Eventually, all managers learn that if they want a person to make some changes, whether stopping a frustrating behavior or gaining new skills, motivation is going to be at the center of the behavioral change. Motivation, that prompting to behave in a certain way, is just very, very important for business success.**
The ability to motivate others is far more important today than in the pre-digital age, especially with the wide use of cross-disciplinary teams. But, a global survey by Nik Kinley and Shlomo Ben-Hur found that only 28% of more than 500 global managers and leaders were confident they could motivate people to learn new behaviors and make change. And only 10% of that group said they felt confident that the changes would stay changed over time. The issue then is not what changes need to take place, but how to do it.
The beginning place for making change is understanding personal or inner motivation, what researchers call intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation developed out of cognitive psychology and self-determination theory. Initially identified in the 1970s and 80s, it has evolved over time and been put to very successful use. Understanding intrinsic motivation is highly important because overwhelming research has found that the typical motivational strategies of better pay, bonuses and external rewards don’t cut it long term. In fact, recent analysis of hundreds of studies of intrinsic motivation reveals that personal motivation accounts for 24% of a person’s performance levels.
Don’t skip over that conclusion. Most still think that money can solve work or learning problems. But it’s a lot more complicated than that today. There’s no question but what money can solve some problems. You see this in exaggerated form in low-paying jobs. There, the potentially resolving the problems of housing, food, shelter, and transportation can be motivational with the necessary dollars. The recent strikes by baristas and Amazon warehouse people are about the basics of food, shelter and transportation, the basic basics. It’s about the all-important question of how to live on $15 to $20 dollars an hour. But get this: once the basics are adequately taken care of, intrinsic motivation enters the picture.
And over the long term, those with a lot of intrinsic motivation will outperform those who work on the basis of rewards, like money--or punishment, like bad hours--otherwise referred to as extrinsic motivation.
The key ingredients of personal, intrinsic motivation are very clear-cut: autonomy, mastery and connection. But the effective manager can help create conditions where for those ingredients to thrive.
Autonomy is the sense of being in control and having free choice. Research reveals that people with a high level of autonomy will sustain their efforts, perform well and achieve their goals. Managers can offer choices, offer feedback and ask for employee ideas and opinions. When these processes are supported by a positive—and optimistic--tone, managerial input goes a long way toward providing employee autonomy and motivation.
Mastery is the belief in one’s own ability or proficiency to perform a task or change a behavior. The most useful form of praise details and qualifies the actions the person has taken to achieve an objective. “I noticed that you laid out your schedule, stuck to it and achieved the objective in very timely fashion. I deeply appreciate being able to count on you.” In other words, think more deeply about what a person is doing right rather than what a person is doing wrong.
Connection is about whether you feel a sense of relationship to your job, its underlying purpose--and the people involved. Research by Duke University’s Dan Ariely reveals that simply being able to see purpose in what we are doing can significantly enhance performance. The most basic connection technique is to clearly establish “why” a task or job is important and needs to be done. Making the importance of a job change personal can be just as motivating as changes chosen by an individual.
The old industrial age managerial rationale for a job change, “because I said so,” is long dead in the water. Furthermore, assuming that a person understands the “why” of a job without specific input is a huge presumption.
In our overly individualistic American culture, the idea that motivation should be engineered from the inside out, rather than the outside in, is the default belief. But in business, and actually in all of life, a wide body of research reveals that motivation depends on other people. If, for example, you’re working in a company where execs make all the decisions for you, there’ll be little in the way of free choice. Or if no one is confirming your ability to perform a task, or you can’t figure out the quality of your task performance, your needs for mastery are going to be unfulfilled. And if the purpose for completing a task is not clear, makes no sense to you, or you don’t like working with a given team, then the idea of connection or relatedness will be small indeed.
The challenge of these three ingredients is that the most relevant ingredient will vary between people. Autonomy may not be as important for one person as for another. And one person may have mastery as a high priority while another sees connection as their highest priority. Furthermore, if a person focuses on only one motivational key—say mastery—over time, that person will be performing at lower levels and, at least in today’s economy, looking to move on to another job or company.
There is a great deal of value in changing contexts. That’s true not only in the work world, but also in all of life. Changing contexts enables the person to understand differences in cultures, people, organizations, thinking styles, priorities, work process and many other areas which can make for a more mature, capable person. Many organizations have an interest in keeping in keeping people childish. Living and working only in one context prevents people from thinking independently and cultivates our worst tendencies in order to do so. But organizations who do not change contexts for employees are shooting themselves in the foot. On the one hand they want employees who are highly motivated, but on the other hand, when they limit contexts, they are limiting their employees.
Recent surveys since the pandemic reveal that a high proportion of workers are very unhappy with their jobs. It’s inevitable that when a person’s motivational needs are not satisfied, firms are going to have some very unhappy, unmotivated, low performing people. The converse is truer still: when the environment offers a context for intrinsic motivation, it drives and improves the performance of the staff.
**See especially Nik Kinley and Shlomo Ben-Hur, Changing Employee Behavior. (London: Palgrave Macmillan), 2015.