February
2003 - Theories of motivation
Why do we work? Is it the money?
Is it because we love our jobs? Or does it have
something to do with fear? In eight years of looking
at this issue I have read plenty of motivational
theories that associate work with people's needs
or wants but very few that mention fear.
Yet it seems to me that fear
remains a significant source of motivation . Fear
of failure, fear of getting fired, of missing
a deadline or of losing face: are these not all
powerful emotions that tie people to their regular
jobs? How many people are prepared to endure tyrannical
bosses, harassment and miserable working conditions
simply so that they can hold on to a job?
It seems extraordinary to be
considering these questions today, after so many
years of theorising from the likes of Elton Mayo,
Abraham Maslow, Frederick Herzberg and Douglas
McGregor - the "big four" of motivational
theory. But for all their ideas that did so much
to advance our thinking on motivation , they failed
to create a satisfactory theory of work.
Mayo was inspired by perhaps
the most famous of all experiments in motivation
, those carried out at the Hawthorne factory of
Western Electric in Chicago. I went there a few
years ago in a kind of industrial tour of the
Midwest. Those at Midvale and Bethlehem in Pennsylvania,
where Frederick Taylor carried out his work on
scientific management, are derelict although the
old Bethlehem Steel plant is being made into an
industrial museum.
The empty factory floors of the
Hawthorne works were awaiting redevelopment at
the time I called. The factory had hosted a series
of experiments between 1924 and 1932. These had
two distinct phases. The first was designed to
discover whether electric lighting - then a new
development for factories - could improve productivity.
The small "test" team
of women assembly workers did indeed improve its
output when the lighting was increased. What really
threw the investigators was that when the lighting
was dimmed to the level of moonlight, production
rose again.
Mayo, the Harvard professor brought
in to comment on a further set of experiments,
this time looking for the real reasons behind
the increased output, concluded that it had everything
to do with employee morale. The women, he said,
felt special because they had been separated from
others and given much more managerial attention
than their colleagues. People were taking an interest
in them.
The conclusions may well have
been correct but the absence of a proper control
experiment meant that other possibilities could
not be discounted. Western Electric's personnel
manager, for example, believed that money had
been the biggest factor in the production improvements,
since those in the test room had been given a
better rate of pay. But Mayo chose to ignore this
point. He also ignored the idea that motivation
can vary in strength and direction depending on
circumstances.
Maslow pursued this line of thinking
in developing his theoretical hierarchy of needs
that explains how people's desires change as respective
needs are fulfilled. Frederick Herzberg turned
the problem of motivation on its head by looking
at sources of dissatisfaction at work and found
that the things that demotivated people differed
from those that inspired them.
The conditions that needed to
be right if people were not to become dissatisfied
with their jobs he called "hygiene factors".
In various studies, he found that the most important
of these involved the culture of the company and
the way that people were supervised. Work conditions
and salary were important but less so. What he
called the "intrinsic motivators" were
the sense of achievement from a job well done,
recognition, the work itself and responsibility,
together with, to a lesser extent, potential for
advancement and learning.
Curiously, although Herzberg
considered what he called "kick in the pants"
motivation , he did not associate this with fear.
Rather he reflected that motivation was attached
to the super-visor who was issuing the threat.
There was motivational push - the kick - and there
was an alternative "pull" that could
be exerted through reward. This stick-and-carrot
approach, he concluded, was not intrinsic motivation
, because people were doing things in response
to some stimulus and not because it was something
they really wanted to do. With this kind of stimulus,
he noted, it was necessary constantly to up the
ante.
In an experiment that did include
control groups to avoid the distorting "Hawthorne
effect", Herzberg's list of leading motivators
such as recognition and added responsibility were
introduced gradually at the rate of one a week
among one of the groups. Subject matter experts
were appointed in each group, supervision and
the inspection of work were reduced and work quotas
were dropped. Within six months the group was
out-performing the control groups where no such
changes had been introduced. The achieving group's
members were enjoying their jobs more and experiencing
less absenteeism than the other groups.
Unlike the Hawthorne results,
Herzberg's studies had established beyond doubt
the productivity that could be achieved by investing
greater responsibility among work teams. So why,
in spite of all that has been demonstrated about
the advantages of investing responsibility in
workers - so-called empowerment - do we still
see so little of it in the workplace?
Why instead do so many managements
feel that it is acceptable, even desirable, to
maintain a climate of fear? Sally-Ann Huson, knowledge
and intellectual property director at TMI, a UK
training and development company, points out that
a degree of fear can be helpful in some activities.
"Fear of falling off a cliff
when you are skiing will keep you focused on what
you are doing; but I don't experience the same
fear when I am running a training programme. It's
less of an issue," she says. "You could
argue that it can be linked to your reputation
or a worry of experiencing rejection.
"A lot of people don't realise
that motivation is about the circumstances that
exist at any given moment when a task needs to
be accomplished. I love what I do and find it
inspiring. But there are days when my energy isn't
there and the 'to do' list is as long at the end
as it was at the beginning. We have to accept
that motivation is a complex issue."
There's the rub. It helps to
explain why Peter Drucker, the management writer,
once remarked: "We know nothing about motivation
. All we can do is write books about it."
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