Employee Experience and High-Performance Culture
Blog: Motivation Isn’t Work Performance. So, What Is It?
By Prof. Rob Briner, Director (Research)
What exactly is ‘motivation’? What does it entail? How has the term and concept been used? What does doing something to ‘motivate’ employees mean?
Without answers to these questions, particularly given the broadness of the topic, it is not possible to have any focused or meaningful discussion of work motivation. It is also not possible for HR functions to make well-informed decisions about policies and practices aimed at improving motivation.
Here’s a few well-known and relatively recent definitions of motivation.
A set of energetic forces that originate both within as well as beyond an individual’s being, to initiate work-related behaviour and to determine its form, direction, intensity, and duration. (Pinder, 1988)
Motivation reflects processes involved in the allocation of limited resources across the nearly infinite range of possibilities. (Schmidt, Beck & Gillespie, 2013)
A dynamic, goal-directed, resource allocation process that unfolds over the related variables of time, experience, and place. (Kanfer, Frese & Johnson, 2017)
Four key aspects of most of these definitions are that:
1. Motivation is a process
Something that occurs episodically and over time. Not a simple stimulus-response or cause-effect phenomenon. It is something that is on-going and unfolds over time in the minute-to-minute and hour-to-hour actions of employees. By implication it, and the work performance it impacts, are therefore dynamic and change over time.
2. There are several stages in this process
In terms of a potentially very large set of factors or inputs that are both internal and external to the employee that shape the:
- Initiation of an action (when the behaviour starts),
- Direction of the action (which action is selected for which goal),
- Intensity of the behaviour (how vigorously or effortfully the action is undertaken),
- Persistence (for how long the action is performed).
3. Many different factors influence motivational processes
The drivers of motivational processes are many and varied. There is no single influence on motivation. Nor is there any particular type of influence which is necessarily more important. Different theories of motivation (which we will discuss later) focus on just some of these factors and explain how they affect different parts of the motivational process. No single theory can explain how every possible influence affects every part of the motivation process.
4. Motivation is not the same as work performance
An individual may be highly motivated towards achieving a particular goal but for a whole range of reasons (e.g., ability or lack of resources) they may not be able to do so. Even if a goal is completed it can only be considered to be relevant to work performance if it contributes to organisational objectives.
Look out for our full white paper on motivation and work performance, released later this month. The associated event: https://www.crforum.co.uk/work-psychology-series-motivation-and-work-performance/ is now fully booked – email events@crforum.co.uk to join the waiting list.
