Motivation and What Really Drives Human Behavior

A person’s act because of something is called motive, and the motive behind doing anything is called motivation. It can be considered abstract, that is it is not tangible. Motivation drives a person to do certain activities or work in a positive or negative manner. The examples of motivation are endless. Sachin Tendulkar, Nelson Mandela, Roger Federer, Mahatma Gandhi, Morgan Freeman, and so on, are the examples of the people whom we consider highly motivated. They changed their destiny by only being motivated and had a motive behind being motivated.

Motivation cannot be considered highly applicable if we leave actions behind. Eagerness and willingness to do something without being told or compelled to do it is motivation.

The fundamental structure and overall directionality of driven human intervention are determined by two universal features: 1. Control struggle and 2. Engagement of the objective and disconnection of the objective. These two features of human intervention are so universal within and far beyond our species that it is difficult to imagine any difference in human conduct.

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It is not enough to be clear and correct about the purpose of an activity to achieve efficiency and effectiveness. Experience shows that motivation is of enormous importance, so the results are compromised without it or when it exceeds it. It was established that there must be an optimum motivation.

Theories of Motivation

There are various theories of motivation;

  • Behavioral theories: Reinforcement, Social information processing
  • Cognitive theories: Intrinsic motivation, Cognitive evaluation
  • Equity theories: References, Choices of inequity, Justice
  • Expectancy: VIE (expectancy, instrumentality, valence)
  • Need theories: Needs(McClelland), Maslow hierarchical need model, ERG(existence, relatedness, growth)

Behavioral Theories

The theory of reinforcement studies the relationship between external stimuli, special reward and punishment, and the behavior witnessed after applying the stimulus.

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This theory can be adhered to maximize outcomes primarily through rewards, punishments needed, and useful only in rare cases. B.F. Skinner observes that behavior is determined by a stimulus and the results are behavioral implications.

When benefits are immediately linked to success, including incentives, bonuses, work safety, and much other stuff, they function as beneficial strengthening. Increasing benefits job well when individuals are teaching fresh employment, fresh abilities but with some constraints, so they think that by creating an attempt they can perform better and they will earn benefits for stronger performance, in fact the benefits must be enjoyed.

Punishment, on the other side, by showing stuff with uncomfortable effects to individuals, if they fail to act in a required way, can lead to reactions such as rage, resentment, hostility, or retribution.

The handling of personal data requires an account of personal indications that consist of embracing attitudes and actions from instances, such as peers or impressive ones, such as fresh starlets. This can be noted in particular for the youthful generation that sometimes develops with unwanted effects.

We can say that extrinsic motivation is addressed by this kind of theory.

Cognitive Theories

Motivation is learned from the knowledge of flow, inherent motivation, behavioral assessment, and vision setting goals.

Flow experience means the willingness to replay experiences when there is concentration and requires certain features such as elevated concentrations of competence, difficulty and creativity, and completely inherent motivations.

Intrinsic motive arises from the intrinsic benefits of a job or activity itself - the pleasure of a game or the pleasure of playing. Fritz Heider's concept of attribution, Bandura's work on self-efficacy, and the behavioral assessment theory of Ryan and Deci (which suggests that enhancing extrinsic motivation decreases inherent fulfillment) described inherent motivation.

Equity Theories

The equity theory relies on the beliefs of individuals about correctness and fair therapy given to them compared to others from the same group, in particular, or other individuals from distinct groups or organizations doing the same thing. J. Stacy Adams observed that equity exists in the same circumstances when the income of the individual is equal to the income of everyone else. People assess capital by comparing inputs (level of schooling, knowledge, commitment, and capacity) to yields (wages, wages, appreciation, rewards, and promotion). When the percentage is unbalanced, there is inequity and, as a consequence, people will decrease exercise by doing the following: changing inputs (growing or decreasing effort), changing results (strikes for better wages), or leaving work.

Expectancy Theories

Victor Vroom researched and acquired three chain interactions between work performance-reward and incentive objectives that are inspired to behave for the benefits they want and think they have a fair opportunity to achieve. Valence is the choice for production. To discover this, people assess whether they can achieve the objective, how important it is to them, and what course of intervention can be taken. The anticipation of a person to eventually reach the objective is very crucial for achievement.

In summary, Motivation is equivalent to valence plus instrumentality plus expectation according to this hypothesis.

Need Theories

Are the most recognized because motivation is based on requirements and understanding them allows a strategy to be set to meet those requirements and perform the behavior

Abraham Maslow's Needs Hierarchy suggested that people have a variety of distinct needs that they are trying to fulfill in their work. He assumed that unsatisfied needs motivate and, once a need has been satisfied, another takes his place in the foreground of attention so that human beings are 'wanted beings.'

  • Physiological: For survival, these are essential: food, drink, shelter, sleep. Work meets these requirements and offers a secure, pleasant working atmosphere with sufficient wage compensation.
  • Security: Individuals need unidentified stabilization, composition, order, and security.
  • Social: Affection, friendship, and companionship are needed by individuals. This need is met by team involvement with excellent interactions.
  • Esteem: Which include acceptance and status requirements. People also want respect for themselves and they need a decent picture of themselves.
  • Self actualization: There are uses of human requirements to achieve self-realization. By being creative or accepting difficult employment, individuals meet this need.

