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Human Motivation and Organizational Mobilization
by
Stephen Kelner
The PDF file attachment is a copy of this article that has been formatted for printing.
Category:
Integrated Management Systems
Reprint Number:
RP11300
Volume 9, Number 1
Summer 2000
Page Number(s) 25-43
About the Author:
Stephen P. Kelner, Jr., Ed.M, Ph.D, is a motivational psychologist who spends most of his time in the business world applying motivational theory to managerial practice. Formerly Director of Education at CQM, he is now Director of Implementation Services at WebCT, a platform for web-based higher education, applying what he discusses in this paper.
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When a company has only a few dozen people, they can talk to each other, read the same books, and in general communicate with each other about how to implement. With thousands of people, however, a company needs a strategy and structure. —A New American TQM, p. 337
Organizations change by changing the behaviors of individuals. People, however, do not like to change. Therefore, organizational change requires a strategy and a structure that incorporate awareness of individuals’ key drivers. Psychological research has identified three key emotional drivers, known as motives, which account for 80 percent of the conscious and nonconscious mental patterns underlying most people’s behavior. Coupled with conscious foci known as values, these motives make for highly effective tools to drive organizational change through a refined application of the Seven Infrastructures for Organizational Mobilization. This article will describe how common motivational applications and approaches can be linked with the Seven Infrastructures.
Changing Organizations through People
The ability to change is a critical organizational need, especially in an era in which technological advances may force companies to undergo rapid and dramatic transformation. But change is no easier today than it has ever been; and the larger the organization, the more difficult change becomes. Why? Because organizational change comes about through the actions of individuals. The larger the organization, the more people must change their behavior. A crucial element of behavior is individual motivation — the emotional drives that influence the patterns of actions people take.
The quotation at the start of the article, from A New American TQM (Shiba, Graham, & Walden, 1990), may be familiar to most readers. This paper proposes adding another element or level of depth to the discussion of how to mobilize organizational transformation by going beyond communication to the motivation beneath what people choose both to communicate and to do.
To mobilize change on a large scale requires a systematic approach, a strategy and structure, if only because of the exponential growth in the number of one-on-one conversations required. Individual differences in motivation add to this complexity by multiplying the kinds of conversations required to engage different motivations. If a company understands what motivations are required for given jobs, it can align these requirements with the motives jobholders actually bring to bear, and thus reduce the complexity to some extent. To mobilize all kinds of people, a company needs a framework for mobilizing change that allows room for these individual variations.
The Seven Infrastructures for Mobilization (see Figure 1, also found in ANATQM) provide one such framework. When combined with more detailed motivational links, this model makes for a highly robust approach to mobilizing an organization to make change.
Figure 1: The Seven Infrastructures for Mobilization.
Close examination of the Seven Infrastructures in light of the extensive literature on motivation and individual change suggests that although motivation need not affect all of the infrastructures, it does have particular importance to five of the seven: Goal Setting, Organization Setting, to some Training and Education, Promotion, and Incentives and Rewards. The seventh of the infrastructures, Diagnosis and Monitoring, arouses motivation in a specific and effective manner, but motivational knowledge does not necessarily improve one’s understanding of how to apply it. Likewise, Diffusion of Success Stories reinforces motivation regardless of awareness, though motivational knowledge may enhance the effect.
Before discussing in detail the linkages between motivation and the Seven Infrastructures, I wish to clarify both what I mean by “motivation” and what kinds of motivation apply here.
Different People and Different Motivations and Values
Why do people do what they do? One classic formulation of behavior was created by psychologist John Atkinson:
Behavior = ƒ(person; situation)
Or in words: Behavior is a function of the characteristics of a person interacting with the characteristics of the person’s situation. Characteristics of the person can include skills, knowledge, self-image, traits, background, and motives, to name only a few. Characteristics of a situation include urgency, the environment itself, demands being made, and so forth. The implications of this simple formula are twofold:
The same person will behave differently in different situations (e.g., do you behave the same in an emergency as you do at the beach?).
Different people will behave differently in the same situation (e.g., how do two different people respond to the same urgent request?)
Mobilizing an organization means eliciting specific behavior — using selected improvement tools or finding a new way to do business, for example. Atkinson’s formula suggests that you can control for the people, or you can control for the situation. Many leadership tomes call for creating a sense of urgency. This is an example of changing the situation to get altered behavior out of existing people. Some organizations rearrange staff; in this way they alter behavior by changing the person in the existing situation.
Which is easier to change, the person or the situation? In the case of the deep and powerful motives I will discuss here, studies have shown that for most people they remain stable over periods as long as ten years or more. In other words, fundamental motives do not change much, or change easily. This suggests that, despite ideas about “putting motivation into people,” it is easier to create a new situation than to reinvent the people you have.
