Editor's Note: Motivation is a key objective for many of the plans and programs we devise. But how well do we really understand and work to appreciate the variations and complexities of motivation? Jim Brennan share some insights and conclusions in this Classic post.
No one can motivate anyone else. People already come with their own motivations. As an employer, you must deal with the actual people who do your work rather than artificial stereotypes stamped from an identical mold formed by the creative imagination of some speechwriter. All you can do is offer reinforcements and consequences that hopefully align with the actual motivations of your employees.
Herzberg's refinements of Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a starting point, but individual motivations run the gamut. The starving poor need basic necessities and money; the prosperous rich have the luxury of pursuing other goals like affiliation, recognition or self-actualization. What works best with a particular group depends on what they need and want. One cannot generalize that cash is always superior to other rewards nor that individual recognition will always create more productive output results than group awards. In the immortal words of the ancients, it depends. Motivation is a diagnostic process rather than a universal lever that can be quickly identified and easily pressed for instant results. You don’t inject motivation into your people like a serum; they already have their own, thank you.
The most effective managers are those who know the actual key motivations of each of their subordinates and therefore customize their contacts, output consequences and reinforcements to the actual motivations that drive each individual. Those who believe "everyone is just like me" are gambling on a broad oversimplification. They will find occasional success with their clones but will experience failure with the majority of people who have different circumstances, different priorities and different motivations. Research has proven that the most effective supervisors are those with the best understanding of the motivations of their individual subordinates, not those whose direct reports have the exact same motivations as the supervisor.
A boss motivated by status can’t safely expect a crew of workers desperate for money to want the same rewards he wants; their decisions are driven by different desires. A supervisor who wants to Do Good For Mankind better not project her motivations onto her starving subordinates who are struggling to make ends meet; their enthusiasm is currently best excited by cash. In academia, where the subjects studied are comfortable in regard to their hygiene factors, the forces that motivate behaviors are quite different than those operating among twenty-somethings with growing families to feed. There is a wide disparity of motivations encountered in a typical work group, and the effective supervisor needs more than one tool in his or her kit.
Bottom line: your employees will determine which consequences are more effective with them. Personal responses depend on the preferences of actual individual persons and cannot be reduced to a binary choice between A or B, cash or non-cash, personal or group, individual or team, intrinsic or extrinsic, etc. Life is more complicated than that. Actually, the ideal situation is to offer some of all: the most effective total remuneration systems encompass both cash and non-cash elements in a tremendous variety of forms.
Universal prescriptions tend to be specifically ineffective. There is always more than one way to skin a cat.
E. James (Jim) Brennan is an independent compensation advisor with extensive total rewards experience in most industries. After corporate HR posts and consulting CEO roles, he was Senior Associate of pay surveyor ERI before returning to consulting in 2015. A prolific writer (author of the Performance Management Workbook), speaker and frequent expert witness in reasonable executive compensation court cases, Jim also serves on the Advisory Board of the Compensation and Benefits Review.
Comments