- #WHICH IS BETTER EXTRINSIC VS INTRINSIC MOTIVATION HOW TO#
- #WHICH IS BETTER EXTRINSIC VS INTRINSIC MOTIVATION FULL#
And if it will, when? During the annual performance appraisal 7 months from now?Īnd it may seem like the last piece, valence, is easy. Likewise, most knowledge workers don’t trust that an increase in performance will even be noticed. In a knowledge work economy, it’s not as easy as “harder work equals more productivity.” If your work is highly interdependent and others aren’t also ramping up their effort, then your performance might stay the same
But many times, it’s not exactly clear that putting in longer hours or increasing focus will increase performance. Second, employees have to believe that an increase in performance will be noticed and rewarded ( instrumentality), And lastly, employees have to actually want the reward that is being promised ( valence). Vroom said that in order for an award to work, employees first have to believe that an increase in effort will yield an increase in performance ( expectancy). Those terms are a little academic, and fairly outdated, so let’s translate a bit. Based on his research, Vroom said that for an extrinsic motivator to actually motivate people, it needs to have three important elements: More than 50 years ago, the psychologist Victor Vroom developed what he called expectancy theory to explain how extrinsic motivation works and to diagnose whether or not your plan is working properly. We used extrinsic motivation to reinforce good behavior in our toddlers, how hard could it be to motivate grown professionals? (Sarcasm fully intended.) But not every extrinsic motivation scheme, not every incentive compensation plan that we draw up properly motivates people. We just dangle a carrot in front of somebody and magically they’ll do the work.
#WHICH IS BETTER EXTRINSIC VS INTRINSIC MOTIVATION HOW TO#
How To Leverage Extrinsic Motivationīetween the two, it would seem like using extrinsic motivation is really easy. You are intrinsically motivated to do it. You would do it even if they didn’t pay you.īut you would do it even if they didn’t pay you to do the work because you enjoy doing it so much. You do the work because it is internally satisfying or because you enjoy the work. Intrinsic motivation, on the other hand, refers to those activities you do because you enjoy the activity itself. But that’s still a form of extrinsic motivation because what you’re seeking is still the result. You might be motivated to do the work because you like the result even when there is no bonus or trophy at the end. It’s often discussed relative to the person, but there are a lot of things we do without some kind of tangible reward that we’re still extrinsically motivated to do. The easiest way to think about the word “extrinsic” is that it refers to the work itself. Anything that we are promised for doing the work or anything that we get as a result of doing the work are all extrinsic motivators. Extrinsic motivation is any reason we do the work other than the joy of doing the work itself. But extrinsic motivation is a much broader category. They think of all those trophies that end up in a duffle bag.Īnd those are all types of extrinsic motivators. Many people think they know what extrinsic motivation really is. Extrinsic Vs Intrinsic Motivation– Defining The Terms We’ll review what extrinsic and intrinsic motivators actually are, as well as how to use them properly…or perhaps better stated, we’ll review how to know when you can use them properly.
In this article, we’re going to provide some of that clarity. And when you ask executives about the strategy behind those compensation plans or performance contests, you realize that there is still not a lot of clarity around how or when to use extrinsic motivators to improve performance, and when leveraging intrinsic motivation would work better. They try to motivate them to work harder through what amounts to basic bribery.
Companies around the world use plaques, trophies, or bonuses to try to get more out of their employees. What I didn’t realize at the time was that my dad’s rejection of the duffle bag was basically the first rejection I had ever seen of extrinsic motivators at work. He responded plainly “They’re not important anymore. How come these are all packed away in the basement?” These are really cool plaques and awards. Being the trophy-obsessed millennial that I was, I ran upstairs with the bag and asked him, “Dad, these are awesome. They were all awards that my dad had won at some point in his job.
#WHICH IS BETTER EXTRINSIC VS INTRINSIC MOTIVATION FULL#
The bag was full of plaques, trophies, and different awards that all had my dad’s name on them. When I was a kid, maybe eight or nine years old, I was playing in the basement of our house, and I found a duffle bag stuffed under a pile of other random stuff.