Further, to manage people as they are, you must know what they are. People have a range of motives and beliefs that interact in many complex ways — too many different ways for ready management. Fortunately, however, the study of motivation has given us a shorter list of levers you can use to influence the great majority of people. In motivational theory there are two categories of motivation: the nonconscious, implicit motives (usually called motives), and the conscious self-attributed motives (usually called values). An understanding of these two kinds of motivation and of the differences between them provides a powerful tool to influence even large groups of people.
Motives versus Values
Implicit motives, henceforth referred to as motives, define where people find emotional satisfaction (or frustration), and therefore provide a source of energy that supports (or hinders) people’s undertaking tasks. There is not always a one-to-one link between behavior and motive, if only because motives are highly generalized in nature, as we will see in the three most studied, most common motives. But there is a strong link between the broad pattern of people’s choices over time and their motives.
Self-attributed motives, or values, relate to conscious decisions, strongly held beliefs, and specific commitments. Values channel the emotional energy of motives into particular areas, providing limitations or a focus. Generally values have to do with what people feel is important and with what they must do, rather than what they enjoy; so acting on values tends to cost people energy, rather than providing it as motive-linked tasks do. Unlike basic motives, values tend to evolve; throughout a person’s life he or she is likely to add, subtract, or alter many values. A simple example is to consider one’s priorities for action (1) before being married, (2) after being married but before having children, and (3) after having children. Most people find dramatic differences among their choices in these three time periods.
In sum, motives indicate emotional engagement, and values indicate considered importance. Psychologist David McClelland, in a personal communication, put the relationship this way: “Your achievement motive may drive you to improve yourself, but your values lead you to go to a particular graduate school.” Or, I might add, to decide whether to go to graduate school at all.
As you might expect with something deeply emotionally based, motives are so profound in people that in fact few can assess their own motives accurately. Instead, people will tell you their conscious values — which, though important, do not address the same issues or predict things in the way that motives do. Values influence choices, but motives predict long-term preferences. For example, a man may value engineering as a career, perhaps because of a parent, but over time may find he enjoys management more and may become an engineering manager, because his motives drive him to do what he likes. Alternatively, he could stay an engineer because of his values — or for that matter because of a negative value associated with management — and be constantly unhappy for reasons that elude him. This is one illustration of how values and motives interact.
Motivation and Organizations
The implications of motives and values for management are plain: People do what they like or they do what they feel is important. To the extent that a given task fits either of these categories, it will get done faster and better. Where appropriate motives do not exist, people require strong values to replace them. Values are more mutable and adaptable than motives, as mentioned earlier, so values provide one lever by which managers can engage people in tasks. A manager should never assume (although this error occurs constantly) that an employee or peer shares his or her same motives. Something a manager may feel strongly about motivationally and see as vital in terms of values may hold neither appeal for an employee. The choice then becomes:
to create or engage a value,
to appeal to underlying motives.
In other words, you can try to engage or create an intellectual commitment, or you can engage emotional drivers. Note that creating or even changing a motive is not an option: Motives are deep constructs and change only slowly if at all. Changing other people’s motives without their active and dedicated collaboration is far too difficult to be a practical management technique. Therefore, the best approach is for a manager to understand what motives are already driving people, so that he or she may tap into what is there. This understanding is crucial in the use of the values lever, too — because even if a manager creates a new value, it may not lead to the desired results if it conflicts with existing motives.
The Three Social Motives
Early motivational theorist Henry Murray identified fifty human motives. Fortunately, however, McClelland and his colleagues’ (1989) have found that 80 percent of daily mental activity can be related to only three motives, now known as “the three social motives”: achievement, affiliation, and power. If, for example, one beeps people at random and asks them to describe their thoughts and concerns, they will tend to describe something that aligns with one or another of these motives 80 percent of the time. Having to know only three motives makes application of these concepts, even to large groups of people, a practical strategy.
The achievement, affiliation and power motives are simply those motives that are most common in daily life. Although the need for security or the need for nurturance are legitimate and indeed widely studied motives, on average they occupy little enough of most people’s regular concerns that one can ignore them with only occasional exceptions.
Before looking more closely at the achievement, affiliation and power motives, I need to state a few caveats:
Everyone has all three of these motives, simply in different relative degrees. But even a person overwhelmingly strong on two motives can be temporarily aroused by the third.
Motives are not the same as behavior. The fact that people think about certain images does not mean they will act on them. One researcher (Winter, 1971) once found that people who thought a lot about violence actually were less violent than others. In a recent study (Kelner, 2000) I found plenty of harmless mystery writers who cheerfully did people in — in print.
The three social motives are conventionally defined in terms of “primary images,” the central thought or thoughts for each motive, as described below.
