Motivational Immediacy in the Workplace

Facilitating Learner Engagement in Training Environments

Jonathan E. Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000573787
• Subtopic: Adult Education
• Index: Business

Learners are always motivated; they just may not be motivated to learn the things you are wanting them to learn. Motivational Immediacy refers to the moment-by-moment motivation of learners during a learning event. This is in contrast to typical global views of motivation, and while casting a much heavier burden on the instructor, brings with it more deep, meaningful, and permanent learning.

Motivational Immediacy in the Workplace focuses not only on fostering learner engagement with a primary emphasis on the role of the instructor, but also addresses the work and concerns of curriculum writers and training directors. The author defines Motivational Immediacy as both a phenomenon and a practice and provides concrete steps for practical action. Motivational Immediacy, as a construct, refers to a moment-by-moment feeling of motivation on the part of the learner to engage in the learning opportunity directly at hand. As a practice, it is the instructor's process of working to stay connected with individual learners and foster engagement consistently at every moment of the teaching activity. The author addresses this idea from a learner-centered orientation, making the case that understanding and empathizing with the learner's perceptions is the most effective way to promote efficient, meaningful learning.

The book will provide a comprehensive conceptualization of learning engagement and learning resistance. It begins with a substantial theoretical framework and then shifts to direct applications to practice in the workplace. Motivational Immediacy is multidisciplinary and draws from fields such as Adult Education, Workplace and Training Development, Psychology, Educational Psychology, Sociology, Cultural Anthropology, and Communications.

SECTION IMotivational Immediacy: Changing the Way We Think

Chapter 1Something or Someone

DOI: 10.4324/9781003144137-2

In every field of practice, there are certain basic truths that can be ignored without consequence, and others that cannot. Most of what follows in this book rests squarely upon a single premise of the latter sort. Although it does not get chief billing in title or chapter, the foundation of much of what I will share in the following pages rests on this premise: knowing something is about knowing and understanding something. Teaching something is about knowing and understanding people. That is, knowing how to do something is about the something while training someone how to do something is about the someone. However, trite the statement might sound, and, however, narrow the distinction might be, there is no compromising this basic reality, and the failure to fully grasp it in an authentic way will create an almost perpetual series of near misses when it comes to obtaining peak efficiency and return on investment (ROI) in workplace training programs.

This is the first of a number of significant premises that serve as the foundation for motivational immediacy, both as a concept and as a practice. As you read this book, you will see that motivational immediacy is not merely about some new ways by which to motivate learners, but about some new ways to think about motivation in the first place. The conceptual frameworks that are introduced and the related practical methods that are discussed are all predicated on the following five premises.

The Premises of This Book

Over the years, a great many books have been written on the subject of workplace training and development (e.g., Brown, 2018; Holly & Rainbird, 2000; Mitchell, 1988; Ward, 1998). The titles, structure, and content of the books are like the rings of a tree in some ways, marking out the eras in which they were written. Many, if not most, cover all aspects of the training world, and by doing so they tend to either be very long, or to cover broadly at the expense of deeply. It should be clear at the outset that this book is focused deeply at the expense of broadly. It is a book about training and developing people, not about all of the many important aspects of the human resource enterprise, or even about business at large. It is, however, written with an awareness of the constraints of the business world in which the training and development take place. There is a bit of idealism in the following pages, but also the realistic acknowledgement of the limitations and boundaries that influence just how well we, as trainers, are able to do our jobs.

Training is About Knowing People

In a book on high-risk training, Ward (1988) began by claiming that “you need to know only three things to develop and manage training programs…” and those three things were:

• How to develop curriculum, staff, procedures, and records;
• How to utilize curriculum, staff, procedures, and records; and
• How to evaluate curriculum, staff, procedures, and records (p. xx).

A full reading of Ward's work would reveal that he did express an understanding of the need to be aware of the learner overall, but his point of departure, not at all unusual for workplace training books, is the reason that I have started right at the outset in my own training book by sharing the first of five premises that the concepts in this book are based upon. In fact, of the five, it is this first premise that serves as the foundation for the other four.

Ward's work started by pointing out the importance of knowing about stuff; I wish to start by pointing out the importance of knowing about people. It is true, of course, that one must know both stuff and people, and my reference to Ward's opening is not an indictment of his work, but a contextual reason for my own. Ten years later, Mitchell (1998) started with the considerations of the learner as his stepping-off point, going so far as to discuss the reasons that learners may not actually want to learn and some proposed methods for working with learners to change this situation. More will be said about this later on, but for now, it will suffice to say that this book, like Mitchell's, also starts with the learner as the focus. Knowing something is about knowing and understanding something. Teaching something is about knowing and understanding people.

Motivation is Value-Neutral and Bidirectional

When approaching the matter of training and education with a focus on the learner, there are at least three broadly different ways of seeing the learner. First, there are learners who are open and willing to learn, and highly proficient at doing so. Second, there are learners who are open and willing to learn, but who struggle through many sorts of difficulties to do so. Third, there are those learners who are closed off to the prospect of learning, unwilling to engage, and due to lack of manifest evidence, could otherwise be of the sort in either of the first two groups.

We may say with reasonable confidence that most discussions, whether of the verbal or written types, tend to be light on the first group. This is, reasonably so, because those who are open and willing to learn, and also highly proficient at learning, are by virtue of this tag those who are almost always at the top of the class. It is not so much that it is not important to help them, just that they seem, ostensibly, to need much less help. Indeed, it is this group that the trainer might often use as an indicator of one's measure of success as a trainer. This habit may be fraught with an inflated sense of self-worth but is an easy one to develop.

