Work motivation is a person's internal disposition toward work. To further this, an incentive is the anticipated reward or aversive event available in the environment. While motivation can often be used as a tool to help predict behavior, it varies greatly among individuals and must often be combined with ability and environmental factors to actually influence behavior and performance. Results from a 2012 study, which examined age-related differences in work motivation, suggest a "shift in people's motives" rather than a general decline in motivation with age. That is, it seemed that older employees were less motivated by extrinsically related features of a job, but more by intrinsically rewarding job features. Work motivation is strongly influenced by certain cultural characteristics. Between countries with comparable levels of economic development, collectivist countries tend to have higher levels of work motivation than do countries that tend toward individualism. Similarly measured, higher levels of work motivation can be found in countries that exhibit a long versus a short-term orientation. Also, while national income is not itself a strong predictor of work motivation, indicators that describe a nation's economic strength and stability, such as life expectancy, are. Work motivation decreases as a nation's long-term economic strength increases. Currently work motivation research has explored motivation that may not be consciously driven. This method goal setting is referred to as goal priming. It is important for organizations to understand and to structure the work environment to encourage productive behaviors and discourage those that are unproductive given work motivation's role in influencing workplace behavior and performance. Motivational systems are at the center of behavioral organization. Emmons states, “Behavior is a discrepancy-reduction process, whereby individuals act to minimize the discrepancy between their present condition and a desired standard or goal” (1999, p. 28). If we look at this from the standpoint of how leaders can motivate their followers to enhance their performance, participation in any organization involves exercising choice; a person chooses among alternatives, responding to the motivation to perform or ignore what is offered. This suggests that a follower's consideration of personal interests and the desire to expand knowledge and skill has significant motivational impact, requiring the leader to consider motivating strategies to enhance performance. There is general consensus that motivation involves three psychological processes: arousal, direction, and intensity. Arousal is what initiates action. It is fueled by a person's need or desire for something that is missing from their lives at a given moment, either totally or partially. Direction refers to the path employees take in accomplishing the goals they set for themselves. Finally, intensity is the vigor and amount of energy employees put into this goal-directed work performance. The level of intensity is based on the importance and difficulty of the goal. These psychological processes result in four outcomes. First, motivation serves to direct attention, focusing on particular issues, people, tasks, etc. It also serves to stimulate an employee to put forth effort. Next, motivation results in persistence, preventing one from deviating from the goal-seeking behavior. Finally, motivation results in task strategies, which as defined by Mitchell & Daniels, are "patterns of behavior produced to reach a particular goal".
Theories A number of various theories attempt to describe employee motivation within the discipline of industrial and organizational psychology. At the macro level, work motivation can be categorized into two types, endogenous process (individual, cognitive) theories and exogenous cause (environmental) theories. Many theories fit simply into one type, but hybrid types such as self-determination theory attempt to account for both. It can be helpful to further divide theories into the four broad categories of need-based, cognitive process, behavioral, and job-based.
Need-based theories Need-based theories of motivation focus on an employee's drive to satisfy a variety of needs through their work. These needs range from basic physiological needs for survival to higher psychoemotional needs like belonging and self-actualization.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs
Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (1943) was applied to offer an explanation of how the work environment motivates employees. In accordance with Maslow's theory, which was not specifically developed to explain behavior in the workplace, employees strive to satisfy their needs in a hierarchical order. At the most basic level, an employee is motivated to work in order to satisfy basic physiological needs for survival, such as having enough money to purchase food. The next level of need in the hierarchy is safety, which could be interpreted to mean adequate housing or living in a safe neighborhood. The next three levels in Maslow's theory relate to intellectual and psycho-emotional needs: love and belonging, esteem (which refers to competence and mastery), and finally the highest order need, self-actualization. Although Maslow's theory is widely known, in the workplace it has proven to be a poor predictor of employee behavior. Maslow theorized that people will not seek to satisfy a higher level need until their lower level needs are met. There has been little empirical support for the idea that employees in the workplace strive to meet their needs only in the hierarchical order prescribed by Maslow. Building on Maslow's theory, Clayton Alderfer (1959) collapsed the levels in Maslow's theory from five to three: existence, relatedness and growth. This theory, called the ERG theory, does not propose that employees attempt to satisfy these needs in a strictly hierarchical manner. Empirical support for this theory has been mixed.
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