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Victor Vroom and Why Motivation Goes Wrong

The Management Pocketbooks Pocket Correspondence Course

Pocketblog has gone back to basics. This is part of an extended management course.


Have you ever wondered why people suddenly lose motivation?

Victor Vroom gives us a simple way to understand not what motivates people, but when they are and are not going to be motivated by something.

It is simple really…

The only problem is the obscure words Vroom chose for some of his model. But let’s not let that get in the way.

I am going to ask you to do something and promise you a reward if you do it. Will you be motivated?

Here is what goes on in your mind…

First, do you believe that if you put in your best effort, then you will get the result I am looking for? If you do, then that is good, but if you think you don’t have the skills or the resources, or if you think the task is too hard, or my standards are too high, or I am deliberately setting you up to fail, then you won’t be motivated – and that is that.

This is what Vroom called ‘Expectancy’.
Let’s say you are satisfied…

The next question you will be asking yourself is whether you believe that if you do as I ask, I will actually deliver the reward I promised. A lot of organisations have a record of letting people down here; promising promotions and pay awards that never come. Can they be surprised if people get demotivated?

This is what Vroom called ‘Instrumentality’.
Let’s say you do believe me…

Finally, you will consider whether the promised reward is worth the effort. This is a simple cost-benefit assessment: a chocolate bar for a day’s work – No; a meal out for two at a posh restaurant for an hour’s work – Yes.

This is what Vroom called ‘Valence.
Let’s say you want the reward…

Then you will be motivated to undertake the task.

But… if any link in the chain is broken: no motivation.

I told you it was simple. Here is an illustration from The Management Models Pocketbook, and you can read the section on Vroom in the free extract from that book too.

Expectancy Theory

Further Reading

The Motivation Pocketbook

The Management Models Pocketbook

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Motivational Needs

The Management Pocketbooks Pocket Correspondence Course

Pocketblog has gone back to basics. This is part of an extended management course.


If you need to motivate your team, then you absolutely need to understand the concept of ‘needs’.

Most psychological models of motivation, starting with the best known of all – Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs – are based on a simple premise:

Human beings have needs. Therefore the promise to
satisfy them is necessarily motivating.

Maslow is overdone in training courses, management guides and, yes.. blogs. So we’ll skip that for a moment, but you can always take a look at The Motivation Pocketbook.

Modern thinking focuses strongly on four workplace needs:

1. The Need to Master our Work

We have a deep psychological drive to achieve proficiency and mastery and, when we do so and are able to work at that level, we find our work deeply satisfying. We fall into a ‘flow state’ where our work totally absorbs us.

2. The Need to Feel a Sense of Purpose

What question do small children ask, continually?

Why? Why? Why? Why?

As adults we equally need an answer to this and if we sense that our work has a real meaning and purpose that aligns with our values, then it is highly motivating.

3. Relationships

If you work full-time, then you probably spend more time with your work colleagues than you do with the person or people you thought you had chosen to spend your life with. People are social creatures and we have a powerful need for strong social relationships in which we feel there is a place for us – and ideally some sense of esteem from those around us. Respect is also a very important motivator.

4. Control

Once again, young children hold a mirror to us as adults. Much toddler misbehaviour (and the same is true for a lot of teenage actions) is driven by a desire to control our lives, our environment and our choices. Rob people of control and stress is a rapid result. Give workers more control and that is intrinsically motivating.

Two other Needs Based Models on the Management Pocketblog are:

  1. David McClelland’s Three Motivational Needs
  2. Ryan and Deci’s Self Determination Theory

 

 

Further Reading

The Motivation Pocketbook

The Management Models Pocketbook

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What Motivates your Team Members?

The Management Pocketbooks Pocket Correspondence Course

Pocketblog has gone back to basics. This is part of an extended management course.


Exercise 1: What Motivates You?

This is a list of factors that commonly motivate people at work. Score the factors from 12 to 1, with 12 being the most important and 1 the least important, according to your perceptions of what motivates you.