The second group demonstrates a clear need and has received a significant amount of attention in that nearly every comprehensive book on workplace learning addresses learning difficulties to some extent. This also makes sense, given the role of the teacher to foster learning and the need of the student for support in the face of learning difficulties.

The third group – those who are closed off to learning and refuse to engage in a learning situation, are, on the face of it, a group of great importance to the trainer. This is so because those in the first group have shown their ability to thrive and learn in almost any condition. That is, they might very well succeed without our help at all. The second group, those with learning difficulties (whether internally driven, externally driven, or some combination of both), have a clear and definable need, and are, beyond that, typically open to assistance in working through it. This third group, however, is entrenched in a refusal to engage and therefore the trainer is in the dark about the true cause of this behavior, unsure of what to do about it, and unable to turn to a source written about either of the first two groups for help.

Insofar as these three groups are concerned, all sorts of learners may be addressed but it is those in the third group – those who do not engage – who are the stepping-off point for all that follows. This is a book about motivation, but it is more specifically about the quite common motivation to not learn. And, of course, it is a book about what is to be done about such a motivation. The following words, taken from a book on the same topic but focused on higher education, share the essence of the way motivation will be handled in this book:

It is not often that learner motivation is cast as the villain. Typical conversations run along the lines of whether or not a given learner is motivated, and how one might foster more of it. This is a good question but perhaps not the best. What, exactly, are learners motivated to do, and why are they motivated to do it? Those are the questions addressed in the pages of this book, and at the center will be this claim: all learners are motivated. All learners are motivated, but they may not be motivated at all to do the things that we are hoping that they will do. Motivation will not be cast as the villain here, but it will not be cast as the hero either (Taylor, 2022, p. 1).

Merriam and Bierema (2014) define motivation in the more typical unidirectional way by saying that “motivation can also be described as educational engagement” (p. 147) Colquitte, LePine, and Noe (2000) include directionality in their definition of motivation as “…the direction, intensity, and persistence of learning-directed behavior in training contexts” (Colquitt, LePine, & Noe, 2000, p. x), but even a quick read of nearly any workplace training literature on motivation will tend toward casting the dynamic as something that is directed toward the act of learning rather than the act of actively rejecting learning. While this is the norm in books and articles on the subject of workplace motivation, treating it as such relies on an assumption that if there is no motivation to learn, there is no motivation. That is a tragic misunderstanding of human learning.

Another major premise of this book is that Motivation is a value-neutral, bidirectional construct that can drive a learner to learn intently or to avoid learning at all. The important question is not one concerned with learner motivation being indiscriminately generated, but with learner motivation being of the type that is conducive to learning. If motivation is, indeed, something learners could have in either direction, then the job of the instructor is to foster a change in learner motivation, not just to promote more of it. It seems odd, for sure, to talk about demotivating learners rather than motivating them, but generic talk of fostering motivation in learners rides on an assumption, and the implications of that assumption are of great importance for anyone serious about educating others.

Motivation is a Moment-by-Moment Dynamic

Motivation also is not a one-and-done sort of phenomenon, although it is quite often treated that way. We speak of learners being motivated to take courses so that they may earn a promotion at work, become certified to use a certain piece of equipment, or to earn more long-term designation. This confuses a motivation for an ultimate outcome goal with an immediate learning goal. If it is moment-by-moment learning that we wish to bring to the learner during a learning event, then it is moment-by-moment motivation we must foster. The act of doing so – motivational immediacy – is a difficult task, but a necessary part of any truly effective teaching.

Just because adults are “motivated” to get a degree, earn a certificate, or even learn something from a specific course, does not mean that they are motivated in any given instant to learn a particular thing, at that particular moment, on a particular night, etc. Therefore, the instructor/trainer must work to make every moment an engaging moment and simply cannot “clump” the learner's motivation around more global concepts such as “I want to have a degree,” or “I want to be an officer in the USAF,” or “I want to be able to apply for that new position.”

We are Training the Wrong Sort of Thing

Going back a moment, to the three groups of learners, it is important to point out that thinking in terms of these three groups of learners may be helpful but also creates its own problem, as do nearly all attempts to snap things into rigid taxonomies. All approaches to both thought and action rely upon assumptions – it is impossible to progress in either thought or action without first setting parameters by way of assumptions. In this case, the three-types-of-learners framework carries with it the assumption that when we consider whether or not someone learns or learns well, we are assuming that they are learning what we intended them to learn; the word learning is meant to mean learning the right thing. However, there is little cause to consider this a valid assumption. In fact, literature points out that learners quite often learn something different than what the teacher or instructor intended (Illeris, 2017). Jarvis (1992) referred to this as mislearning, This, however, leads to another pressing issue to work out prior to digging into the following pages.

There are books about teaching and training, and there are books about learning. Most are about some mixture of both, knowing that teaching expertise should involve an expertise of human learning. It can become difficult at times, to remain clear when reading, about which one is being discussed. They are related but distinct. How someone learns has a direct bearing on how one might effectively teach them, but when thinking about a given learning dynamic, it is easy to get confused.

There is a different message for the reader who is reading as a student and the reader who is reading as a trainer. If this book is a training book, intended to help us be better trainers, then it would seem odd to be using terms like “mislearning” when it is probably a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Section I: Motivational Immediacy: Changing the Way We Think
• Section II: Motivational Immediacy: Changing the Way We Practice
• References
• Index