Motivating Others

David P. Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317921165
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book shows how principals can foster collegiality, provide mentorship, offer rewards, and otherwise create conditions so that teachers will be internally motivated.

1

SETTING THE STAGE

It is the middle of the night, actually early on a cold, snowy March Wednesday morning. You look at the clock and it reads 2:30 a.m. You turn over in bed for the umpteenth time and command yourself to go to sleep. It’s been an hour since you went to bed, trying carefully not to awaken your spouse. The flood of seemingly random thoughts just won’t stop. What a day! The school was abuzz about the girls basketball team’s regional championship game. One win and the girls would be going to state. Unfortunately, the dream came crashing down with a last-minute basket which beat the team in triple-overtime. Everyone knows that your team should have won handily; the coach has been under fire all season because the team wasn’t winning convincingly. A certain group of influential parents has even been stirring up talk about a new coach. Certainly, this game will not help to douse the fire. Anyway, you didn’t get home until 1:00 a.m. because the game was played 100 miles down the road and school buses can’t travel at more than 50 miles per hour. On Monday, your two year old daughter learned each of her “A-B-C’s” in order; unfortunately, due to Monday evening’s board meeting and Wednesday night’s Site-Based Decision-making committee meeting, you won’t get to hear her utter those precious words until Thursday at the earliest. Oh, that’s right. Tomorrow. Does it really start at 5 a.m.? Was it really my idea to schedule a classroom observation for first period with the head of the local teacher’s union, who is currently embroiled in a messy grievance with the school district? Will the parents who are mumbling about a new basketball coach be waiting in my office when I arrive? Is the discipline hearing for the learning-disabled son of the band booster club president really tomorrow as well? Will it snow eight inches tonight like the weather forecast predicted? What does all of this have to do with me being the instructional leader of this campus?

Even though this scenario is fictitious (somewhat!), it illustrates the situations that school principals face in trying to lead teachers, students, and parents to the goal of educational excellence, operationally defined as student success. Like the principal in this scenario who finally went to sleep at 3:30 a.m., arose at 5:00 a.m., and helped provide the opportunity for children to achieve that day, something inside of you propels you to do the same thing day in and day out. That something inside of each of you is motivation.

Notice that I said “something inside of you.” I truly believe—and not just because “the research” tells us so—that we do not initiate and sustain our behaviors as educators because we anticipate receiving some extrinsic reinforcement such as a paycheck or extra time off during a holiday period. Rather, I believe that we do what we do because we are engaged in a “cause greater than one’s self”; that is, we believe that we have the opportunity to make a difference in the lives of our students and our fellow educators. As one elementary school teacher so simply, and yet so eloquently, put it:

... I get satisfaction, I get a lot of love from the kids I teach. I really feel that I have the possibility to make a difference in somebody’s life, which to me is worth more than the money, I guess. I mean, certainly you’re not in it for the money. And you’re not in it for the prestige. And you’re not in it for the sense of autonomy, because you don’t have much autonomy, in terms of what you want to do. But for what you get from the one-on-one with kids, I don’t think anyone could replace that feeling for me personally. (Johnson, as quoted in Sergiovanni, 1992, p. 23).

Something motivated the principal in our scenario to get up and take on another challenging day. Yet, we know that principals do not exist in a vacuum. Principals are, if only by the virtue of their positions, the leaders of our schools. In spite of reform efforts such as shared governance, site-based management, and participative decision-making, one thing seems not to have changed: When all is said and done, the “buck still stops” at the principal’s door. As such, the principal is not only responsible for self-motivation, but more importantly is held accountable for the motivation of the school staff and even students.

WHY ANOTHER BOOK ON MOTIVATION?

Good question. In a recent five-minute examination of several online databases, I discovered the following. The East Texas State University Library Information System listed over 500 book titles on motivation; the ERIC database indexed nearly 24,000 articles and other documents addressing motivation in one form or another between 1966 and 1995. Psychology’s counterpart to ERIC, the PsychLit database, listed over 16,500 articles and documents, while the Social Science Index indexed another 500 or so documents. Simple addition suggests that over 40,000 documents addressing the topic of motivation have been authored, and this number is probably a low estimate. So much has been written about this subject that the 40,001st document on motivation runs a high risk of adding very little to what we know about motivating others.

