What can motivate workers by achieving a more satisfactory fit between workers and their jobs?

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Encourage your team to fly high.

Your people may have all the expertise in the world but, if they're not motivated, it's unlikely that they'll achieve their true potential.

On the other hand, work seems easy when people are motivated.

Motivated people have a positive outlook, they're excited about what they're doing, and they know that they're investing their time in something that's truly worthwhile. In short, motivated people enjoy their jobs and perform well.

All effective leaders want their organizations to be filled with people in this state of mind. That's why it's vital that you, as a leader and manager, keep your team feeling motivated and inspired. But of course, this can be easier said than done!

In this article, we'll go over the key theories, strategies and tools that you can use to help your people stay enthusiastic about their work.

The Two Types of Motivation

There are two main types of motivation – extrinsic and intrinsic.

Extrinsic motivation is when you use external factors to encourage your team to do what you want. Pay raises, time off, bonus checks, and the threat of job loss are all extrinsic motivators – some positive, some less so.

Intrinsic motivation is internal. It's about having a personal desire to overcome a challenge, to produce high-quality work, or to interact with team members you like and trust. Intrinsically motivated people get a great deal of satisfaction and enjoyment from what they do.

Every team member is different, and will likely have different motivators. So, it's important to get to know your people, discover what motivates them, and find a good mixture of extrinsic and intrinsic motivators, so that you can motivate them successfully.

Benefits of Motivation in the Workplace

You can't directly control a person's interest in his or her job. Of course, an individual does have some responsibility for motivating himself, but you can encourage that process by creating an environment that helps him to become more intrinsically motivated. Individuals, teams and even whole organizations can reap the rewards.

Motivated people are highly adaptable, particularly when it comes to change, and they have a positive attitude at work. They help to spread an organization's good reputation, reduce rates of absenteeism, and improve performance and profit. They also work hard to achieve their goals, and work with a greater sense of urgency than unmotivated people.

Strategies for Motivating Your People

As a manager, you can use the following steps and strategies to create a motivating environment for your team.

Step 1: Check Your Assumptions

You may not realize it, but your management style is strongly influenced by what you believe about your people.

For example, do you think your team members dislike working, and need continuous supervision? Or, do you believe that they're happy to do their jobs, and are likely to enjoy greater responsibility and freedom?

These two fundamental beliefs form the backbone of the team motivation concept Theory X and Theory Y.

Theory X managers are authoritarian, and assume that they need to supervise people constantly. They believe that their team members don't want or need responsibility, and that they have to motivate people extrinsically to produce results.

Theory Y managers believe that their team members want more responsibility and should help make decisions. They assume that everyone has something valuable to offer.

In short, your beliefs about your team members' motivation affect the way you behave toward them. So, it's important to think carefully about how you view your people, and to explore what you believe truly motivates them. (It can help to think about it from your own perspective – would you prefer your own boss to manage you using Theory X or Theory Y? And how long would you stay working for a Theory X manager?)

Step 2: Eliminate Dissatisfaction and Create Satisfaction

Psychologist Fredrick Herzberg said that you can motivate your team by eliminating elements of job dissatisfaction, and then creating conditions for job satisfaction.

In his Motivation-Hygiene Theory, he noted how causes of dissatisfaction often arise from irritating company policies, intrusive supervision, or lack of job security, among others. If you don't address these issues, people won't be satisfied at work, and motivating them will prove difficult, if not impossible.

Once you've removed the elements of job dissatisfaction, you can look at providing satisfaction. Sources of job satisfaction include clear opportunities for advancement/promotion, an increased sense of responsibility, ongoing training and development programs, or simply a feeling of working with purpose.

Step 3: Personalize Your Motivational Approach

Remember, your team is made up of individuals who have their own unique circumstances, backgrounds and experiences. Consequently, each person may be driven by different motivating factors, and be more or less adept at self-motivation. When you make an effort to understand each team member, you can help them stay motivated.

