Motivation pt. II: Stickytaping it all together

I needed to do a little refresher on motivation for another audience, so I’m going to subject you all to it as well. This will, I expect, be fairly superficial because the psychology of motivation is one of those sub-disciplines that’s a bit vague and all over the place. Probably this is because ‘motivation’ is a word that could be used to describe a lot of very different things.¹

Like, it’s not clear to me that the motivation to drink (thirst), prompted by a mechanism that monitors the amount of water in your cells, meaningfully sits in the same category as the motivation to listen to your Spotify daily mix in search of new songs you might like. It’s not even clear to me that the motivation to drink because your cells are too dry is in the same category as the motivation to drink because you’re anticipating there being less water in the future.

It’s messy. But even at a high level, there are some interesting frameworks for understanding what makes people do things. And then, as I am wont to do, we’ll shoehorn some neuroscience in there too—thinking about how the brain and the nervous system might contribute to the whole thing.

This is the second part of a two part series. We’ll call this one “Trying very hard to sticky-tape it all together”, because if part one was all about various collections of motivation binaries that just avoid the messiness, this part is all about the theories that try to stick the messy bits to each other.

¶What motivates us

Probably the most interesting category of these sticky-tape theories are called content theories. These theories describe what motivates us, and so you might also hear them called needs-based theories, because they try to capture the internal needs and desires and goals that drive us. You’ll probably be familiar with the most famous example of these:

A stylisation of Maslow's hierarchy. The pyramid is an invention of business consultants, but roughly Maslow's idea was that we're motivated to satisfy the deficiency needs to a certain extent before we start to be motivated by our growth needs.

I’ve written elsewhere about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but it is the quintessential example of a ‘content’ theory of motivation. The pyramid is an invention of management consultants but, roughly, Maslow reckoned we can think of ‘tiers’ of needs, with different levels of priority. Some needs could be called ‘deficiency needs’: ones we are motivated to maintain at a certain level. Others could be called ‘growth needs’: needs we can invest in once our deficiency needs are met to a certain level of satisfaction.

Maslow’s hierarchy isn’t just well-loved by management consultants, but also sociologists, ed-dev specialists, and Instagram influencers because it does a pretty good job of illustrating at a high level what kinds of things drive people, and under what circumstances. But because Maslow was philosophising, not measuring, it’s received plenty of criticism for failing to represent various groups under various circumstances.

One of the main things people like to concentrate on is the lack of emphasis Maslow placed on interpersonal needs. So, while many of the alternative content theories really just riff on the core ideas Maslow spent his life thinking about, some of their reshuffling brings out more our relational and cultural needs. For example, you have Alderfer’s ERG theory which condenses Maslow’s tiers to three: [E]xistence needs, [R]elatedness needs, and [G]rowth needs. Or you have McClellend’s ‘Three needs’, which speaks of people’s needs for achievement in their lives, affiliation with others, and power or influence over others. Or you have Schutz, who was only concerned with relationships, considering our need for belonging, affection, and control within them.

A related interest, and an overlapping critique of Maslow, has been the tension between our need to be distinct from others, and our need to be intertwined with them. So, McClellend’s model considered this—the need for affiliation with others being distinct from the our need for control over them. Self-determination theory is a bit too high-speed for me, attempting to sticky-tape six or so (it’s still growing!) mini-theories into one, but like McClelland, their ‘Basic needs’ mini-theory highlights autonomy, competence, and relatedness as our core psychological needs.

The Human givens model zooms back out again, ungrouping the needs as Maslow did, but with far more emphasis on needs for relatedness and autonomy. So they highlight security, autonomy and control, status, privacy, attention, community connection, intimacy, competence or achievement, and lastly a need for purpose.