Achievement Motive
(Atkinson & McClelland, 1953, p.51)
Scoring criterion: A concern for excellence or doing better. This can emerge in any of several ways:
Competing to meet a standard of excellence.
Meeting or beating a self-imposed standard.
Accomplishing something new or unique.
Long-term career planning.
Affiliation Motive
(Kelner, 1991, p. 14)
Scoring criterion: A concern around establishing, maintaining, and restoring relationships. This concern can manifest in one or more of three ways:
Positive. Focused on enjoyment of relationships. Includes taking actions on another’s behalf with no thought of recompense other than improving the relationship; enjoying the company of others; and feeling part of a greater whole (e.g., “He was proud to be part of a nonprofit consortium”).
Cynical. Focused on relationships, but assuming they will go bad. Includes hypocrisy (presenting oneself as better than one is), and deception in supposedly affiliative relationships (cheating on one’s spouse).
Anxious. Focused on anxiety about the success or failure of relationships. Includes discussions of interpersonal relationships, flow experience, negative reaction to separation.
Power Motive
(Winter, 1971)
Scoring criterion: A concern for impact or influence on others. There are, again, several ways in which this can emerge:
Concern for prestige, position, and prestige-laden circumstances or items.
Taking strong, forceful actions.
Taking actions that imply the possession of power.
Actions that arouse strong emotions in others.
Unsolicited help or advice.
Note that motivated behavior is a broad category indeed. Different people manifest their motives in different ways that are shaped by their competencies, training, and values. A person who comes up with many ideas for improvement but dislikes details may possess just as much achievement motive as a person who meticulously checks for quality issues but dislikes having to do something new. One does not have to demonstrate all the criteria above to be assessed as having a given motive.
Perhaps the best example of this variability is the power motive. Generally this is seen as a negative motive in English-speaking countries, as the word power carries associations of domination and manipulation; but in fact the power motive, like all three social motives, is amoral in nature. An effective coach or an empowering leader can be driven by power motive (which is really just about influence and impact) just as much as a dictator or a bully is. Likewise, some of the worst managers I have seen were those driven primarily not by power but by achievement motive — and hence not alert to the implications of their actions as they drove people for excellence at any cost.
The descriptions I have given are at the personal level; they apply to individual people. However, you can also apply these descriptions to jobs and roles, which leads us from the individual to the organization.
Motivation, Working Roles, and Results
Few companies promote or select individuals for jobs based on candidates’ personal motives; instead, organizations often look at technical qualifications, experience, credentials, and the alma mater. However, long-term success in a given role may depend far more on the energy and emotional engagement a person brings to the role than on the training the person has happened to obtain. Over the long term, this energy tends to differentiate those who enjoy a role from those who do not, if only because enjoying their work makes it easier for individuals to excel.
Motives and Job Roles
As I stated earlier, motives define what people enjoy. A manager can define job roles in terms of the three social motives as well, in part by examining what opportunities exist for enjoyable motivated behavior, and in part by looking at the themes in the kinds of behaviors required. For example, a role that allows for frequent innovation appeals to the achievement motive, a role that allows for socializing appeals to the affiliation motive, and a role that allows for impact on others appeals to the power motive.
The AT&T study described first by McClelland and Burnham (1982) and replicated by Ruth Jacobs (1992) illustrates this point as well as demonstrating the predictive power of motivation. AT&T assessed all individuals coming into the company with many psychological measures, including a picture-story exercise used to assess motives. The researchers followed up on all of the new hires over a 4-year period 8 to 12 years after their hiring. By then, most of the new hires had progressed from “individual contributor” status to other jobs, and these studies examined where they wound up. Figure 2 is a rough graph of the career paths of those employees driven primarily by achievement motive versus those driven primarily by power motive.
Figure 2: Career Path and Motives in the AT&T Study.
In numerical terms, in 8 to 12 years roughly two thirds of primarily power-motivated individuals made it to the executive level, if not at AT&T, then elsewhere, whereas two thirds of primarily achievement-motivated individuals did not make it past first-line management. Why?
Holders of different jobs require different motives to succeed. Individual contributors, lacking managerial responsibilities, can focus on doing a job personally and to high quality standards. Achievement motive supports that kind of behavior. However, the higher the level one attains in an organization, the farther away one is from the hands-on work, and the more important it is for an individual to think about influencing others to work to high quality standards. In other words, influence and impact — and the power motive — are more predictive of success in managerial or executive roles. The reverse is also true: A manager who spends more time on his or her individual contribution than on management is not likely to succeed. Nor is an individual contributor who spends too much time on unnecessary (even if enjoyable) influencing of others.