There are a number of tools and strategies that you can use to tailor your approach to motivation – and not all are completely consistent with one another. However, it's important to remember that every individual and situation is different, so make sure that you choose the theory or model that best fits your circumstances.

Let's explore these in more detail:

• Sirota's Three-Factor Theory argues that there are three crucial factors that motivate your people. These are Equity/Fairness, Achievement and Camaraderie. You can help to ensure that your team members remain motivated and positive by incorporating each of these factors into their work.
• McClelland's Human Motivation Theory is subtly different. McClelland believed that we all have three different drivers, the need for Achievement, Affiliation and Power, with one of them being dominant. If you structure your motivators and leadership style around a team member's dominant driver, your efforts should produce good results.
• Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs identifies five needs that we all have, from the most basic to the most complex. These are physiological/bodily, safety, love/belonging, self-esteem, and self-actualization (the sense of doing what you were born to do). Maslow's Hierarchy is usually presented in a pyramid – you place the basic needs at the bottom, because you need to meet these before you can address any of the more complex ones. According to this approach, you can motivate your team by addressing all of the levels.
• Amabile and Kramer's Progress Theory highlights how progressing and achieving small "wins" can be motivating. It suggests six things you can provide – clear goals and objectives, autonomy, resources, time, support, and the ability to learn from failure – that give people the best chance of making recognizable and meaningful progress at work.
• You can also use Expectancy Theory to create a strong, motivating work environment where high performance is standard. It clarifies the relationship between effort and outcome, and you can use it to tailor motivational rewards to individuals' preferences.
• According to the Pygmalion Effect, your expectations can affect your team members' performance. For example, when you doubt that someone will succeed, you can make her feel undervalued and you undermine her confidence. The Pygmalion Effect is useful because it reinforces the idea that you can encourage people to perform better at work by having and communicating high expectations of them.
• Of course, money does matter, and Understanding Strategic Compensation can help you structure your team's extrinsic rewards. Whether you reward people with increases in base, performance or group-performance pay, understanding the differences between them, and their inherent benefits, can help you structure financial compensation in a more motivating way.

Step 4: Use Transformational Leadership

Motivation is vital in the workplace, but this will only take you so far, and then leadership takes over (click here to visit the Mind Tools leadership section). Once you've used the motivational approaches we've discussed above, you need to take the next step towards becoming an inspirational, transformational leader.

What do people want from their jobs? Do they just want a higher salary? Or do they want security, good relationships with co-workers, opportunities for growth and advancement – or something else altogether?

This is an important question, because it's at the root of motivation - the art of engaging with members of your team in such a way that they give their very best performance.

The psychologist Frederick Herzberg asked the same question in the 1950s and 60s as a means of understanding employee satisfaction. He set out to determine the effect of attitude on motivation, by asking people to describe situations where they felt really good, and really bad, about their jobs. What he found was that people who felt good about their jobs gave very different responses from the people who felt bad.

Click here to view a transcript of this video.

These results form the basis of Herzberg's Motivation-Hygiene Theory (sometimes known as Herzberg's Two Factor Theory). Published in his famous article, "One More Time: How do You Motivate Employees," the conclusions he drew were extraordinarily influential, and still form the bedrock of good motivational practice nearly half a century later.

Motivation-Hygiene Theory

Herzberg's findings revealed that certain characteristics of a job are consistently related to job satisfaction, while different factors are associated with job dissatisfaction. These are:

Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review. From "One More Time: How do You Motivate Employees?" by Frederick Herzberg, January 2003. Copyright © 1968 by the Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation; all rights reserved.

The conclusion he drew is that job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction are not opposites.

• The opposite of Satisfaction is No Satisfaction.
• The opposite of Dissatisfaction is No Dissatisfaction.

Remedying the causes of dissatisfaction will not create satisfaction. Nor will adding the factors of job satisfaction eliminate job dissatisfaction. If you have a hostile work environment, giving someone a promotion will not make him or her satisfied. If you create a healthy work environment but do not provide members of your team with any of the satisfaction factors, the work they're doing will still not be satisfying.

