Motivation

Motivation is generally defined as the psychological forces that determine the direction of a person's level of effort, as well as a person's persistence in the face of obstacles. The direction of a person's behavior refers to the many possible actions that a person could engage in, while persistence refers to whether, when faced with roadblocks and obstacles, an individual keeps trying or gives up.

Most motivation theories are mainly focus their studies on trying to explain, predict or knowing how to influence individual’s behavior.

The first attempts to understand motivation clearly defined that there are internal needs and external incentives that influence the individuals’ behavior. The internal needs vary from one individual to another depending on their beliefs, values, thoughts, dreams, objectives, etc. Each individual has different needs and feels motivated in different ways to satisfy them. The external incentives refer mainly to the self interest and the economic gain that an individual could reach by doing something. For example doing a job and being paid for it.

After these attempts to understand motivation, many authors studied motivation and developed different theories that try to explain how motivation depending on the needs affect individuals’ behavior. I will explain those that I consider more important because of their contribution to the motivation studies.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: is a theory that explains needs from a progression hypothesis, where each need is a different level and each individual goes up to a different level when he satisfies the need of the level before.

Theory X and Y: this theory developed by Douglas McGregor, applies Maslow’s hierarchy of needs but at the same time he explains that there are “Low order needs (X)” and “High order needs (Y)”, depending on how an individual feels motivated. For example individuals motivated by money that have to be forced and continuously forced to do something belong to the group X. While individuals that are really committed to do something and they want to do it to feel satisfied, because of the need of recognition or personal growth belong to group Y.

ERG Theory: Is a theory developed by Clayton Alderferer, and in few words, this theory explains how individuals’ needs are there like a collage of needs, and as the time passes and the life goes through, each individual starts to feel more motivated to fulfill or satisfy different needs. Not like a progression hypothesis or levels of needs, just each individual decides which needs are more important than others giving them a hierarchy and feels much more motivated to satisfy the better ranked ones.


REFERENCES

• HRMagazine, Jul2010, Vol. 55 Issue 7, Special section p1-9, 9p

• http://www.corestrategies.com/

• Source: http://mkhanpmp.blogspot.com/2009_10_04_archive.html