Note that we are not discussing basic ability. For example, basic influence skills can be taught very effectively no matter what your motive, although having a power motive will predispose you to develop the skills even without training. Instead, we are talking about sustainable behavior. If a manager must spend 80 or 90 percent of his or her time in conversation with employees (as has been found again and again when managers are asked to assess their time use in the Conversation for Action and Personal PDCA courses), it helps a great deal to enjoy the process as well as the result. People possessing large degrees of any given motive tend to be sensitive to opportunities and signals related to that motive, which means they respond rapidly and intuitively, rather than having to engage in conscious reasoning about the need for response.
Another important point here is that each job must be assessed uniquely for the motives that fit it. There are some common patterns in businesses, but there are also exceptions; it is a mistake to view a job too simplistically. For example, you might assume that a job with the title “CEO” would require a great deal of power-related thinking. But if the role is that of CEO of a three-person software firm, the entrepreneurial achievement motive might be more critical. (If the company then succeeds and grows, so may the need for power-related thinking.) I assessed successful senior vice presidents in one major multinational corporation and discovered that they possessed more achievement motive than power motive. Upon close examination, the organization turned out to be arranged almost like a holding company, with each division really acting as an entrepreneurial firm and having no great depth of organization. Conversely, some first-line managers need to think a lot about influence and impact because they are part of cross-organization working teams in which influence is more critical than individual mastery of a job. And finally, some professional mystery writers I mentioned, despite working alone in a room all day most of the time, are disproportionately motivated by power — they simply have the ability to postpone satisfaction for a long time.
Given these provisos and cautions, we see several common patterns. One pattern is that jobs that personal control of tasks (not people), or which emphasize goal setting, excellence, improvement, or goal accomplishment, tend to be achievement-motivated jobs; jobs that require working through others and focus on empowering, coaching, and leading tend to be power-related roles. It is also possible and normal for a job to require two or more types of motive-related behavior to different degrees. Working supervisors, for example, typically perform both achievement-related behaviors to do the direct work and power-related behaviors in influencing their subordinates. Table 1 lists some common job-role criteria in relation to each of the three social motives.
Table 1: Motive-Related Job Role Criteria.
There are subtleties in the list in Table 1. One example is behavior that seems to manifest one motive but in fact is driven by another. One of the commonest of these is affiliative behavior for a power purpose: being nice as part of the job of influence. I knew a manager in the United Kingdom who always went down to the pub with “the boys” each Friday. He did not want to join his subordinates there — he would have preferred to go home to his family — but, as he said: “If I don’t sit with them in the pub, they won’t trust me and they won’t work for me.” In English-speaking nations this kind of behavior can be seen as manipulative or somehow ungenuine; I prefer to think of this as speaking to people in the language they can hear. This manager happened to be power-motivated, and he understood that the employees had certain expectations that, whether reasonable or not, were part of their culture. He had to work within the culture rather than against it if he wanted to earn their loyalty.
Similarly, many achievement-driven salespeople learn influence as a way to reach the satisfying goal of beating quota. They enjoy the behavior not for its own sake, as they would if it were motive driven, but as a means to an end: achieving motive-satisfying results. This is power (or affiliation) behavior for an achievement purpose.
In sum, if you know the demands of the role, you can determine the approximate motive pattern of the individuals who will find it most satisfying. Likewise, if you understand the motive pattern of an individual, you can predict the degree to which that person will thrive in a given role. For our purposes one role is particularly salient: the role of change implementer.
Motivation and the Implementation Role
One role is particularly important to mobilization of organizational change, and that is the role played by managers and implementers, as opposed to practitioners, of new methods. One study, by Dreyfus and Pelote (1992), indicates that the motivational requirements for successful implementation of new methods are quite distinctive. In this study, which resembles many others but which happens to focus on the implementation of TQM, Dreyfus and Pelote compared matched groups of effective and less effective managers. As summarized in Table 2, the researchers found no significant differences among the conceptual frameworks managers had learned — Deming, Juran, and Crosby were all represented, and none differentiated success. Other differences among the managers, however, indicate that underlying individual motives are a key factor in getting people mobilized to do something new.
Table 2: Contrasts between Effective and Less Effective TQM Implementers.
As Table 2 shows, the unsuccessful implementers focused on task quality, acted as experts in the technical knowledge, and tended to be driven by the achievement motive. By contrast, successful implementers coached, tended to explain why things should be done, described themselves more as catalysts, and were driven by the socialized power motive. In brief, this finding indicates that the people best at practicing quality methodology are not necessarily going to be the best at managing or implementing quality. Expertise is not enough. It is more important to think about mobilizing the organization and its individuals than to be a superb practitioner. This leads us directly to mobilization through the Seven Infrastructures.