According to Herzberg, the factors leading to job satisfaction are "separate and distinct from those that lead to job dissatisfaction." Therefore, if you set about eliminating dissatisfying job factors, you may create peace but not necessarily enhance performance. This placates your workforce instead of actually motivating them to improve performance.

The characteristics associated with job dissatisfaction are called hygiene factors. When these have been adequately addressed, people will not be dissatisfied nor will they be satisfied. If you want to motivate your team, you then have to focus on satisfaction factors like achievement, recognition and responsibility.

Despite its wide acceptance, the theory has its detractors. Some say its methodology does not address the notion that, when things are going well, people tend to look at the things they enjoy about their job. When things are going badly, however, they tend to blame external factors.

Another common criticism is the fact that the theory assumes a strong correlation between job satisfaction and productivity. Herzberg's methodology did not address this relationship, therefore this assumption needs to be correct for his findings to have practical relevance.

To apply the theory, you need to adopt a two-stage process to motivate people. Firstly, you need to eliminate the dissatisfaction they're experiencing and, secondly, you need to help them find satisfaction.

Step One: Eliminate Job Dissatisfaction

Herzberg called the causes of dissatisfaction "hygiene factors." To get rid of them, you need to:

• Fix poor and obstructive company policies.
• Provide effective, supportive and non-intrusive supervision.
• Create and support a culture of respect and dignity for all team members.
• Ensure that wages are competitive.
• Build job status by providing meaningful work for all positions.
• Provide job security.

All of these actions help you eliminate job dissatisfaction in your organization. And there's no point trying to motivate people until these issues are out of the way!

You can't stop there, though. Remember, just because someone is not dissatisfied, it doesn't mean he or she is satisfied either! Now you have to turn your attention to building job satisfaction.

Step Two: Create Conditions for Job Satisfaction

To create satisfaction, Herzberg says you need to address the motivating factors associated with work. He called this "job enrichment." His premise was that every job should be examined to determine how it could be made better and more satisfying to the person doing the work. Things to consider include:

• Providing opportunities for achievement.
• Recognizing people's contributions.
• Creating work that is rewarding and that matches people's skills and abilities.
• Giving as much responsibility to each team member as possible.
• Providing opportunities to advance in the company through internal promotions.
• Offering training and development opportunities, so that people can pursue the positions they want within the company.

Here we're approaching the subject of motivation in a very general way. In reality, you'll need "different strokes for different folks" – in other words, different people will perceive different issues, and will be motivated by different things. Make sure you talk with your people regularly one-on-one to find out what matters to them.

Tip 2:

This theory is largely responsible for the practice of allowing people greater responsibility for planning and controlling their work, as a means of increasing motivation and satisfaction. To learn more about this, see the Mind Tools article on job enrichment.

The relationship between motivation and job satisfaction is not overly complex. The problem is that many employers look at the hygiene factors as ways to motivate when, in fact, beyond the very short term, they do very little to motivate.

Perhaps managers like to use this approach because they think people are more financially motivated than, perhaps, they are, or perhaps it just takes less management effort to raise wages than it does to reevaluate company policy, and redesign jobs for maximum satisfaction.

When you're seeking to motivate people, firstly get rid of the things that are annoying them about the company and the workplace. Make sure they're treated fairly, and with respect.

Once you've done this, look for ways in which you can help people grow within their jobs, give them opportunities for achievement, and praise that achievement wherever you find it.

Apply This to Your Life

If you lead a team, take a little time with each of its members to check that they're happy, that they think they're being fairly and respectfully treated, and that they're not being affected by unnecessary bureaucracy.

You may be horrified by what you find once you start probing (bureaucracy, in particular, has a way of spreading), however, you may be able to improve things quickly if you put your mind to it.

Then find out what they want from their jobs, do what you can to give this to them, and help them grow as individuals.

If you do this systematically, you'll be amazed by the impact this has on motivation!

To explore how you can apply this at work, take our Bite-Sized Training session on Motivating Your Team.