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MOTIVATION (Part 1)
Topics covered

● What Is Motivation?
● Classification Of Theories Of Motivation
● Content Theories Of Motivation
○ Maslow’s Needs Hierarchy
○ Alderfer’s ERG Theory
○ Mcclelland’s Achievement Motivation
○ Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory

What is Motivation?

● Motivation is the answer to the question “Why do we do what we do?”.

●
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The motivation theories try to figure out what the “M” is in the equation: “M motivates
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P” (Motivator motivates the Person).
● It is one of the most important duties of an entrepreneur to motivate people.
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Classification Of Theories Of Motivation

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● A Classification of Motivation Theories (Content vs. Process)

● Motivation theories can be classified broadly into two different perspectives:
● Content and Process theories.
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● Content Theories deal with “what” motivates people and it is concerned with
individual needs and goals.
● The main content theories are:
○ Maslow’s needs hierarchy
○ Alderfer’s ERG theory
○ McClelland’s achievement motivation
○ Herzberg’s two-factor theory
● Process Theories deal with the “process” of motivation and are concerned with “how”
motivation occurs.
● The main process theories are:
○ Skinner’s reinforcement theory
○ Victor Vroom’s expectancy theory
○ Adam’s equity theory
○ Locke’s goal setting theory

● No single motivation theory explains all aspects of people’s motives or lack of

motives. Each theoretical explanation can serve as the basis for the development of
techniques for motivating.

Content Theories of Motivation

Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

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● When motivation theory is being considered the first theory that is being recalled is
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs which he has introduced in his 1943 article named as “A
Theory of Human Motivation”.

● According to this theory, an individual strives to seek a higher need when lower
needs are fulfilled. Once a lower-level need is satisfied, it no longer serves as a
source of motivation.

● Needs are motivators only when they are unsatisfied.

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● In the first level, physiological needs exist which include the most basic needs for
humans to survive, such as air, water and food.

● In the second level, safety needs exist which include personal security, health,
well-being and safety against accidents remain.

● In the third level, belonging needs exit. This is where people need to feel a sense of
belonging and acceptance. It is about relationships, families and friendship.
Organizations fulfill this need for people.

● In the fourth level, self-esteem needs remain. This is where people look to be
respected and to have self-respect. Achievement needs, respect of others are at this
level.

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● In the top-level, self-actualization needs exist. This level of need pertains to realising
the person’s full potential.

Alderfer – ERG Theory: Existence Needs, Relatedness Needs And Growth

Needs

● Alderfer (Furnham, 2008) distinguished three steps or classes of needs: existence,

relatedness and growth.

○ Existence needs: These include needs for basic material necessities. In

short, it includes an individual’s physiological and physical safety needs.

○ Relatedness needs: Individuals need significant relationships (be with family,

peers or superiors), love and belongingness, they strive toward reaching
public fame and recognition. This class of needs contains Maslow’s social
needs and external component of esteem needs.
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○ Growth needs: Need for self-development, personal growth and
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advancement form together this class of need. This class of needs contain
Maslow’s self-actualization needs and intrinsic component of esteem needs.
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● Alderfer agreed with Maslow that unsatisfied needs motivate individuals.

● Alderfer also agreed that individuals generally move up the hierarchy in satisfying
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their needs; that is, they satisfy lower-order before higher-order needs.

● As lower-order needs are satisfied, they become less important, but Alderfer also
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said: as higher-order needs are satisfied they become more important. And it is also
said that under some circumstances individuals might return to a lower need.

● Alderfer thought that individuals multiply the efforts invested in a lower category need
when higher categorized needs are not consequent.

● ERG theory of motivation is very flexible: it explains needs as a range rather than as
a hierarchy.

● Implication of this theory: Managers must understand that an employee has various
needs that must be satisfied at the same time. ERG theory says, if the manager
concentrates only on one need at a time, he or she won’t be able to motivate the
employee effectively and efficiently.

