Talent management and motivation
Text: Mikael Nederström Images: iStockphoto
There is a lot of talk about talent management, but the psychological dynamics behind it are less known. Rewarding people and making them committed are current themes in many companies. In motivation research, the dynamics acting behind these were found years ago.
Motivation indicates what a person wants when there are no external obligations. The lack of external obligations is a short way
from providing concrete rewards. When most people think about increased motivation, they think about money. However, the meaningfulness of work consists of other.
The significance of money and rewards as a source of motivation have often been exaggerated. A certain amount of remuneration is of course necessary to prevent competitors from taking away the company’s talent, but when considering the ratio of money to motivation, there is a certain point after which an increase in the pay no longer increases the motivation. The same goes for any other external factor.
Paradoxically enough, the long-term effect may even be the opposite: excessive remuneration for desired behaviour will slowly start undermining its meaningfulness. This is especially true when the employee is a highly motivated professional who regards his or her work as meaningful. However, the negative effect of rewards is strongly against classic behaviourism, and it is not very well suited to everyday thinking either.
One of the great achievements of psychological motivation theory was explaining why rewarding is no longer sensible after a certain point is reached. Unfortunately, even few psychologists remember the golden years of motivation theory and its achievements.
What motivates us?
What most people remember from the history of science are Pavlov’s dog and the classic behaviourist assumption: if you want to encourage a certain action, the best way to achieve the goal is to reward this action and punish for the opposite. In the scientific sense, this connection was beautiful, clear and linear – the more you reward a certain action, the more the object of the reward will do it.
Today we know that this is not so simple. But where does behaviourist reasoning go wrong?
The problem is easier to understand when we recognise the fact that the people may have different levels of motivation. External motivation comes from the willingness to show others, status, public recognition or monetary remuneration. Work is often considered just a means towards these ends. If they can be achieved by other means, such as a lottery win or inheritance, the meaningfulness of externally motivated work will end there.
Beneath the external and publicly expressed objectives, however, there is a more psychological, less conscious layer of motivation. This can be referred to as internal motivation. This level of motivation brings genuine and lasting satisfaction – if it is the way it should be, the person performs the work principally because of the work itself. In this case, the feeling of meaningfulness is not a result of any external factor but the pleasure of the work itself. The work then provides contentment, aiding the person to reach the state of flow easily and without further thought.
Nowadays, we accept that some of the motives may be more conscious than others, and yet these do not necessarily contradict each other; according to one opinion, they act in parallel, independent of each other. In other words, the question is more about differences in tone rather than polar opposites.
An inner need
Hobbies that you begin on your own initiative are a good example of the realisation of your inner level of motivation. When an activity brings you satisfaction, you are prepared to invest even large amounts of money and time in it. Few people count the hours or money spent on a hobby that brings them genuine satisfaction. The best sign of the meaningfulness of the activity is that there does not seem to be any sense in it – it is fun just because you enjoy doing it.
A classic example of losing internal motivation is how even a nice hobby gets a new meaning when it becomes your job. The objective then comes from the outside, even if it was the same as before. You feel that what you previously considered self-evident is now something you do because you have to, just because it earns you money.
Even if getting money for your hobby felt ideal at the beginning, your internal motivation may gradually turn into external motivation. At some point, you may end up noticing that the only reasons for your continuing your hobby are remuneration and external expectations.
Differences in motivation
The difference between levels of motivation is even more evident in the behaviour of children. A psychologist acquaintance working in England once told me about children who kept making loud noise under his office window every day. The situation started to get unbearable. Because my acquaintance was well familiar with the significance of different levels of motivation, he decided to give the children a pound every time they made an even louder noise than before.
The rewarding was successful and the noise got worse from day to day. However, one morning the man went to the children and said that unfortunately he was out of money. His pockets were empty; the budget had been spent. After a few days, the children noted that the “work” was no longer worth their while because they were not getting paid, so they might as well stop making noise under the window altogether.
This story is an illustrative example of how making noise, which had brought the children genuine enjoyment, started to become an externally controlled activity. And once an activity becomes externally rewarded, it is no longer fun.
Corresponding results were received in a study of social psychology students. Students were taken to a tedious, boring test one at a time. After the test, they were to tell those coming after them that the test had been very interesting and exciting. Some of the students were paid to lie, others were not.
When the students were later asked who had lied in claiming that the test was exciting, those who had been paid were more eager to admit to lying. This was because those who had not been paid thought they had lied of their own free will. Thus, the immoral deed was naturally more difficult to admit. Those who had been paid thought they had lied just for the money, so the motive for lying was easier to externalise.
The mechanism was exactly the same as with the children making noise: people considered their actions self-guided depending on whether they got paid or not.
Factors influencing commitment
If money alone is not enough to guarantee that talented employees will remain motivated, what is? Well-being at work and the feeling of doing meaningful work might be a good start. Optimal conditions and prerequisites for motivating work are already a big step in the right direction.
In a more extensive sense, well-being can be considered to include personal development opportunities, a good atmosphere, sufficient influence on one’s own work and high-quality leadership. These are the tools for ensuring the commitment and motivation of personnel.
Studies seem to support the idea that the more complicated and demanding the job is, the more important the factors related to job well-being become. They are the most important in demanding specialist or supervisor roles.
This does not mean that people should not receive monetary compensation for a job well done. Nonetheless, money can never make up for lack of well-being at work and motivation. Money alone is not enough to keep the talent in the company.
Connection to productivity
Well-being at work also promotes the company’s productivity. Recent, extensive meta-analyses show that the connection between productivity and well-being at work has long been underestimated.
You can always ask whether well-being increases productivity or the other way round. A behaviourist might think that payment by results directly increases the well-being. However, the most likely model is complex and has several psychological factors as transmitting features, including positive feelings, internal motivation, the need to perform well, conscientiousness and a feeling of autonomy.
Lately, there have been signs indicating that well-being at work has more influence on productivity than vice versa. Money has a mainly indirect significance and does not increase the sense of well-being. When the company is doing well, this naturally enhances the stability of the job, thus increasing the feeling of security, but it usually has no effect on other atmospheric variables.
From a motivational-psychological point of view, there is nothing extraordinary about the direction of this cause-effect relationship. Productivity is a positive side-effect of meaningful and motivating work. To put it the other way round: investment in the motivation and meaningfulness of work can also increase productivity.
Mikael Nederström
firstname.lastname@psycon.fi
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