So why this book? I think that a relevant question, followed by clearly-articulated answers, might lend insight as to why this book and the accompanying volumes in “The School Leadership Library” should be important. The relevant question might be, “How much of what you learned in your administrator preparation program were (or are) you able to apply to the ‘real-world’ of practice?”

... In educational administration, practitioners do not resort to the literature in the field because they know they will not find there current knowledge about how to solve the problems they are facing. (Silver, as quoted in Thomson, 1993, p. ix)

New principal preparation programs must address the troublesome “clinical gap” that exists between classroom and practice, and between subject content and specific technique. To close this gap, a new starting point is required. Accordingly, the search for a knowledge and skills base should begin with the work of principals in contemporary schools. That work must first be defined and organized into identifiable, rational building blocks that are skill-rich and knowledge-rich. Next, the connections between knowledge and skills should be recognized in the many problems principals respond to and in the many tasks they initiate. (Thomson, 1993, pp. x-xi)

Therefore, the purpose of this volume is to take what we know about leader behavior in motivating others and tie it to the “real world” of school practice. The success of this volume will be judged by the extent to which this knowledge can serve to inform the practices of principals in motivating others.

WHAT MOTIVATION IS

Words have meaning. This is certainly no less true for the word “motivation.” In fact, since motivation has been written about tens of thousands of times, you might expect more than one definition. Consider the following definitions:

Motivation is made up of “all those inner striving conditions described as wishes, desires, drives, etc.... it is an inner state that activates or moves individuals.” (Berelson and Steiner, as quoted in Owens, 1991, p. 102)

... work motivation is defined as the complex forces, drives, needs, tension states, or other mechanisms that start and maintain work-related behaviors toward the achievement of personal goals. (Hoy and Miskel, 1991, p.168)

... the initiation, intensity, and persistence of behavior. (Geen, 1995, p. 2, emphasis in original)

... the energization and direction of behavior. (Deci & Ryan, 1985, p. 3)

Motivation is the level of effort an individual is willing to apply toward the achievement of a particular goal or motive. (Hersey and Blanchard, 1977, p. 16)

At least three themes can be gleaned from considering the above definitions. First, motivation involves the behavior of individuals. The idea that motivation is individually oriented has important implications for principals trying to motivate others. In fact, if motivation is individually oriented, principals really do not motivate others as much as principals create conditions in the workplace which enhance the ability of other individuals to motivate themselves. Aflie Kohn (in Brandt, 1995), in discussing student motivation, punctuates my point by noting, “It’s remarkable how often educators use the word motivation when what they mean is compliance. Indeed, one of the fundamental myths in this area is that it is possible to motivate someone else” (p. 14, emphasis in original). Second, individual motivation is driven by something, whether it is goals, needs, or desires. Assuming this is true, principals who wish to be successful in creating conditions for motivation must be cognizant of the particular goals, needs, and desires which drive staff members to behave in certain ways. Whether these goals, needs, and desires are individually- or organizationally- oriented, or both, will be the subject of later discussion. Finally, motivation entails not only initiating, but also maintaining and directing behavior. Therefore, the principal’s actions of creating conditions to enhance the motivation of others is not a “one-shot” effort. Certainly, extrinsic rewards which reinforce desired behaviors cannot be considered as a means for long-term maintenance and direction of behavior; principals’ reward powers are not unlimited, nor are extrinsic resources. Principals who are effective “motivators” create other conditions which satisfy the needs of individuals within the school.

WHAT MOTIVATION IS NOT

In your professional and administrator preparation readings you undoubtedly have come across the concepts of motivation and job satisfaction. As often as not, these concepts have been used interchangeably, as if they meant the same thing. While there is a strong relationship between motivation and job satisfaction, I would like to argue that they are not the same thing (though I am certainly not the first to advance this argument). In t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• FOREWORD
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1 SETTING THE STAGE
• 2 FOSTERING TEAMWORK, COLLEGIALITY, AND PARTICIPATION
• 3 PROVIDING CHALLENGING WORK ROLES, INTELLECTUAL STIMULATION, AND AUTONOMY
• 4 PROVIDING RESOURCES AND SUPPORTING INNOVATION
• 5 PROVIDING MENTORSHIP
• 6 REWARDING AND RECOGNIZING EFFECTIVE PERFORMANCE
• 7 PORTFOLIO OF ONE
• REFERENCES