● Prioritization and sequence of these three categories, classes can be different for
each individual.

Frustration-Regression Process

● For example there is a student, who has excellent grades, friends, and high standard
of living, maybe also working at the university.

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● What happens if this individual finds that he or she is frustrated in attempts to get
more autonomy and responsibility at the university, maybe also more scholarships
that generally encourage individuals’ growth?
● Frustration in satisfying a higher (growth) need has resulted in a regression to a
lower level of (relatedness) needs (‘I need just my friends, some good wine, I do not
want to go to the university anymore.’).

● This event is known and called the Frustration-Regression Process. This is a more
realistic approach as it recognises that, because when a need is met, it does not
mean it will always remain met.

McClelland’s Achievement Need Theory

In the early 1960s McClelland – built on Maslow’s work – described three human motivators.
McClelland (Arnold et al., 2005) claimed that humans acquire, learn their motivators over
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time that is the reason why this theory is sometimes called the ‘Learned Needs Theory
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● He affirms that we all have three motivating drivers, and it does not depend on our
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gender or age. One of these drives or needs will be dominant in our behaviour.

● McClelland’s theory differs from Maslow’s and Alderfer’s, which focus on satisfying
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existing needs rather than creating or developing needs.

● This dominant motivator depends on our culture and life experiences, of course (but
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the three motivators are permanent).

● The three motivators are:

○ Achievement: a need to accomplish and demonstrate competence or

mastery

○ Affiliation: a need for love, belonging and relatedness

○ Power: a need for control over one’s own work or the work of others

● These learned needs could lead to diversity and variety between employees. More
precisely, prioritization and importance of these motivational needs characterises a
person’s behaviour.

● As we wrote, although each person has all of these needs to some extent, only one
of them tends to motivate an individual at any given time.

Achievement motivation

● A need to accomplish and demonstrate competence or mastery.

● It pertains to a person’s need for significant success, mastering of skills, control or

high standards.

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● Individuals seek achievement, attainment of challenging (and also realistic) goals,
and advancement in the school or job.

● This need is influenced by internal drivers for action (intrinsic motivation), and the
pressure used by the prospects of others (extrinsic motivation).

● Low need for achievement could mean that individuals want to minimise risk of
failure, and for this reason people may choose very easy or too difficult tasks, when
they cannot avoid failure.

● In contrast, high need for achievement means that humans try to choose optimal,
sufficiently difficult tasks, because they want to get the chance to reach their goals,
but they have to work for it, they need to develop themselves.

● Sources of high need for achievement can be: praise for success, goal setting skills,
one’s own competence and effort to achieve something, and it does not depend only
on luck; of course positive feelings and also independence in childhood.
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● McClelland said that training, teaching can increase an individual’s need for
achievement. For this reason, some have argued that the need for achievement is
not a need but a value.
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Affiliation motivation
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● A need for love, belonging and relatedness

● These people have a strong need for friendships and want to belong within a social
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group, need to be liked and held in popular regard.

● They are team players, and they may be less effective in leadership positions.

● High-need-for-affiliation persons have support from those with whom they have
regular contact and mostly are involved in warm interpersonal relationships.

● There are times when individuals want to be with others and at other times to be
alone – affiliation motivation can become increased or decreased.

● Individuals do not like high risk or uncertainty.

Authority/power motivation

● A need to control one's own work or the work of others.

● These persons are authority motivated. There is a strong need to lead and to
succeed in their ideas.
● It is also needed to increase personal status and prestige. This person would like to
control and influence others.
● McClelland studied male managers with high need for power and high need for
affiliation and found that managers with a high need for power tended to run more
productive departments in a sales organization than did managers with a high need
for affiliation.

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● It is important to speak about gender differences in need for power. It is said that men
with a high need for power mostly have higher aggression, drink more, act in sexually
exploitative manner, and participate in competitive sports, and also political unrest.
● At the same time women with higher need for power show more socially acceptable
and responsible manners, are more concerned and caring. These types of people
prefer to work in big, multinational organisations, businesses and other influential
professions.

