Work Motivation

History, Theory, Research, and Practice

Gary P. Latham

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781483317205
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Organizational Behavior

A seminal work in the field of motivation by the leading author on the topic, this classic has been fully revised and updated to include and distill the most current research from top international scholars. Drawing upon his experiences as a staff psychologist and consultant, Gary P. Latham writes in a mentor voice that is highly personal and rich in examples, providing a unique behavioral science framework for motivating employees in organizational settings. The book offers a chronological review of the field, and a taxonomy for the study and practice of motivation, complete with anecdotes about the major thought leaders in the field of motivation and behind-the-scenes research accounts. Highlights of this updated edition include new findings in goal-setting research, including insight into the dark side of goal-setting; more on the self in motivation, including self-regulated learning, self-evaluation methods, and the significance of self-efficacy as a predictor of performance and satisfaction; and more trending in the area of positive psychology and prosocial behavior in organizations.

PART I

The 20th Century

Understanding the Past

1

1900–1925

Biology, Behavior, and Money

Introduction

The term motivation, as Steers, Mowday, and Shapiro (2004) pointed out, is a derivation of the Latin word for movement, movere. Its importance in the workplace is captured in the equation promulgated by Victor Vroom’s former mentor, N. R. F. Maier (1955), more than a half century ago: job performance = ability × motivation. This equation succinctly explains why the subject of motivation is a cornerstone in the fields of human resource management (HRM), industrial and organization psychology (I-O), and organization behavior (OB).¹

Motivation is an integral aspect of training. The time, money, and resources an organization devotes to ways of increasing a person’s abilities are wasted to the extent that an employee chooses not to learn what is being taught or chooses not to apply newly acquired knowledge and skills in the workplace.² Hence, the purpose of performance appraisal/performance management is to focus not only on identifying the requisite abilities an individual requires to be able to perform effectively, it is also to coach the person so as to inculcate a desire for continuous improvement (Latham & Mann, 2006). To facilitate the coaching process, researchers in the area of selection/staffing focus on the identification and development of tests that predict who is predisposed to being highly motivated in a work setting.

Motivation is a core competency of leadership. AstraZeneca, a global pharmaceutical company headquartered in London, expects its leaders to determine the areas that, if acted upon, will generate “breakthrough performance” as well as determine the necessary actions required of people to generate a “breakthrough.” They are expected to instill in the people who report to them a sense of urgency and flexibility. Leaders at Microsoft, headquartered in Redmond, Washington, a suburb of Seattle, are expected to create an environment in which the very best people can do their very best work. The strategy at Manulife, a global financial services company headquartered in Toronto, includes a focus on employee commitment to values expressed in the acronym PRIDE (professionalism, real value to our customers, integrity, demonstrated financial strength, and employer of choice).

Among the requirements for performing effectively as a leader in these organizations is the ability to galvanize and inspire individuals to exert effort, to commit to and persist in the pursuit of an organization’s values or goals.³ Hence the importance for leaders of answers to such questions as:

1. Do the keys to unlocking motivation lie within the personal characteristics of an individual? If yes:

(a) Should we focus on a person’s needs? Should we expect people who are worried over finding adequate food and clothing for their families to be focusing on ways to attain a specific high goal with regard to increasing a company division’s revenue?

(b) The employees in a telecommunications company where I am a consultant wear lapel pins with the word attitude. They do so because of their belief that attitude and motivation are interrelated. Are they correct?

(c) If a person likes the job, will the person be motivated? What is the relationship between an employee’s job satisfaction and job performance? Are highly trained happy individuals productive employees? Is it likely that a person who is highly satisfied with multiple aspects of the job has little or no motivation to be a high performer?

(d) What is the importance of a person’s affect to job performance? Should we be concerned with a person’s moods and emotions?

(e) Instead of or in addition to affect, should we examine cognition in terms of a person’s goals, self-efficacy, and outcome expectancies? If we assign people specific high goals, will their performance increase? Are self-set or participatively set goals likely to lead to an even greater increase in a person’s job performance? Should we be looking at ways to enable employees to see the relationship between what they do and the outcomes they can expect? If yes, should we be seeking ways to increase their confidence that they can attain a high goal? Are there ways of inducing a “can-do” mindset among those people who perceive one or more goals as unattainable?

(f) If the answer to the question of motivation lies within the person, are some personality traits likely to be more predictive of a high performer than others?

