Work Motivation

What work motivation is

Work motivation (الدافعية في العمل) is the set of forces that lead a worker to begin a behaviour at work and that determine its direction, its intensity and how long it lasts. It cannot be observed directly. What is observed is the behaviour, and what motivation explains is the cause behind it.

The concept covers internal motives, such as interest in the work and the wish to master it, and external motives, such as pay, promotion and fear of being held to account. An HR officer needs this distinction when asked why performance is weak and told to “motivate” the team, because the answer depends on what is actually blocking motivation.

How work motivation differs from satisfaction, engagement, incentive and commitment

• Motivation and satisfaction. Satisfaction is an attitude towards the work as it stands, and motivation is a force that drives action. An employee can be satisfied and give no extra effort, and another can be dissatisfied and work hard towards an end the employee is seeking.
• Motivation and engagement. Employee engagement is the degree of attachment that moves an employee to put in effort beyond what is required. Motivation is wider, because it also covers what moves a person to the required level itself.
• Motivation and incentive. An incentive is a tool an organisation uses, such as a reward or recognition, while motivation is a state in the person. An incentive can exist without motivation arising, if what is offered has no value to its recipient. The spot award is one of the incentive tools.
• Motivation and commitment. Commitment is attachment to the organisation, and one of its forms is affective commitment. An employee can be attached to an organisation and find nothing in today’s work that drives the employee.

Intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation

Intrinsic motivation comes from the work itself: interest in the task, a wish to master it and a sense that it has meaning. Extrinsic motivation comes from outside the task: pay, reward, recognition and avoiding a penalty. The distinction is not a judgement of value, since both can be present in a job. The difference lies in what remains when the external motive is absent. Work done by someone who is interested in it need not stop when a reward is withdrawn, and work done for the sake of a reward alone is affected by its withdrawal.

The theory of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan points out that intrinsic motivation grows stronger when three psychological needs are met: autonomy, competence and relatedness. The first connects with job autonomy, which is the amount of freedom a job leaves its holder in carrying it out.

An organisation can weaken intrinsic motivation without intending to, through close monitoring, the language of orders, and turning what an employee did out of interest into a duty for which the employee is held to account. Deci and Ryan’s theory regards such settings as restricting autonomy, which weakens intrinsic motivation. Employee empowerment rests on giving an employee authority to take decisions within the scope of the work, and that touches the need for autonomy described above.

The theories that explain motivation to work

The theories do not agree on a single cause of motivation, and each explains one aspect of the picture:

• Hierarchy of needs. It ranks human needs and holds that motivation moves to the next category when the one before it has been sufficiently satisfied. It is set out in detail under hierarchy of needs.
• Herzberg’s theory of motivators and hygiene factors. It separates factors that prevent dissatisfaction, called hygiene factors, such as working conditions, pay and security, from factors that lead to satisfaction and effort, called motivators, such as achievement, recognition and responsibility. The gist is that increasing the first kind does not necessarily produce what the second kind produces.
• Vroom’s expectancy theory. It makes motivation the product of three factors: whether the worker believes that effort will lead to performance, whether the worker believes that performance will lead to an outcome, and whether the worker values that outcome.
• Goal setting theory. It holds that specific, difficult goals, with feedback, lead to more effort than vague goals such as “do your best”. Framing a goal in that way is the subject of SMART goals.
• Equity theory. It says that a worker compares what the worker puts in and receives with what others put in and receive, and if the balance looks unfair the worker reduces effort or tries to adjust the balance. Fairness in distribution is the subject of distributive justice.

An example of when a reward fails to move an employee

Imagine an organisation that announced a reward for reaching a monthly target, and the performance of one employee did not change. The case is examined with the questions of expectancy theory, each answered separately:

• Does the employee believe that effort reaches the target? If the employee sees the target as beyond capacity whatever is done, the employee may give nothing, even if the reward is large.
• Does the employee believe that reaching it leads to the reward? If colleagues reached their goals earlier and the reward was not paid to them on time, the employee’s confidence in the link between performance and outcome weakens.
• Does the employee value the reward? It may be an amount that changes nothing in the employee’s view, or a form of recognition that does not matter to the employee, so its value is missing for that person.

The theory makes motivation the product of these factors, so if one is absent the whole of motivation is absent, and a rise in the others does not compensate. The fault is therefore put right by finding which of the questions is answered “no”: adjusting the target in the first case, controlling how the reward is paid in the second, and changing the kind of thing offered in the third.

A second example: a pay rise or recognition

Consider an engineer whose pay is acceptable to her, who performs her work with skill, and whose achievement on a demanding project nobody knows about. Another engineer is paid less than he considers fair and works hard because he likes what he does. If one solution, such as a rise in pay, were applied to both, the first would benefit less from it than the second. On Herzberg’s theory the first lacks recognition, and the second lacks what falls among the hygiene factors. Whoever makes the remedy the same for both ignores that difference.

The example shows the value of the question before the programme: what drives this person or blocks that person? The answer differs in the two cases, and it decides what is offered.

What blocks motivation in an organisation

Organisational causes can weaken motivation, and a manager should check them before looking at the person:

• Vagueness about what is asked. The worker does not know what the work will be judged by. Stating the goal clearly helps with this.
• No feedback. The worker works for months without knowing how the work is seen. Continuous feedback addresses this.
• A sense of unfairness in procedure. The worker sees that a decision affecting the worker was taken in a way the worker does not understand or cannot have reviewed. That is a matter of procedural justice.

If a worker finds no place to say that something is not working without being penalised, the worker may stop raising problems while still turning up and working. The absence of such a place is the opposite of psychological safety.

Whether the problem lies in motivation or elsewhere

Before weak performance is put down to weak motivation, a simpler question is asked: is the employee unable or unwilling? The weakness may come from a shortage of skill, of tools or of clarity about what is required, and a reward does not remedy that.

This does not deny the effect of motivation. It places motivation correctly: it is a diagnosis to make after the simpler causes have been ruled out. A weak motive may also be a consequence of a worker’s progress halting in a role, which is called career stagnation, and not the cause of weak performance.

What to ask before any motivation programme

• Which behaviour do we want to increase? A reward with no specific behaviour rewards what happens anyway. The clearer the behaviour, the easier it is to tie an incentive to it.
• What do the people we address value? Value is learned from the people themselves, by asking and observing, and not from an organisation’s assumption that money is enough or that thanks is enough.
• What would happen if the incentive were withdrawn? If the whole behaviour rests on one incentive, withdrawing it ends the behaviour, and the organisation finds itself committed to an incentive it did not mean to be permanent.

How motivation changes over a worker’s service

Motivation does not stay in one state throughout service. A new employee may be moved by learning and by the novelty of the work, so competence and relatedness, in the language of Deci and Ryan’s theory, may weigh more than other needs. After years in a role, what once moved the person may have become routine, and the job needs something to renew it: wider responsibility, a project or a move, which is what internal mobility addresses. That is our reading of the theories above and not the result of a measurement, and we do not say that a worker passes through fixed stages.

How work motivation is measured

Motivation is measured by one of two routes: a scale the worker answers, rating agreement with statements about the work, or a manager’s observation of behaviour such as initiative and persistence on a hard task. In the first, the answer expresses what the worker sees in himself or herself on the day of the question, and it may be affected by the wording of the statement and by the worker’s confidence that the answer will not be held against him or her. In the second, the manager measures what shows to the manager and not what is inside the worker.

Neither gives a shared quantity that would allow one organisation to be compared with another, so the result of any scale is judged together with the way it was collected: who answered, how the question was worded and when it was asked. A score on a scale does not replace asking the worker what drives and what blocks.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.