Motivation and Mobilization through the Seven Infrastructures
What applies to individuals applies equally well to organizations composed of many individuals: Motivation is central to the mobilization of organizational change. Each of the Seven Infrastructures is, in a sense, a set of tasks or roles required for organizational transformation. And by examining the motivational demands and foci of each, which means we can forge a link between individual emotional energizers and the task of organizational change. This, to me, is what mobilization is really all about.
Let’s look again at Figure 1. As stated earlier, motivational concepts need not directly affect all of the seven infrastructures, but they have particular importance to five of the seven: Goal Setting, Organization Setting, Training and Education to some extent, Promotion, and Incentives and Rewards. We will examine each of these five in the light of motivational research, theory, and practice.
1. Goal Setting
In principle, organization-wide goal setting resembles goal setting for an individual: It must be specific, measurable, timely, and moderately challenging. When appealing to multiple people, however, you must add an awareness of multiple motivations, in order to appeal to all those participating in the achievement of the goal.
Studies have shown that the best way to temporarily arouse achievement motive and a desire to improve in individuals is to provide a clear, measured gap between one’s desired state and where one is now. This principle supports coaching individuals; it can also apply to a larger-scale goal.
“Noble goals,” which are a high ideals an organization espouses and supposedly works toward, can be readily “coded” as achievement, affiliation, or power-oriented. The tricky aspect of noble goals is that they are often set by executives who possess a very different motive profile from those of most of the other employees; what may appear noble and empowering to top management often feels irrelevant to the bulk of the firm. This leads to employee cynicism and disengagement from the noble goal, effects that compromise people’s allegiance to the company as a whole. Conversely, goals set purely from a traditional quality perspective may over-emphasize the achievement motive and lose the interest of power-motivated senior managers. Table 3 contrasts some specific companies’ noble goals and codes them for the three motives.
Note that in Table 3 the quality-related statements (e.g., those of 3M, Xerox, and Ford) tend to appeal to the achievement motive. By contrast, other statements, including the NEC goal, tend to draw in multiple motives, especially power and achievement.
Table 3: Noble Goals of Organizations and Related Motivational Appeals.
Business leaders tend not to be quite as daring in their goals as political leaders, but there are exceptions. When Jack Welch decided that every one of GE’s business units had to be first or second in its field or get out, he was setting a kind of high-challenge noble goal that appealed both to the achievement motive (in terms of being the best) and to the power motive (in terms of beating other companies and taking market share).
The question that must drive organizational goal setting is: Are we appealing to everyone? As mentioned before, the commonest error managers make is to assume that others share the same motivation. Many of the stated goals listed in Table 3 were anchored in the quality philosophy, which is clearly achievement driven. But successful managers are often driven primarily by the power motive, which may explain why quality efforts often come from the bottom up. An organization can arouse any motive temporarily, but is it possible that the more successful companies are those that have noble goals engaging all three social motives? This question has not been studied in depth, but there are some suggestive findings. Note that Disney captured all three motives, and Disney is a very successful company indeed. On the other hand, it is counterproductive to espouse a noble goal but not demonstrate commitment to it. An ignored noble goal can have a negative impact on motivation.
2. Organization Setting
Resetting an organization to manage major change means engaging all three motives. As an organization prepares to change, it is important to fit the correct people to the job structure. Selecting influence-focused people for influential leadership positions and achievement-focused employees for technical or goal-based innovation can improve the impact of setting the organization. And naming change implementers who are respected for the right things can help in many ways. This can be more challenging in practice than it sounds, however. Selecting a known innovator to lead an organizational change effort may have sentimental appeal, but achievement-motivated innovators are often not effective leaders of people.
3. Training and Education
Every few years someone writes a paper on an experiment in which researchers discovered, to their amazement, that high achievement motivation does not necessarily correlate with academic success. These researchers may have made the mistake of assuming that “academic achievement” must correlate with the achievement motive. But learning and response to teaching do not relate to one motive alone. All three of the social motives can drive someone to improve. Though strongly achievement motivated people do tend spontaneously to improve themselves over the long term, they do so only in areas where they want to improve — not necessarily where someone else wants them to improve.
In formal educational settings, it is possible to engage individuals’ motives to drive learning in three ways:
Through the nature of the instructional approach, which may be inherently engaging to one motive versus another. For example, group learning appeals to affiliation; frequent testing of progress appeals to achievement.
Through students’ relationship with the teacher, and the way the teacher runs the classroom.
Through the ultimate goal of the learning.
All three aspects of education can be customized to some extent to appeal to different motives, as shown in Table 4.
Table 4: Examples of Tailoring Education to Motivation.