What Motivates You

Herzberg’s Hygiene and Motivational Factors

Traditionally, motivation was viewed as single scale from low to high. Frederick Herzberg’s research led him to propose that dissatisfaction and satisfaction were not opposites of each other, but that we have two scales:

  1. From strong dissatisfaction to no dissatisfaction
    Some things leave us upset or angry. Take them away and we don’t feel good – we just stop being dissatisfied.
    Herzberg called these ‘Hygiene Factors’.
  2. From no satisfaction to strong satisfaction
    Some things don’t bother us if they are missing, but we are really pleased by their presence and motivated to achieve them.
    Herzberg called these ‘Motivational Factors’.

Hertzberg - Hygiene and Motivational Factors model

This nicely explains why a messy workplace kitchen or rest-room gets people massively annoyed, but nobody celebrates the fact that their warehouse has clean facilities – this is quite literally a hygiene factor.

If hygiene factors are not right, they dominate workplace agenda, causing poor morale and motivation. Putting them right will not make a great workplace but it will stop the rot.

Few people will be motivated by motivation factors until hygiene factors are right. But once they are, use motivating factors to boost morale.

Note that some people have different attitudes. To some, money is a hygiene factor, for others it is a motivator. What is nearly always true is that my perception of a fair wage determines the point at which money for me moves from being a hygiene factor (below that level) to a motivational factor (above). However, my attitude to money and what it could bring me will determine the extent to which it really motivates me.

The Results

Hertzberg gave examples of hygiene and motivating factors and there were six of each in the list you looked at. Tot up your scores for each by entering the scores from the top of the article into these boxes. If you score highly on hygiene factors, this suggests things aren’t quite right at work for you. If you score highest on motivational factors, then let your bosses know what they need to do for you.

Hertzberg - Hygiene and Motivational factors

 

Further Reading

The Motivation Pocketbook

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Setting Good Goals

The Management Pocketbooks Pocket Correspondence Course

Pocketblog has gone back to basics. This is part of an extended management course.


Goal setting is such a fundamental part of management, that we sometimes forget what it is for.  It has become embedded into formal processes that can distance us from what we are doing and turn good management practices into form-filling, box-ticking routines; devoid of any real meaning or purpose.

So let’s be explicit about what goal setting is for

We set goals for others so that they will know when they have achieved what we want.  We set goals for ourselves, for the same reason.  Goal setting is therefore about:

  • Giving a clear direction and reason for work
  • Giving an equally clear indication of when to stop
  • Being explicit about what triggers the reward – which may only need to be a thank-you
  • Setting a standard of achievement, on the route to mastery
  • Motivating people to achieve what is needed

SMART Goals

There are a lot of formulations of SMART goals – most typically:

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Achievable
  • Relevant
  • Time-bound

All of these are designed to remind users that good goals are explicit about what is expected, balance challenge with realism, are rooted in what is important, and have a time-scale attached.

What, Why, When, What if?

Good goals need to answer these four questions:

  1. What do you expect of me; precisely?  I need to know what you want in enough detail to be able to meet your expectations.
  2. Why are you asking it of me?  Without a sense of valuable purpose, I shan’t be motivated.
  3. When do you need it by?  So that I can schedule the work into my diary and assign it the right priority.
  4. What if things don’t go according to plan?  What resources can I draw upon, what help will you offer, what compromises are appropriate and what are not acceptable, what authority do I have to make decisions?

The key, however, to good goals is that they must be agreed between you, the manager, and the person for whom you are setting the goals.  The best way to get the commitment you need is to express the goals clearly, put them in writing and then to look your colleague in the eye, and ask: ‘do you accept this goal?’

When goal-setting becomes a formal process it loses its power.  Make good goal-setting an everyday routine – part of your day-to-day management of your team and of each individual.  Formal, annual or quarterly goal setting will then feel easy – it will set the strategic context for your day-to-day management.

Further Reading

The Performance Conversations Pocketbook

The Motivation Pocketbook

Performance Management Pocketbook

Feedback Pocketbook

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Hierarchy of Needs: Motivation Stack

Hierarchy of Needs

Hierarchy of NeedsAbraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is one of the world’s best-known management and psychology models. And the internet does not need another detailed article about it.

