Part 1 of a 3-part series on Motivation
By: Kellie Fowler

Within every organization lies the opportunity for employee performance improvement. And, if you’re a manager or in upper level administration, motivating your team is a must: it can be one of the quickest ways to increase the bottom line of your business.

Because of this, a great deal of time and effort has been invested in motivation practice and theories. Despite the various researchers who have worked to understand exactly what motivates us and the numerous theories that have been applied, one common denominator prevails: To understand motivation, one must first understand human nature.

We will dive into the various theories (theory y, theory z, achievement motivation and two factor motivation hygiene theory (some of which is touched on in this article)) in the second article of this series. But for now, we will work to understand that motivation in the workplace may best be defined as performance improvement.

So, just how can you increase motivation, improve employee performance and sit back and watch your bottom line grow?

Perhaps we should start with the old saying: “You can lead a horse to water, but cannot make it drink”. The same is true for people. Thus, making the first step in this direction one that ensures your employees and/or your colleagues want to be motivated.

While it seems that some people are born with higher levels of motivation than others, this is not always the case. In fact, it has been proven that motivation is a skill, one that must be mastered to achieve success.

Motivation - A Key Contributor to Performance

Thus, performance is considered to be a function of ability and motivation. You can think of it as a simple equation

Job performance = ability x motivation

Ability is hinged, to some degree, on education, experience and training. This makes improvement a continual, lengthy process. By contrast, motivation can be quickly improved.

There are a handful of very basic, broad strategies that exist to improve it. These include:

While motivation practices will vary widely from workplace to workplace, these are the areas you should draw on when looking to improve performance, hence motivation.

Frederick Herzberg’s Findings

Now, it's worth going into a bit of theory here. One can look to Frederick Herzberg, a well-respected researcher who closely studied the sources of employee motivation in the 1950s and 1960s, to find answers relating to job satisfaction and employee satisfaction. While Herzberg’s studies were conducted some time ago, they are strongly respected and underpin much of our current view of motivation.

As he found, the things that make people satisfied and motivated on the job are different in kind from the things that make them dissatisfied (or act as de-motivators), which points to a trend which is exactly opposite of the motivators commonly put in place in the modern workplace, i.e. compensation and incentive packages.

For, as discussed in his classic article in the Harvard Business Review ("One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?", January - February 1968), Herzberg determined that spiralling wages may very well serve to motivate employees; however, it may very well only be motivating the employees to seek the next wage increase and nothing more.

In fact, Herzberg’s motivation-hygiene theory, drawn originally from an examination of events in the lives of engineers and accountants and later paired with at least 16 other studies that utilized a broader sampling of professionals, suggests that the factors that determine job satisfaction (and serve to motivate) are “separate and distinct from the factors that lead to job dissatisfaction.” Hence, the opposite of job satisfaction is not job dissatisfaction, but rather no job satisfaction. Conclusively, the opposite of job dissatisfaction is not job satisfaction, but no job satisfaction.

According to Herzberg, the factors to consider when working to enhance job satisfaction and motivation include:

And the factors which cause most dissatisfaction (Herzberg's "hygiene factors", which we'll talk about in the next article) include:

So managers should seek to motivate people by giving opportunities for and celebrating achievement, and helping individuals enjoy and grow in their jobs. And they should actively minimize the bureaucracy and petty irritations that organizations often unthinkingly inflict on employees.

Herzberg concluded that motivators are the primary cause of satisfaction, and hygiene factors are the primary cause of unhappiness in the workplace. Taking an example: people are often only temporarily motivated by an increase in salary, however they can become very demotivated if they think salaries are too low or if they’re earning less than their peers.

Now, it’s easy to pass over this information without absorbing its significance.

Instead, pause for a moment and put aside your current assumptions about other people’s motivations. Reflect on how you feel yourself. Isn’t this true for you? Don’t you get your greatest satisfaction from doing a good job, being recognised for it, and from growing your capabilities?

And aren’t you most demotivated by the frustrations of bureaucracy, organizational stupidity, politics and being “taken advantage of”?

As it is for you, so it is for most other people.

A Surprising Summary

If you’re a manager, you already know that an important part of your job is to motivate your team. In so many cases, the level of motivation of your team is a huge factor in its performance.

The role of motivating or “job enrichment” is, as Herzberg determined, more than a single project, instead calling on continuous efforts from management. In working to do this, managers should:

Obviously, not all jobs can be enriched, nor do all jobs need to be enriched. As Herzberg concluded, if a small percentage of the time and money that is dedicated to hygiene was instead allocated to his motivating factors, the return in employee satisfaction and motivation, as well as economic gain, would be one of “the largest dividends that industry and society have ever reaped….”

Now, time to put this into practice. How are you going to motivate your team? How will you make good motivation a routine part of your approach to management?

Look for part two of our in-depth series on motivation in the next edition of the Mind Tools newsletter.