OUTSIDE IN, OR INSIDE OUT?

Motivation combined with capability tends to lead to effective behaviours, and behaviour underpins performance. To get the right answer to the question above, it helps to ask the right question: how do we get our employees to perform better? If someone has the capability but not the motivation to perform, the necessary behaviour is very unlikely to arise and they will not perform; the same applies if someone has the motivation but not the capability. You need both motivation and capability for performance.

 The second question is: which is more important with regard to performance, motivation or capability?

 At first it would seem that capability is more important, and often great emphasis is placed on training in the workplace to enhance that. Appropriate training is important, and, after all, motivation is not trainable, so one might wonder what is the use in focusing on human motivation? But look more deeply and you realise that motivation is much more important than capability in the wider context of both professional and personal life. In short, this is because:

 1.     Motivation determines what you do; in many ways it determines the path you take at work (and in life).

2.     If you do not have the motivation, your capability becomes largely irrelevant. Not surprisingly, motivation precedes capability and often leads to capability.

Given all this, the third question becomes very important: what can we do to increase motivation? To answer this you can split the factors affecting motivation into two types: internal and external to the individual.

 Internal factors. Internal factors include a person’s personality (values and beliefs etc). It is important to look at this is when selecting individuals. It is also wise to use good psychometric instruments to increase the accuracy of your decisions, such as the Universal Hierarchy of Motivation (UHM) Professional Report (see accuratesurveys.com), especially as they are so cost-effective.

External factors. A key external factor is the systems and structure of an organisation. But it is often difficult to predict how this affects motivation. Consider the real-life example of a daycare centre that encounters tardy parents at closing time each day. This situation can lead to anxious children and frustrated carers. A solution put in place by 10 daycare centres in Haifa, Israel, was to fine parents $3 if they were more than 10 minutes late. Rather surprisingly, this solution had the opposite effect, and the number of late parents more than doubled after the fine was introduced. It turned out that for those parents motivated to be on time by the guilt of being late, the payment of a small fine assuaged these feelings and they were less motivated to be punctual.

A good model on human motivation helps us better predict better the actual outcomes. The UHM provides the basis for a complete understanding of human motivation so that you can accurately predict what behaviours will result from system or structural changes. For instance, many people still believe that bonuses make employees work harder and more effectively. Alfie Kohn, a teacher-turned-writer, found that the more you reward a person with grades or incentives, the lower the person’s productivity. In this context, individuals become less intrinsically motivated. Bonuses (extrinsic motivators) actually reduce people’s performance on complex tasks because they limit individuals’ capacity to fulfill the task by changing their focus to how to get the best bonus.

American psychologist Edward Deci observed that tangible rewards inevitably reduce intrinsic motivation. “There is no question,” he stated, “that in virtually all circumstances in which people are doing things in order to get rewards, external tangible rewards undermine intrinsic motivation”.i (There is one exception. In jobs where there is little intrinsic motivation, with simple, repetitive manual tasks, rewards tend to increase output or productivity.)

 International studies have found that employees who were fully engaged in their work were almost 50% more productive in terms of revenue generation and 300% better at delivering value than their disengaged (disaffected) colleagues.

The UHM levels in the table below are correlated with the relevant intrinsic motivator and extrinsic behaviour. ‘Extrinsic behaviours’ correspond to increasing levels of positive engagement, starting with the lowest: satisfaction at work. The UHM theory explains why paid bonuses at work are poor motivators, because they only move employees’ motivation to the level of pleasure, which renders them less able to deal with greater and more complex challenges that are best dealt with at a higher level.

MAKING YOUR INVESTMENT WORK

To get the best performance (combination of motivation and capability) from your employees, it is critical that you provide structures and systems (including pay systems) that motivate them at the higher levels. To understand and predict what these are, you need a very good model or framework describing human motivation.

Only when you have achieved this is it worth investing time and money in training your employees. If you do it the other way around, not only may your employees not use the new skills acquired in their training but they are more likely to leave the organisation, which means someone else is likely to get all the investment you have made in them!

About the author Mark Oliver is the managing director and CEO of MarkTwo Consulting. He is also author of ‘The Seven Motivations of Life’, available at lulu.com, or visit marktwoconsulting. com