In organizational change efforts, in addition to tailoring training and educational offerings to existing motives, it is also possible to temporarily arouse a motive, as noted earlier. One motivational approach, shown in Figure 3, is known as the “Coaching Model” or the “Self-Directed Change Model” and works reliably in arousing people’s desire to change (Kolb & Boyatzis, 1987).
Figure 3: The Self-Directed Change Model.
What makes this approach work is the arousal of the achievement motive, the wish to improve. The measured gap between where one actually is and where one wants to be arouses the desire to close that gap. That produces emotional energy for change, which in turn generates a commitment to change. That is, desire is not enough; you also need commitment. But even commitment is not sufficient, and the next step is goal setting. Studies have indicated goal-setting processes increase people’s overall productivity as well as their likelihood of accomplishing specific tasks.
In sum, training and educational programs that take into account the self-directed change model and differences among individual motives are more likely to drive effective change. For example, a person may choose to join an educational program because
she wants to improve herself (achievement);
she likes being part of a noble effort (affiliation); or
she wants to impress her boss (power).
To take advantage of these different motives, a manager or leader may promote education by providing or promising
feedback on performance or opportunities to improve;
positive team spirit and esprit de corps; and/or
visibility, prominence, or opportunities to influence others.
Start by assuming that people are driven by their fundamental social motives, and will want to do that which supports their motives, even if a given task is not directly motivated. Salespeople will learn how to schmooze (affiliation) and how to influence (power) so as to meet goals (achievement). Managers will learn improvement methods (achievement) because these methods enable them to make a dramatic impact on an organization (power).
4. Promotion
Promotion of the change effort should engage both employees’ values and their motives. And again, because emotional engagement comes from the motives, promotional activities should appeal to different people possessing different motive patterns.
General principles of advertising and promotion often recognize this fact implicitly by identifying the difference between addressing someone’s head and appealing to the person’s emotions. An appeal to emotions bypasses the rational portions of the brain — or so advertisers hope. A quick survey of television commercials certainly indicates that marketing experts believe in aiming for a nonrational response. This principle also aligns with motivational theory: Appeal to the emotions is appeal to the motives. But in an organization, one should not ignore the conscious values, which screen individuals’ options for behavior. People will not generally act contrary to their values unless the motive is powerful indeed. So promotion of mobilization for change should try to capture both the emotions and values.
The primarily achievement-motivated person is energized by the idea of doing something better, of being the best, of doing something new and innovative. Promotion of improvement efforts should appeal to this motive, as long as the individual feels that he or she has control of the process and can use it to improve themselves. In other words, enabling people to choose to make improvements is a way to enlist achievement-motivated individuals in change.
The primarily affiliation-motivated person likes being part of a greater whole, being connected to people on a personal level. Belonging to a team can appeal to these people, as does supporting a meaningful higher purpose of some kind. In other words, reinforcing the identity of a group of change agents will help engage these people — and possibly power-motivated people as well, if the group association is prestigious.
Finally, the primarily power-motivated person enjoys influencing people, being somehow visible, or having an impact on the organization. Transforming the business should appeal to these people in general, and the visibility or prestigious identification will reinforce it as well.
It is possible, indeed preferable, to have promotional activities appeal to all three motives at once, as in “Join the team in changing the way we work — help us move to the future!” Although it takes skill to avoid sounding like a collection of cliches, engaging all three motives greatly increases the chances of getting the majority of the organization on board. Using the thoughts associated with the three motives, a leader can craft promotional messages that appeal to them directly. And this appeal to the emotions will drive people’s nonconscious desire to belong to the change effort.
For example, the CEO’s involvement in promotion of improvement efforts will appeal to the power motivated — do something that impresses the boss! In contrast, improvement will tend to appeal more to the achievement motivated if they feel they will have ownership of the effort instead of being an imposed corporate program.
Any kind of promotion or advertisement within a company can and should appeal to all three motives, remembering that appeal to the emotions will drive people’s nonconscious desire to belong to the effort.
5. Incentives and Rewards
Incentives should appeal to the person. Appeal is emotional. Therefore, satisfying rewards are those that are emotionally satisfying. It is vital to match rewards to the person, or a supposed incentive can actually have a negative impact on motivation. For example: The executive team at a multinational petrochemical firm wanted to reward their geophysicists, who typically sat crunching numbers and creating beautiful graphs and reports of the best places to drill. Management correctly identified the importance of these people to the organization and wanted to reward them for their good work.
Geophysicists, working alone, trying different analyses to arrive at the optimum recommendation, are people who are primarily motivated by achievement; they have little need or desire for personal impact. By contrast, executives more often than not, have a strong power motive, because their job is about influencing layer upon layer of the organization. The petrochemical firm’s executive committee came up with what they thought was a wonderful reward: They would bring the author of the best report to headquarters to make a presentation to the total executive committee. To a young executive hopeful this would indeed have been a wonderful incentive. To the geophysicists it was a punishment. They deliberately decreased their performance in order to avoid being selected for this “honor.”