● McClelland argues that, with a strong need for achievement, people can become the
best leaders – as we wrote above. But at the same time there can be a tendency to
request too much of their employees, because they think that these people are also
highly achievement-focused and results-driven, as they are. Think about your
teachers and professors! I am sure they all want the best for you, they would like to
develop you, but I do not think you feel the same every time. McClelland said that
most people have and show a combination of these characteristics.
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Herzberg’s Two Factor Theory

Frederick Herzberg, introduced his Two Factor Theory in 1959. It is also called
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motivation-hygiene theory.

● This theory says that there are some factors (motivating factors) that cause job
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satisfaction, and motivation and some other also separated factors (hygiene factors)
cause dissatisfaction. That means that these feelings are not opposite of each other,
as it has always previously been believed.
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● Opposite of satisfaction is not dissatisfaction, but rather, no satisfaction. According to

Herzberg (1987) the job satisfiers deal with the factors involved in doing the job,
whereas the job dissatisfiers deal with the factors which define the job context.

● He suggested that there are two kinds of factors affect motivation, and they do it in
different ways:

○ Hygiene factors: A series of hygiene factors create dissatisfaction if

individuals perceive them as inadequate or inequitable, yet individuals will not
be significantly motivated if these factors are viewed as adequate or good.
Hygiene factors are extrinsic and include factors such as salary or
remuneration, job security and working conditions.

● Motivators: They are intrinsic factors such as a sense of achievement, recognition,

responsibility, and personal growth.

● The hygiene factors determine dissatisfaction, and motivators determine satisfaction.

Herzberg theory conforms with satisfaction theories which assert that “a satisfied
employee tends to work in the same organization but this satisfaction does not
always result in better performance”. In other words, satisfaction does not correlate
with productivity.

Herzberg’s Five Factors Of Job Satisfaction (Motivating Factors):

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● Achievement
● Recognition
● Work itself
● Responsibility
● Advancement

Only these factors can motivate us. But at the same time we need the lack of dissatisfaction
(we need hygiene factors, “workpeace”) to achieve more efficient work.

Herzberg’s Five Factors Of Job Dissatisfaction (Hygiene Factors – Deficiency

Needs):

● Company policy and administration

● Supervision
● Salary
● Interpersonal relationships
● Working conditions
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Can we be motivated with money, with a higher salary? What did Herzberg and Maslow say?
Is it just the same or something different?
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● Herzberg addressed salary not as a motivator in the way that the primary motivators
are, just like achievement and recognition.
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● Salary can be a motivator, if you always get higher and higher salary, but we cannot
say that it is an incentive.
● Maslow said, money or salary is needed to buy food to eat, to have some place to
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live and sleep, etc.

● It can be a physiological need.

Limitations of this theory:

● This theory oversees situational variables.

● Herzberg supposed a correlation, linear between productivity, performance and
satisfaction.
● The theory’s reliability is uncertain.
● No comprehensive measure of satisfaction was used.
● The theory ignores blue-collar workers, only white-collar men’s opinion was
discussed.

● However, Herzberg tried to bring more humanity and caring into companies’ life. His
intention was not to develop a theory that is used as a ‘motivational tool’, but to
provide guidance to improve organisational performance.

Criticism

● Universality: they do not care about gender, age, culture, religion or other factor
differences.

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● Research support and methodology problems: these theories were not based on
reliable and creditable research results.
● Work focus: individuals have needs only at their workplaces, but not at any other
places of their life.
● Individual differences and stability over time.
● Process simplicity.

MOTIVATION (Part 2)
What is Motivation?
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● Motivation is the answer to the question “Why do we do what we do?”.
● The motivation theories try to figure out what the “M” is in the equation: “M motivates
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P” (Motivator motivates the Person).