2. Peter Drucker, a highly regarded thought leader for managers throughout much of the 20th century, argued:

An employer has no business with a man’s personality. Employment is a specific construct calling for specific performance, and for nothing else. Any attempt of an employer to go beyond this is usurpation. It is immoral as well illegal intrusion of privacy. It is abuse of power. An employee owes no “loyalty,” he owes no “love,” and no “attitudes”—he owes performance and nothing else…. Management and manager development should concern themselves with changes in behavior likely to make a man more effective. (Drucker, 1973, pp. 424–425)

• Are there effective motivational techniques for increasing the frequency of desired and decreasing the frequency of undesired behavior? Should the focus be on a person’s behavior rather than on the person?

3. Do the keys to unlocking employee motivation lie within the environment? Do factors external to a person act as inducements for action?

(a) Does the environment shape one’s values?

(b) Does the environment affect one’s behavior?

(c) Can an environment mask or minimize personality differences among people?

(d) Are there characteristics of a job that will lead to an increase in both a person’s job satisfaction and motivation?

(e) To what extent do organizational procedures, processes, and systems affect a person’s feelings of trust and fairness, and hence his or her subsequent behavior?

(f) Can an employee’s motivation be bought? If yes, when and how should money be given for performing effectively?

4. Will answers to motivation be found in person–environment fit? As I noted in the Preface, they have for me. Is person–environment fit likely to prove beneficial for others? If yes, in what ways?

5. Are there reasons to believe that the keys to unlocking the secrets to motivation are to be found in “all of the above”? Is there reciprocal determinism among characteristics of the person, the person’s behavior, and characteristics of the environment?

To answer these questions, the history of work motivation research and theory in the 20th century must be examined, as must the progress that has been made in the present century in understanding and explaining this fascinating topic.

Few areas should be more exciting and more worthwhile reading to facilitate understanding the present than history. Yet few books are more tedious to read than those written by many historians. This is often because the subject matter is explained void of the motivation of people and the circumstances that affected them. For example, most people know that the British won Canada by defeating the French on the Plains of Abraham in 1759. But how many know that the victory was due, in part, to the lack of motivation of a French officer to rally his troops? His choice, effort, and persistence—the three pillars that define motivation in the workplace—were to remain in bed with his mistress despite being warned that the British were scaling the cliffs of Quebec City. Most people have studied the conquests of Alexander the Great. How many know that he burned the city of Persepolis in Iran the morning following the request of a woman to do so as proof of his love for her? Little wonder that, as recently as the middle of the 20th century, sex was said to be a motivator of an employee’s job performance (Harrell, 1949).

Biology

At the opening of the 20th century, Freud (1913) argued that a person’s motivation is a function of the unconscious and that it is biologically, that is, sexually, based. When asked to define the capabilities of a healthy person, he responded: “To work and to love” (Kelloway & Day, 2005).⁴ Trained as a physician, Freud formed his conclusions on the basis of what he heard from people who came to him because of difficulties they were experiencing in their personal lives as opposed to those who confronted difficulties primarily in the workplace. He did not conduct empirical research to test his theory. This is because psychoanalysis is more an art, a philosophy, and a practice than it is a science.⁵

Freud believed that crucial developmental experiences with our parents affect how we later adapt to authority. The crux of his theory is Eros-Thanatos. Eros concerns the biological need to develop bonds with others. Thanatos concerns the need to dominate others. Freud argued that human relationships are ambivalent because of these two motivating needs. Thus, friendships, argued Freud, are tinged with implicit if not explicit resentment as well as competition.

A century later, in his historical review of psychotherapy, Bandura (2004a) noted that Freud’s theories were discarded by behavioral scientists because they lack predictive power. Moreover, outcome studies showed that one could predict the type of insights a client gained from psychoanalysis based on knowledge of a therapist’s particular orientation. Finally, these outcome studies showed that it is difficult to change a person’s behavior only by talking to a therapist. These studies would lead to a paradigm shift in the 1950s and 1960s from unconscious psychic dynamics to a causal analysis of the interplay among personal, behavioral, and environmental influences without reference to the unconscious.