The classic error of rewards and reward systems is assuming someone likes the same things as you. Incentives must relate to the other person, not to you. To complicate matters, many psychologists believe that external rewards can extinguish intrinsic motivation if not carefully administered. According to this theory, a task people enjoy should be left alone, or it will require unlimited reinforcement. If you pay people to do it, they will expect pay from then on; and if you cease paying them, the behavior will cease as well. For this reason, most compensation systems reward results rather than process — the exception being team process. This does not necessarily mean that you cannot give greater rewards to people who do work the right way, just that care should be taken to link rewards more to global performance than to specific tasks, which will then be forever linked to pay.
I once sat next to a consultant who took off the last month of the year, because his company’s compensation system (based on their own principles!) capped rewards at 120% of goal. Because he had reached 120 percent in the penultimate month, he postponed any additional business into the new year. Whereas if he had had no cap, he might have brought in more sales in the current year, because he would have been rewarded for it. The lesson here is that monetary rewards can sometimes work against you, once people learn to play the game. For this among other reasons, motivationally based rewards — which may or may not include monetary compensation — can be more effective.
Suppose an employee has worked day and night to accomplish an improvement project, with great results. How do you reward this person? The achievement-motivated employee might like another such project, which would allow him or her to push the envelope and make still further improvements. The affiliative person, on the other hand, would see that “reward” as a punishment; these projects keep people from their families, and an affiliative person would prefer a party or time off to be with his or her family. The power-motivated person might like public acknowledgment of his or her accomplishment, or a handshake from the CEO. The same reward can also apply several ways, if desired: Having your hand shaken by the CEO for being the best appeals to both power and achievement motives.
There are many subtleties to the management of rewards and incentives. Probably the most important point here is that rigid systems cannot substitute for good management. Many structured systems specify a range of possible rewards at each level. At least some choices must be available, as well as choices in presentation — remember the geophysicists.
Integrating Mobilization and Motivation
As discussed earlier, motivation seems directly linked to “only” five of the Seven Infrastructures. But at its core mobilization is about moving people, not objects. Motivation can be — indeed, probably must be — considered in the application of the five infrastructures I have examined, but even the remaining processes are directed ultimately toward motivation. Number 7, Diagnosis, is a necessary condition for the self-directed change model, essentially a motivational model of individual change, in that diagnosis defines the gap between the actual and the desired. Number 5, Diffusion of Success Stories, has no purpose if not to motivate people — one merely has to diffuse enough for everyone.
It is tempting to consider an organizational model, or indeed a model of any kind, to be a kind of machine in which pulling any lever leads to a predictable and controllable result. In fact, however, models substitute for a reality that is too complex to manipulate easily. Models take the commonest cases, but there are always exceptions. The extent to which one can add data into a model correlates with the ultimate precision of that model’s use.
Unfortunately, organizations are vastly complex (and hence unpredictable), because they are composed not only of individuals but of the interactions among them. My contention here is that motivation provides a remarkably powerful lever, in that three core drivers that are found in all people, all of which have broad application, drive 80 percent of motivated behavior. It would be neither useful nor practical to try to provide the Seven Infrastructures with decimal-point precision; ultimately the effort required would be is prohibitive, especially because the measures change as the organization does. But adding three motives to one’s thinking about mobilization is not unreasonable, given that these motives apply consistently to people, who do not change as a species all that quickly. The three social motives provide simple, effective levers that managers and leaders can use in complex ways to engage large sets of people or individuals in improvement efforts.
In this paper I have introduced only a small part of the vast literature of motivation and management. Motivation is a key competency in many ways, not least of which is the fact that motives tend to drive the development of other competencies. For example, power-motivated people tend to develop people skills in order to influence others more effectively; achievement-motivated people tend to measure their work spontaneously so they can track their improvement; and so on. Appealing to these universal can potentially lead to a population of employees who are not only more productive but more excited about their work. The organizational effectiveness of motivation goes even deeper than what I have described here.
Identifying Individual and Role Motivation
At this point, having recognized the importance of motivation to organizational change efforts, you may be wondering how to identify these motives in individuals.
There are several answers to this question. One is that if you appeal to all three of the three social motives, you don’t really need to know how to identify any one. On the other hand, appealing to all three motives on every occasion can be more than a little tedious. Furthermore, the brief descriptions I have given here could cause more harm than good if misapplied. For example, I have seen people assume that a tyrannical manager is power motivated; this assumption can reinforce people’s value around power motivation and distract them from the actual emotional engagement of the manager, which may well be achievement motivation. In this way people create a vicious circle of attribution, which can be summed up as “Achievement = good, Power = bad,” and vice versa. So I will provide here a few clues to identifying motives.