● It is one of the most important duties of an entrepreneur to motivate people.
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Classification Of Theories Of Motivation

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● A Classification of Motivation Theories (Content vs. Process)

● Motivation theories can be classified broadly into two different perspectives:

● Content and Process theories.

● Content Theories deal with “what” motivates people and it is concerned with
individual needs and goals.

● The main content theories are:

○ Maslow’s needs hierarchy

○ Alderfer’s ERG theory
○ McClelland’s achievement motivation
○ Herzberg’s two-factor theory

● Process Theories deal with the “process” of motivation and are concerned with “how”
motivation occurs.

● The main process theories are:

○ Skinner’s reinforcement theory

○ Victor Vroom’s expectancy theory
○ Adam’s equity theory
○ Locke’s goal setting theory

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● No single motivation theory explains all aspects of people’s motives or lack of
motives. Each theoretical explanation can serve as the basis for the development of
techniques for motivating.

Process Theories of Motivation

Skinner’s Reinforcement Theory

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● The Reinforcement theory, based on Skinner’s operant conditioning theory, says that
behaviour can be formed by its consequences (Gordon, 1987).
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● Positive reinforcements, for example praise, appreciation, a good mark/grade, trophy,

money, promotion or any other reward can increase the possibility of the rewarded
behaviours’ repetition.

● If a student gets positive verbal feedback and a

● good grade for his test, this reinforcement encourages the performance of the
behaviour to recur. If the teacher doesn’t tell precisely what he expects, then the
positive reinforcements can drive the behaviour closer to the preferred.

● We use negative reinforcement when we give a meal to a hungry person if he

behaves in a certain manner/way.

● In this case the meal is a negative reinforcement because it eliminates the

unpleasant state (hunger).

● Contrary to positive and negative reinforcement,punishment can be undesired

reinforcement, or reinforce undesired behaviour.

● For example, if a student is always late to class and thus he gets negative verbal
feedback and also always has to tidy up the classroom at the end of the day, in this
case the undesirable behaviour is reinforced with an undesirable reinforcer. The
punishment declines the tendency to be late.

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● According to the theory, positive reinforcement is a much better motivational
technique than punishment because punishment:

○ Tries to stop undesirable behaviour and does not offer an alternative

behaviour
○ creates bad feelings, negative attitudes toward the activity, and the person
who gives the punishment
○ suppresses behaviour, but does not permanently eliminate it.

● Once certain behaviour has been conditioned through repetitive reinforcement,

elimination of the reinforcement will decline the motivation to perform that behaviour.
Therefore it is better not to give a reward every time. Reinforcement in the workplace
usually takes place on a partial or irregular reinforcement schedule, when reward is
not given for every response.

● The reinforcement theory is included in many other motivation theories. Reward must
meet someone’s needs, expectations, must be applied equitably, and must be
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consistent. The desired behaviour must be clear and realistic, but the issue remains:
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which reinforcements are suitable and for which person?

Incentive Theory:
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● Incentive theory suggests that an employee will increase her/his effort to obtain a
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desired reward.
● This is based on the general principle of reinforcement.
● The desired outcome is usually “money”.
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● This theory is coherent with the early economic theories where man is supposed to
be rational and forecasts are based on the principle of “economic man”.

Victor Vroom’s Expectancy Theory

● Expectancy Theory argues that humans act according to their conscious

expectations that a particular behavior will lead to specific desirable goals.

● Victor Vroom’s (1964) expectancy theory aims to explain how people choose from
the available actions. Vroom defines motivation as a process that governs our
choices among alternative forms of voluntary behaviour. The basic rationale of this

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theory is that motivation stems from the belief that decisions will have their desired
outcomes.

● The motivation to engage in an activity is determined by appraising three factors.

These three factors are the following:

○ Expectancy – a person’s belief that more effort will result in success. If you
work harder, it will result in better performance.
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○ Instrumentality – the person’s belief that there is a connection between
activity and goal. If you perform well, you will get a reward.
○ Valence – the degree to which a person values the reward, the results of
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success.
● Vroom supposes that expectancy, instrumentality and valence are multiplied together
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to determine motivation. This means that if any of these is zero, then the motivation
to do something will be zero as well.

