Motivation is the desire within people that prompts them to do what they do. Such desires are either intrinsic (i.e., our nature) or extrinsic (i.e., external source), and people generally have many of both kinds competing simultaneously that determine their behavior. Ultimately, people respond to all of these desires by behaving in a way that seems—reactively, intellectually and emotionally—to be in their best interests. It’s true that you can’t motivate other people or control what they choose to do; you can only influence people by impacting their desires—by creating new desires, triggering latent desires, reinforcing prominent desires, etc.

Work Fulfills Motivating Desires

From a management perspective, the purpose of employee motivation is to influence employees in such a way that they have a prevailing desire for high-performance work. Since intrinsic desires are decidedly more substantial than extrinsic desires in determining human behavior, most management effort toward motivation should be focused on the natural desires of workers.

Many managers recognize some of the more important natural desires through Abraham Maslow’s theory about the human “hierarchy of needs,” which includes physiological needs, security/safety needs, social needs, ego-status needs, and self-actualization needs, in order of their importance. Key to applying this theory is the understanding that people seek the initial needs only until these needs seem satisfied, and then their desire rises to the next level of needs. For managers, it is important to recognize the level of needs that their workers were attempting to meet through their work. This understanding guides managers to create and emphasize work conditions that contribute to the fulfillment of this need.

Self-Motivated Organization

Ultimately, managers will want to create a self-motivated organization—one that inspires employees to take responsibility for their own motivation. To do so, managers will need to help employees understand and attend to their own desires to do their best work. This is particularly important for knowledge and service workers because much of this work is performed out of the direct view of managers. Furthermore, today’s knowledge and service workers are more better informed and psychologically more complex than their predecessors.

When work is designed following humaneering principles, it is naturally motivating to employees well suited for the work. This is the subject of a quickly read book coauthored by Jim Pepitone—Motivating Employees (McGraw-Hill, 1999).

pepitoneworldwide is routinely sought after to share the valuable knowledge and insights we have gained from our development and application of humaneering technology. When it comes to the design of a motivating organization, no one knows how to do it better than our professional humaneers.

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