The key ingredient for successful motivation is awareness. This includes learning to become aware of what motivates a particular individual (including yourself), what de-motivates them, or inhibits their motivation, what environmental factors may be affecting motivation, the individual’s general attitude and beliefs about success and achievement, and other factors.
In other words, to motivate others, you need to take a learning and enquiry approach to finding what works, and what doesn’t. Awareness also includes knowing why the task is worth doing well (or quickly and well), where it fits into the realisation of business, workplace, study or other goals, and what difference the motivation will make.
Introduction
How important is the study of motivation
What is motivation
Incentives
Internal or intrinsic incentives
Incentives external to the working environment
The relational character of incentives
Social reinforces
Awareness
Motivation and goals
Motivation and distress
Reinforcement
Tangible Rewards
Intangible Rewards
Intrinsic motivation
Ethics
Gratitude
Belief systems
Peer pressure
Negative Motivators
Punishment
Pain
Suffering
Discipline
Initiating Motivation
Maintaining Motivation
Applications
Space management
Time management
Staff appraisals
Expectations
Vicious and virtuous cycles
DiscoverHOWto Create and present a plan with specific strategies for improving the employee’s motivation in the workplace, based on a clear understanding of the person’s needs, values and situation.
One difficulty in identifying motivating factors is that although motivation is associated with desire, they are not the same thing, even if they have the same effect on a person’s behavior. For instance, a person might desire marriage in order to gain social standing and recognition. The real motivating factor may not be the desire for marriage, but the goal of increasing the person’s prestige as a ‘solid’ or ‘stable’ member of society.
Also, we are usually moved to act by a combination of motivations rather than one factor. The person contemplating marriage might also be seeking to satisfy a need (goal) for financial security, a desire to be cared for and relieved of onerous housekeeping tasks, and also, to end family pressure to settle down and marry.
Course Aims
Describe the nature and scope of motivation.
Identify the differences between people that distinguish the application of motivational skills.
Explain the significance of knowledge and understanding to motivation.
Explain the effects of Tangible Rewards (e.g. Money, Services, Goods) as a major motivator.
Explain the effect of intangible Rewards (e.g. Security, Ethics, Gratitude, Belief Systems/Religion, Peer Pressure) as a major motivator.
Explain how actions can be motivated by negative motivators such as pain, suffering, discipline, threat), and distinguish this type of motivation from positive motivation.
Explain how to initiate motivation with an individual or group in a situation not previously confronted.
Explain how motivation can be maintained or increased in both successful and unsuccessful environments.
Identify a range of situations where motivational skills can be applied, and determine an appropriate way to initiate and maintain motivation in each of those situations.
We may also be motivated to behave in certain ways by other factors, such as convenience, apathy, laziness, boredom, peer influence, group influences, and a desire to conceal true motives, sublimation of our true motives and so on.
These interacting influences on our behavior make motivation a complicated and challenging concept that cannot always be reduced to a simple action-reward formula. Workplace motivation strategies that are based on simplistic assumptions about what drives individuals often do not work because they are based on desires rather than goals.
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