But, the hierarchy of needs is a Big Idea. In fact, it’s a Big Idea structured around another Big Idea, with a third Big Idea built in, all of which sit on top of an important point.

The truth is that Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs well and truly earns its fame among management models. This is despite a welter of critiques and failings, and a series of later and more rigorously researched theories and models.

So, this article is going to take a rather different view of the hierarchy of needs. But one that will be instructive, nonetheless. Here, I want to break apart the Big Ideas buried in Maslow’smost enduring work.

Continue reading Hierarchy of Needs: Motivation Stack

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Neuroleadership: The Appliance of Neuroscience to Leadership

Neuroleadership

Neuroleadership‘We’ve finally found our silver bullet‘ says one HR professional in a promotional video for a conference on Neuroleadership.

If that doesn’t send a shiver down your spine; perhaps it should. Silver bullets come from the same shop as snake-oil! So we have to ask,

‘how solid is one of the latest big ideas in management: neuroleadership?’

The principle, of course, is solid. Because what it seeks to do is bring the findings of neuroscience into the practice of leadership.

Continue reading Neuroleadership: The Appliance of Neuroscience to Leadership

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Ikigai – the Japanese route to a good life

Ikigai

IkigaiWhy do you get up every morning? Is it out of a sense of obligation, duty, or even compulsion? Or is it ikigai?

In Japanese culture, ikigai is a reason for getting up in the morning. it is the meaning to your life and your reason for being. It is your ‘raison d’être’, but in a more profound sense than English speakers commonly use that French phrase.

Ikigai is a big idea for English speakers, because we don’t have our own word, but the concept is important.

Ikigai is pronounced: ih-kee | guy-(ee)

Continue reading Ikigai – the Japanese route to a good life

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FISH! Philosophy

FISH! Philosophy
FISH! Philosophy
FISH! Philosophy

What if excellent customer service and great team working could be fun? How could that transform your workplace? Those are the questions behind the FISH! Philosophy. It’s a training programme designed around behaviours that came about spontaneously. And they did so in, of all places, a fish market.

The FISH! Philosophy is a trademarked training programme. So, in this article, we’ll tread lightly in describing its main ideas. If you want to know more, the place to visit is Charthouse Learning’s FISH! Philosophy website.

Continue reading FISH! Philosophy

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Teresa Amabile: Progress Principle

The history of academic study of workplace motivation is full of simple accounts of what motivates us, from the ‘Hawthorne Effect‘ through the ‘Hierarchy of Needs‘ and McClelland’sthree needs‘ to ‘Self Determination Theory‘. Teresa Amabile has added a new, starkly simple account of what managers can do to motivate your people. And it is supported by a huge research base.

Teresa Amabile
Teresa Amabile

 Short Biography

Teresa Amabile was born in 1950 and went Canisius College in western New York State, to study Chemistry. After graduating in 1972, she shifted direction and enrolled at Stanford University to take an MA in psychology, and stayed on to defend her PhD thesis in 1977.

She returned to the East coast to take up an academic post as Assistant Professor of Psychology at Brandeis, where she stayed until 1994, having become a full professor in 1990. There, she became an authority on creativity.

Her 1983 book, The Social Psychology of Creativity, republished in 1996 as Creativity in Context, is considered a classic research text for serious students. It reviews a wide and complex topic. Some of her own findings are most easily accessible in a 1998 Harvard Business Review article, called How to Kill Creativity, which is well-worth reading.

In 1995, she moved to Harvard to become the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration, a chair she continues to hold emerita.  There, Amabile opened up a second, related front in her research, looking at motivation, mood, and our inner life, at work.

This led her to the research which gave her the prominence she enjoys today, and is fully covered in her 2011 book, ‘The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work‘, which she co-wrote with her husband, the psychologist Steven Kramer.

