On Internet Business

What motivates people at work?

Posted by Michael under Business Growth

When I was studying Management the key research that described the role and function of motivation was the work of Maslow.

His hierarchy of needs was the classic model by which management designed the processes that were supposed to lead to greater productivity.

Daniel Pinks looks at motivation in a different way in an entertaining clip that is, in itself, evidence of how thinking differently can lead to different outcomes – it’s an example of using mastery, technology and imagination to change the face of business presentations.

What Pinks explores is the way that a wide range of studies show that paying people more to do better work doesn’t achieve the desired result when that work ceases to be monotonous physical effort and requires intellect and complex thought.

Instead, once you ask people to do more sophisticated tasks to achieve their bonus, they actually do LESS well when the incentive of meeting their ‘hierarchy of needs’ is used as a motivating factor – ie if they are offered more money on a sliding scale, they actually perform less well.

So what factors can lead to better business performance today? They are factors relating to personal satisfaction are and achievement:

Autonomy – the desire to have control over our thinking processes. It has been proved in several studies, including some run by MIT, that when you free up employees to think for themselves, they come up with fixes, solutions and improvements in the workplace – not because they want a bonus for a good idea, but because given the chance to make things better, they often focus naturally on improving workplace performance because it’s a big and important part of their lives

Mastery – the inbuilt need to get better at things may be an evolutionary advantage; individuals like to develop their skills, whether it’s the time it takes them to complete a Rubik’s cube or the ability to play a Chopin sonata on the piano. This drive towards mastery is innate and can be harnessed to improve workplace performance when linked to autonomy: people want to improve, but forcing them to improve destroys their autonomy and makes them resistant so you need a balance that recognises these two drives working together with the third

Purpose – having a big purpose helps people want to do better. Money is not a big purpose for many people and ‘more money’ doesn’t inspire a lot of people to get up and do something. Purpose comes from believing you’re doing well in helping make something better – just doing well in a business that is not making something better (or may be making something worse) demotivates the individual so businesses need to look for ways to be ‘good at being better businesses’ as well as just for ways to ‘get better at being in business’.

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