ERG Theory ERG stems from the presence, connectivity, and development that are the key demands of this theory. In reality, demands for existence are physiological and security, needs for relatedness mean relationships with others, and needs for growth refer to personal development. Clayton Alderfer's major contribution is to reveal the mechanism of satisfying needs: if a higher need can not be fulfilled, then disappointment would occur, followed by regression to the reduced stage and need escalation at the end.

Getting individuals to do their finest job is one of the most lasting and slippery problems for executives, even in difficult conditions. Indeed, it is a centuries-old mystery to decipher what motivates us as human humans. Some of the most important human behavior philosophers in history— including Aristotle, Adam Smith, Sigmund Freud, and Abraham Maslow — have tried to comprehend their nuances and taught us a huge quantity of why individuals are doing the stuff they are doing. Clearly, an organization as a whole must take care of the four basic mental drives but personal executives must do so. They could be limited by organizational standards, but the staff is smart enough to understand that there is some wiggle space for their instant superiors. Indeed, our study demonstrates that personal executives affect motivation generally just as much as any organizational strategy does.

Four Drives That Underlie Motivation

The purchase drive: All of us are motivated to obtain rare products that support our feeling of well-being. When this drive is completed, we encounter pleasure, discontent when it is thwarted. This phenomenon refers not only to physical products such as meat, apparel, accommodation, and cash but also to activities such as transport and entertainment— not to mention activities that enhance personal position, such as being promoted and having a corner office or company board seat.

The bonding force: When encountered, the desire to bind is connected with powerful beneficial feelings such as affection and caring and, if not, adverse ones such as solitude and anomy. At the job, the push to connect accounts for the tremendous increase in motivation when staff feels happy to be part of the organization and their loss of morality when they are betrayed by the institution.

The Drive to Understand: The push to understand accounts in the workforce for the willingness to make a significant contribution. Employees are driven by employment that challenges them and allows them to develop and discover, and those who seem monotonous or contribute to a dead-end demoralize them. Talented staff who feel stuck often abandon their businesses elsewhere to discover fresh difficulties.

The defense drive: The tendency to defend teaches us a lot about the reluctance of people to change; this is one reason that staff can be ravaged by the possibility of a merger or acquisition — a particularly important change even if the agreement is the only hope for the sustainability of an organization.

Each one of the four drives mentioned is independent; they cannot be hierarchically arranged or replaced by each other.

Extrinsic and Intrinsic Model

An individual is encouraged intrinsically if he does an activity for no obvious benefit except for the activity itself. Extrinsic motive, on the other side, relates to an activity's success as it results in internal incentives (e.g. status, endorsement, or passing marks). The issue of concern in this research is whether modifications in the inherent motive of a person for an activity will occur when he gets internal benefits for doing that activity.

The concept focuses on the mental assessment of an exercise by a person and the grounds for his activity involvement. It indicates that distinct types of internal incentives should be distinguished, as the assessment of distinct incentives by a person may be distinct. This, in particular, would contribute to various impacts on the intrinsic motivation of the person.

On the other side, when verbal incentives are offered as internal incentives, these benefits may not be phenomenologically distinguishable from the emotions of happiness that the participants receive from the exercise, thereby increasing the complete beneficial value characteristics connected with the exercise. Therefore, in the lack of internal incentives, the desire to execute the exercise will be enhanced; that is, the inherent motivation of the individual will be improved.

The working motive is the organization's capacity to encourage the motive of a person to wilfully seek to achieve organizational objectives by offering possibilities to meet employee requirements.

Take 3M Corporation, for instance. 3M has been granted the largest development prize by the U.S. government, the National Technology Medal. 3M is consistently highly ranked, mostly in the top 20, in the 'America's Most Admired Corporations' annual survey by Fortune magazine. One of the strengths of 3M is how successful staff are treated: offer them possibilities, promote them, as well as help them learn and flourish. 3M offers a wealthy range of facilities and forums to generate a pool of practical thoughts that will then foster possibilities and provide the tools needed for achievement.

3 M has a wealthy collection of resource-friendly constructions and schemes:

Seed Capital: Inventors may request seed funds from their company unit directors; they may seek financing from other company groups if their application is refused. Inventors can also apply in the manner of a Genesis Grant for corporate financing. (Genesis Grant financed the Post-it.)

New entrepreneurial training: Product innovators need to recruit their own teams, taking advantage of the many networking forums of 3 M as they are looking for the correct individuals for the work. The volunteers have an opportunity once signing up to assess the track record of the founder. However if the item fails, their prior employment will be secured to everyone.

Ladder of dual career: Without becoming directors, scientists can proceed to progress up the ladder. They have the same status, reward, and benefits as the leadership of corporations. As a result, 3M is not losing excellent researchers and technicians just to obtain bad executives, a prevalent production industry issue.

3M utilizes an R&D concentrate and a distinctive '15% rule' to guarantee continued effort to extend the pie. 3M spends about 6% of its R&D revenues, far more than a typical production business. This has led to the development of new sectors as well as new goods.

Updated: Jul 20, 2021
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Motivation and What Really Drives Human Behavior. (2020, Nov 22). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/motivation-and-what-really-drives-human-behavior-essay

Motivation and What Really Drives Human Behavior essay
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