Creativity

Teresa Amabile sees creativity arising out of three components:

  1. Expertise, or knowledge in all its forms
  2. Motivation to solve a problem. Self-motivation (or ‘intrinsic‘ motivation) is far more important than external (‘extrinsic‘) motivation, which can even stifle creativity.
  3. Creative-thinking skills. Amabile asserts there is a capability here and she describes it in terms of flexibility, imagination and perseverance.
Teresa Amabile - Three Components of Creativity
Teresa Amabile – Three Components of Creativity

Managers can influence the development and deployment of these three components, and in her HBR article, Amabile lists six ways.

  1. Challenge
    Managers need to provide tasks that challenge and stretch their employees, rather than allowing them to remain in their comfort zone. Notice how this relates to Csikszentmihalyi’s conditions for Flow.
  2. Freedom
    People thrive best when they are able to work independently on their assignments. This reflects one of the three components of Self Determination Theory: Autonomy.
  3. Resources
    We know constraints help creativity and time pressure boosts it too. But these are likely to do so by also increasing intrinsic motivation. Amabile finds that, without sufficient time and material resources, creativity is held back.
  4. Work-group Features
    Managers can create the local conditions for creativity by encouraging enthusiasm, mutual support and, vitally, a respect among team members for each others’ diverse abilities and contributions.
  5. Supervisory Encouragement
    In a finding that is mirrored by Amabile’s more recent work on inner work-life and motivation, she concludes that managers who encourage and praise team members get more creativity out of them. (Shock horror!)
  6. Organisational Support
    She argues that this goes further. A culture of creativity needs full-on organisational support behind that of the team’s immediate managers. People need to feel their creativity is valued and will open up opportunities.

The Progress Principle

Amabile’s most recent work into our ‘inner worklife‘ has caught the attention of the business press. Her findings show a complete conflict between what people think motivates them at work, and what actually leaves them feeling satisfied at the end of the day.

In questionnaires, Amabile found a very low self-assessment of the importance of making progress in overall mood and job satisfaction. But when she carefully analysed thousands of personal journal entries, she discovered that a sense of having made progress during the day offered the single greatest positive correlation to feeling good at the end of the day. And setbacks in work likewise had an adverse effect on end-of-the-day mood.

I can’t help thinking that David McClelland would hardly have been surprised that this is true of the people he described as having a high ‘Need for Achievement’. But Amabile showed that this applies to almost everyone. And this makes progress a very powerful and equally simple lever of motivation.

And… it is one that managers can easily manipulate. As a project manager, I have always advocated the use of more, rather than fewer, milestones on my projects. Each milestone is a point of recognition of progress. As a manager, you can set more progress indicators for your teams, and expect them to feel better about their work than if they had long periods between conspicuous successes.

There is far more to Amabile’s research than this. But she is an eloquent and clear speaker, so take a look at her describing the Progress Principle, in a 2011 TEDx talk, in Atlanta…

Teresa Amabile at TEDx

Here is Amabile speaking about the progress principle at TEDx, in 2011.

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Edgar Schein: Organizational Culture

Edgar Schein is a social psychologist who has introduced a raft of ideas around organizational culture, and placed his thinking at the heart of the subject. He was brought to The Sloane School of Management by Douglas McGregor, where he was a contemporary of Warren Bennis. Though less widely known, he seems to me to be every bit their equal.

Edgar Schein

Short Biography

Edgar Schein was born in 1928 in Zurich and moved to the United States. There he became a citizen and studied Social Psychology, gaining a BPhil from the University of Chicago, and MA from Stanford, and his PhD in Social Psychology from Harvard, in 1952.

Following this, he spent four years in the US army, studying both leadership and, importantly for his later thinking, the rehabilitation of prisoners of war (POWs) returning from Korea under the influence of brainwashing.

In 1956, Douglas McGregor invited him to join the faculty of the Sloan School of Management at MIT, where he became a professor in 1964 and chaired the Organizational Studies Group from 1972 to 1982. He remains an emeritus professor there.