First, observe the patterns of what people enjoy. Remember that people can have more than one motive present, and opportunities to display them all may not be present at work. Still, what people express excitement about on their job is a good indicator of motivation. Remember that the words are not so important as the emotional evidence — energy, excitement, joyfulness, not merely a verbal statement of importance.
Discovering what people do for fun is very suggestive. If they like solo activities in which they test themselves against a goal (running, golf, etc.), achievement motive is indicated. If they like challenging others or taking leadership roles (serving as officers of organizations, coaching, football, soccer, gambling), power motive is indicated. If friends and family are the most important area of enjoyment, affiliation motive is indicated.
The same applies to books and movies. Achievement-motivated people tend to read to improve themselves or to learn something, even when this is not required for the job. (Required reading is valued, not motivated, behavior.) They also read puzzle-type mysteries. Affiliative people tend to read books about characters in relationships. Power-motivated people like books about politics, influential people, and the history of leadership; thrillers; and the “private eye” type of mystery novel.
Observation can often give you a solid sense of a person’s dominant motive, if not of the relative strengths of all three social motives. You don’t need significantly more than that to accomplish the goal at hand, which is to engage at least one strong motive. The more sources of information you have — for example, excitement at work and at play—the more reliable the judgment.
The brief descriptions I gave of the three motives are derived from the explicit thought patterns of motivated individuals; they can be applied in a variety of ways. The key here is not to assume the motive but to judge on appropriate evidence. A person who plays golf, for instance, may not necessarily be achievement motivated; he or she may play only to be with friends or to be seen at a prestigious club. A good question to ask is why someone enjoys an action. If you cannot answer that, you have not reached the level of the motives.
The same reasoning applies to organizational roles. Does the person in a given role focus on
Individual improvement, goal accomplishment, innovation, efficiency? (Achievement)
Working with people as a friend? Belonging to a group? (Affiliation)
Influencing others, acting as a visible leader, coaching? (Power)
Be aware of the impact of values on reasoning. For example, people often assume that the human resource role is an affiliative one. But an HR person who wanted to be friends with everyone would not be very effective at coaching someone to meet a need, or at moderating conflict. Good therapists tend to be power motivated, because they are trying to change people (or to enable people to change themselves). Therapists are not trying to be friends, though they may be friendly. Likewise, as discussed earlier, the effective leader of an improvement effort is not motivated in the same way as a successful practitioner of improvement methods.
But once this point is understood, it is easy enough to determine what the primary (and probably the secondary) motive is for almost any role. And this completes the picture for how one may apply motivation to mobilization: Understand people, understand the roles to be played, and apply that knowledge within the framework of the Seven Infrastructures for Mobilization.
Summary
The Seven Infrastructures for Mobilization are an organization-level approach to directed change. I propose that the most effective approach to organizational change requires that leadership engage all the individuals participating in the effort by appealing to and enlisting the individual motivations and values they bring to the job. I further propose that the three social motives are the most productive levers to use here.
The progression is: Motivation drives self-directed change; individual change drives organizational mobilization. Using the Seven Infrastructures effectively must and will engage the motives as well, in a never-ending feedback loop: Good organizational structures engage the motives, which in turn drive organizational change by energizing all the individuals who belong to that organization. The linkages here are both strong and practical. If you can engage motivation to the task at hand, mobilization will inevitably follow.
References
Jacobs, R. L. (1992). “Moving up the corporate ladder: A longitudinal study of motivation, personality, and managerial success in women and men.” Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Boston University.
Kelner, S. P., Jr. (1991). “Interpersonal motivation: Cynical, positive, and anxious.” Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Boston University.
Kelner, S. P. Kelner, Jr. (2000). Motivate Your Writing! Finding Your Balance Point. Unpublished manuscript.
McClelland, D.C., Koestner, R., and Weinberger, J. (1989). “How do self-attributed and implicit motives differ?” Psychological Review 96, No. 4: 690–702.
McClelland, D. C. and Burnham, D. (Jan/Feb 1995 (first edition 1982)) “Power is the Great Motivator.” Harvard Business Review, 73, No. 1: 126-139.
Kolb, D.A. and Boyatzis, R.E. (1987), “Goal-Setting and Self-Directed Behavior Change,” Human Relations, 23, No. 5: 439-457.
Atkinson and McClelland (1958), Motives in Fantasy, Action, and Society, Princeton NJ: D. Van Nostrand.
Shiba, S., Graham, A., & Walden, D. (1990). A New American TQM. Portland, OR: Productivity Press.
Winter, D. (1971). The Power Motive. New York: Free Press.
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