run those five and you usually find the binding constraint, which is the right target for a response. And the binding constraint is almost never, try harder.
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About What Makes People Tick at Work: The Science of Motivation
What is Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and is it supported by research?
What is Herzberg's two-factor theory?
What is Vroom's expectancy theory of motivation?
Can rewards reduce intrinsic motivation?
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