How does motivation work?

Prop­er­ly mo­ti­vat­ed, peo­ple take mat­ters in their own hands and start to act. In or­der for peo­ple to be ac­ti­vat­ed, mo­ti­va­tion has to find the right start­ing point.

Mo­ti­va­tion is the rea­son for people’s ac­tions, de­sires and needs, it makes peo­ple ready to act. Emo­tion­al and neur­al ac­tiv­i­ties come in to play and cause us to strive for cer­tain goals or ob­jects.

There are two dif­fer­ent sources of mo­ti­va­tion, in­trin­sic and ex­trin­sic, which both have their place in the cor­po­rate world. In this case here, we will fo­cus on the in­trin­sic mo­ti­va­tion, be­cause it can be the dri­ving force be­hind a person’s ac­tion to ac­com­plish a task for its own sake. For ex­am­ple, your sales­per­son, who talks to cus­tomers be­cause he ac­tu­al­ly en­joys do­ing so. He does not think about why he does that or what ben­e­fits it of­fers. He just does it. And that’s why it’s au­then­tic

Straight from the heart

For a com­pa­ny, ex­act­ly this source of mo­ti­va­tion is high­ly in­ter­est­ing. Even if ex­trin­sic fac­tors should not be for­got­ten — ma­te­r­i­al or sim­i­lar in­cen­tives that im­prove your rep­u­ta­tion – one thing stays: If you do some­thing from your heart and in­ner con­vic­tion, you do it right, with­out re­stric­tion or a hid­den agen­da. Those are the kind of em­ploy­ees every com­pa­ny wants. The cor­po­rate val­ues that come in­to play can then ap­pear in many dif­fer­ent ways.

Ac­ti­vat­ing peo­ple

Mo­ti­vat­ing peo­ple gen­uine­ly is an art that can be learned. Along with the right val­ues, shared ac­tiv­i­ties play a role, in­cen­tive pro­grams and an in­spir­ing team that makes you change the per­cep­tion of jour job: work is not just work, it has mean­ing. Mo­ti­va­tion works in dif­fer­ent ways, a com­bi­na­tion of ex­trin­sic and in­trin­sic fac­tors might just do the trick for your em­ploy­ees.

Image: Thnh Phng CC0