Edgar Schein’s Work

Edgar Schein’s work is deeply concerned with organizational culture and its relationship to behaviours, motivation, learning, management and leadership, and careers. Let’s survey six big themes in his work.

Organizational Culture

Schein sees culture as the dominant force within an organization, and he defines it as a pattern of shared assumptions, about how we relate to one another, how we perceive truth and reality, the balance of task focus with growth and fulfilment, and others. These affect how people behave and the values and social norms that evolve.

His primary thinking was captured in his best known book, Organizational Culture and Leadership, originally published in 1985, but now in its fourth edition. In a later article, ‘Organizational Socialization and the Profession of Management‘ he argued that integrating with an organizational culture requires undoing, ‘unfreezing‘ prior cultural norms, and establishing new ones. He related this to what he learned during the Korean War, about brainwashing, and suggested there are three responses to these pressures.

  1. Rejection of the organization’s imposed norms and culture: ‘rebellion
  2. Selective adoption of certain values and norms: ‘creative individualism
  3. Full acceptance of the new culture: ‘conformity

Psychological Contract

In another of Schein’s important text books, Organizational Psychology, (1980), he focused on the idea of a ‘psychological contract’ between an employer and its employees. He credits the original idea to Chris Argyris, but develops it considerably. The psychological contract is a set of undocumented expectations between the organization and its employees. Where expectations match, there will be harmony: where they mismatch, problems arise, such as disloyalty, under-performance, and industrial disputes.

Management Cultures

Within an organization, Schein identified three management cultures that co-exist and, to a degree, compete unhelpfully with one another. Organizational Learning will come as people evolve their organizational culture to properly integrate these three cultures.

  1. Operator Culture: local cultures within operating units
  2. Engineering Culture: technicians and experts seeking optimal technical solutions, mistrustful of the soft roles of people in driving the right answers
  3. Executive Culture: managers focused on financially-driven metrics

Organizational Learning

Under the pressures of constant change, organizations can only thrive when they learn quickly. The problem is that it is frustrated by employees’ and managers’ fear of change. He calls this fear ‘Anxiety 1’ and argues that for learning to occur, it must be overwhelmed by ‘Anxiety 2’ – the fear of the consequences of not learning, and therefore of not transforming to meet the new realities. He therefore advocates the need for creating a culture where people can feel safe to learn and experiment, as a way of overcoming Anxiety 1 without the need to induce greater levels of fear.

Motivational Theories

Not surprisingly for someone who came to the Sloan School at the behest of Douglas McGregor, Schein’s fertile mind also paid attention to motivation. He created two contributions. The first was to group models of workplace motivation into three categories, and the second was to add a fourth category.

  1. The Rational-Economic Model
    McGregor’s Theory X, building on Taylor’s approaches to Scientific management suggest we act out of compliance with incentives of coercion.
  2. The Social Model
    Mayo’s Hawthorne experiments suggested we respond to social cures, which was in part captured in McGregor’s Theory Y.
  3. The Self-Actualizing Model
    Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and, to some extent, McGregor’s Theory Y focused on our need for something more than social or economic benefit.
  4. Schein’s fourth category really seems obvious from any distance…
    The Complex Model
    We are all subject to a whole array of needs, expectations, desires, and motivations, and a wise manager will engage with all the subtlety and complexity of each individual. For me, Self Determination Theory is a good introduction to that necessity.

Career Anchors

We all have perceptions about ourselves. Carol Dweck has shown that we are most successful when we feel free to enlarge these as we learn, rather than see ourselves in a fixed way.

In his 1985 book, Career Anchors: The Changing Nature of Careers, (now in a new edition), Schein documented, first five, then three more, perceptions that act as anchors in the career choices we make. The original five were:

  1. Their technical-functional competence
  2. Their general managerial competence
  3. Their need for autonomy and independence
  4. Their need for security and stability
  5. Their entrepreneurial spirit and sense of creativity

The three later components are:

  1. Their desire to give service or their dedication to a cause
  2. Their need for challenge for its own sake
  3. Their desired lifestyle.

What is Culture?

Excerpts from an Interview with Edgar Schein

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