● A person who doesn’t see the connection between effort and performance will have
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zero expectancy. A person who can’t perceive the link between performance and
reward will have zero instrumentality. For a person who doesn’t value the anticipated
outcome, reward will have zero valence.

● The expectancy theory highlights individual differences in motivation and contains

three useful factors for understanding and increasing motivation. This theory implies
equity and importance of consistent rewards as well (Konig & Steel 2006).

Edwin Locke ‘s Goal Theory

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● Edwin Locke proposed Goal Theory in 1968, which proposes that motivation and
performance will be high if individuals are set specific goals which are challenging,
but accepted, and where feedback is given on performance.
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● The two most important findings of this theory are:

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○ Setting specific goals (e.g. I want to earn a million before I am 30) generates
higher levels of performance than setting general goals (e.g. I want to earn a
lot of money).
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○ The goals that are hard to achieve are linearly and positively connected to
performance. The harder the goal, the more a person will work to reach it.

The following guidelines have been useful in the goal-setting:

● Set challenging but attainable goals. Too easy or too difficult/unrealistic goals don’t
motivate us.

● Set specific and measurable goals. These can focus toward what you want, and can
measure the progress toward the goal.

● Goal commitment should be obtained. If people don’t commit to the goals, then they
will not put effort toward reaching the goals, even specific, or challenging ones.
Strategies to achieve this could include participation in the goal setting process, use
of extrinsic rewards (bonuses), and encouraging intrinsic motivation through
providing workers with feedback about goal attainment. Pressure to achieve goals is
not useful because it can result in dishonesty and superficial performance.

● Support elements should be provided. For example, encouragement, needed

materials, resources, and moral support.

● Knowledge of results is essential – so goals need to be quantifiable and there needs

to be feedback.

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● Goal-setting is a useful theory which can be applied in several fields, from sport to a
wide range of work settings.

● Sports psychology in particular has adopted its recommendations. The concept of

goal-setting has been incorporated into a number of incentive programmes and
management by objectives (MBO) techniques in a number of work areas.

● Feedback accompanying goal attainment may also enhance a worker’s job

performance and ability to become more innovative and creative on the job through a
trial-and-error learning process.

● Since goal-setting is a relatively simple motivational strategy, it has become

increasingly popular.

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Adams’ Equity Theory

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The equity theory states that people are motivated if they are treated equitably, and receive
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what they consider fair for their effort and costs.
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● The theory was suggested by Adams (1965) and is based on Social Exchange
theory.

● According to this theory, people compare their contribution to work, costs of their
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actions and the benefits that will result from the contribution and benefits of the
reference person. If people perceive that the ratio of their inputs-outputs to the ratio
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of referent other’s input-output is inequitable, then they will be motivated to reduce

the inequity.
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● At the workplace the workers put inputs into the job, such as education, experience,
effort, energy, and expect to get some outcomes such as salary, reward, promotion,
verbal recognition, and interesting and challenging work each in equal amounts.

● The equity theory works not just in the workplace, but at school as well.

● The greater the inequity the greater the distress an individual feels, which will
motivate the endeavour to make the outcomes and the inputs equal compared to the
reference person.

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● When inequity exists, a person might…

● Reduce his/her inputs, efforts, quantity or quality of his/her work

● Try to increase his/her outputs (ask for better mark, or pay raising)

● Adjust his/her perception of reference person or his/her outcomes or inputs

(re-evaluate his/her or the reference person’s effort or outcome)

● Change the reference person

● Quit the situation.

● The problem with equity theory is that it does not take into account differences in
individual needs, values, and personalities. For example, one person may perceive a
certain situation as inequitable while another does not. Nevertheless ensuring equity
is essential to motivation.

Public Administration Notes By-G.Rajput