William James (1890) published one of the earliest textbooks on psychology, Principles of Psychology. He was concerned with “the description and explanation of states of consciousness” (James, 1892, p. 1). Unlike Freud, he eschewed hypothetical constructs of unconsciousness (i.e., id, superego, ego) and the use of dreams as a methodology for studying behavior. Instead, he studied his own consciousness through introspection.⁶ Long before the empirical findings of experimental psychologists (e.g., Hebb, 1949; Kolb, 2003), James argued the importance of biological/physiological variables on behavior. Learning, he said, leads to the formation of pathways in the nerve centers. Hence, habits, he believed, were formed early in life. By the age of 30, they were “set like plaster” (James, 1892, p. 375).

James’s research interests did not include employee behavior in the workplace. This was not true of Hugo Munsterberg, the father of I-O psychology (Hothersall, 1984).⁷ Rather than rely on introspection or Freud’s methodology, he engaged in systematic observations as well as interviews of factory workers (Munsterberg, 1913). This work is a precursor to the study of employee motivation in that it pointed to the need for overcoming “dreadful monotony” and “mental starvation” in the workplace (p. 196). His call went largely unheeded for nearly two decades. Munsterberg himself was far more interested in the issue of employee selection than he was in motivation.⁸ He remained fascinated by the differences he had observed as a doctoral student among the participants in the experiments conducted in Wundt’s laboratory. Landy (2005) has made the argument that it was, therefore, in Wundt’s laboratory that the groundwork for the field of differential psychology was laid. This is ironic because, as Landy noted, Wundt did not allow his student Munsterberg to publish the results on these individual differences. Wundt feared that doing so would undermine his search for universal laws of consciousness.

Behavior

The philosophy of behaviorism was articulated in this time period by its founder, John B. Watson. This philosophy advocated a focus on the effect of environmental stimuli on observable behavior. Disagreeing with James, Watson advocated epiphenomenalism, the argument that consciousness has no causal efficacy: “The time seems to have come when psychology must discard all reference to consciousness; when it needs no longer to delude itself into thinking that it is making mental states the object of observation” (Watson, 1913, p. 158). Consciousness “has never been seen, touched, smelled, tasted or moved” (Watson & McDougall, 1928, p. 14). Thus, Watson embraced the philosophy of positivism, a philosophy that only social, directly observable knowledge is valid. Scientific data for the behaviorists in that era were restricted to muscular movements or glandular secretions in time and space that lent themselves to quantitative analyses. Thus, from the outset, systematic measurement was a cornerstone of behaviorism. An enduring legacy of behaviorism in I-O psychology is an emphasis on measurement, particularly the ability to draw causal conclusions when n = 1 (see Komaki, 1977).

Motivation, as an internal psychological concept, was of no interest to the behaviorists. They were only interested in the prediction and influencing of responses. “By response we mean anything the animal does—such as turning toward or away from a light, jumping at a sound, or more highly organized activities such as building a skyscraper, drawing plans, having babies and the like” (Watson, 1925, pp. 6–7). Behavior was viewed as automatic or reflexive to a stimulus rather than cognitive or intentional; thus, the focus of the behaviorists was on learning rather than motivation. The objectives of the behaviorists were twofold: (1) Predict the response knowing the stimulus; and (2) identify the stimulus knowing the response. A belief, fundamental to the behaviorists, is that there is an immediate response of some sort to every effective stimulus. In short, they imposed a strict cause-and-effect determinism in behavior. For them, human choice or “free will” is an illusion.

Watson’s (1913) methodology led him to the study of affect, particularly the conditioning and reconditioning of emotional responses in infants and children, as well as the elimination of conditioned fears.⁹ In 1920, Watson left the academic community for the field of advertising, where he stayed until he retired. He did not publish empirical research conducted in organizational settings. The subject of emotion was largely ignored by I-O psychologists until the end of the century.

The behaviorists acknowledged that although human behavior is more complex than that of animals, it is influenced by similar underlying principles. Thus, animals, particularly rats and pigeons, were studied for reasons of cost and convenience. The behaviorists attached no importance to the reasoning capacity of a human being.

E. Thorndike, among the most famous experimental psychologists in this time period, found that by presenting a reward (e.g., food) immediately after a behavior targeted by the experimenter occurred, the frequency of the behavior increases. Thorndike (1911) labeled this discovery the law of effect:

Of several responses made to the same situation, those which are accompanied or closely followed by satisfaction to the animal will, other things being equal, be more firmly connected with the situation, so that, when it recurs, they will be more likely to recur; those which are accompanied or closely followed by discomfort to the animal will, other things being equal, have their connections with that situation weakened, so that, when it recurs, they will be less likely to occur. The greater the satisfaction or discomfort, t...