The only content theory that really seems to be doing something quite different is Max-Neef’s Needs Taxonomy, which considers motivations as multidimensional things. So, Max-Neef would consider any of the motivations we’ve covered so far as axiological: related to the things we value as humans. He thought we could consider these against another set of motivations—existential needs. He suggested that we have a need for being, having, doing, and interacting. He also reckoned you needed to consider each need in relation to ourselves, others, and the environment. So:

• Being needs describe anything you could describe as an attribute of individuals or collectives. So, an existential need for being, in the axiological space around ‘subsistence’, would be something like health. And this can be considered in terms of health for ourselves, for our loved ones, and for the environment we find ourselves in.
• ‘Having’ needs are more about the resources we want to collect to support ourselves. So an existential need for having, in the axiological space around affection, would be our relationship with ourself, our friendships, and our relationship to nature.
• ‘Doing’ needs are about the actions we take. So an existential motivation to do, in the axiological space around ‘creation’, would be to reflect on ourselves, to work for others, or to build the environment around us.
• and, lastly, ‘Interacting’ needs are about our bonds. A motivation to interact in the axiological space around identity or autonomy would be like the establishment of personal rituals, contribution to social rhythms, and the maintenance of physical spaces we belong to.

And if you read through all of that, or especially if you didn’t, you’ve probably realised why no one ever talks about Max-Neef’s needs, and no one seems to care about all the critiques of Maslow’s model. You can zoom in or out as much as you like, or cluster things in whatever collections feel appropriate to the thing that you’re looking at. But the needs Maslow identified do a pretty good job at capturing the content of people’s motivations.

The only thing we should be cautious about, as the critics make clear, is that our interpersonal and, by extension, our autonomy needs take up much more space than we might care to admit, and Maslow’s more aspirational motivations typically take a backseat. Indeed, even Maslow’s later focus on transcendence or what the Human givens model called a motivation for ‘purpose’ can be found within our interpersonal relations. Giving yourself up to something bigger than yourself can be spiritual or environmental, but it can just as easily be about giving yourself to your community.

¶How we’re motivated

Process theories are another class of motivation sticky-tape solutions. But these describe more how motivation occurs than what motivates us. Expectancy Theory is an excellent example of this:

A stylisation of Expectancy Theory. The idea is that we ask how individual effort will lead to individual performance, and how will performance lead to a desired outcome, and how will those outcomes satisfy our personal needs and goals.

So, the idea is that first, we assess the likelihood that our effort will result in performance. Then we’ll assess how likely the performance we think we can achieve will lead to some desired outcome—a reward or an absence of something bad.² Then we’ll think about how likely those desired outcomes are to satisfy our personal goals or needs, and as such, how attractive those outcomes or rewards are.

You have a bunch of these. Management consultants love them. Equity Theory, Goal-Setting Theory, some of the aforementioned mess that is Self-Determination Theory, and even B.F. Skinner’s Reinforcement Theory will get thrown in sometimes. It’s notable that all of these are half a century old, or more. It’s also notable that defending these theories to uppity undergraduate students is incredibly difficult, because none of them really add anything over and above the rest. Essentially, you need to link what people are doing to what they perceive they’re doing, and from there to some clear idea about what’s going do happen when the thing is done, and most importantly, what they’re going to get out of it as a consequence. The rest seems to be mostly a matter of the content that you populate those outcomes with.

¶How to keep the motivation going

Very critically, motivation needs to be ongoing to be at all useful. And while ‘maintenance theories’ aren’t really considered a distinct class of models, this is my website and I’ll do what I want here. So, there are three models that I think are worth considering a little separately for this purpose.

The first is Hertzberg’s two-factor theory. Most people will class this as a content theory. But considering it as a process theory makes more sense to me. Hertzberg reckoned that there was an important difference between motivators and what he called ‘hygiene factors’. To use this model, we have to think very carefully about what it is we want to be maintaining motivation on. In this context, motivators are things that bring satisfaction in the doing of the thing we want people to be motivated to do. Hygiene factors are the things that prevent dissatisfaction. They are hygienic in the sense that they maintain motivation to do the thing, like hygiene maintains health:

My stylisation of Hertzberg's two-factor theory. Hygiene factors could be considered motivators, but only in the sense that people will be dissatisfied if they don't have them---they won't necessarily want to do the thing. If you have enough hygiene factors, people might do the thing, but they aren't yet satisfied. Motivating factors are the factors that make people satisfied---they'll actually like that they're doing the thing.

So, we want someone to do something for us. We want them to be motivated to do that thing for us. A motivator might be that the thing we want them to do is satisfying in and of itself. A hygiene factor would be that we’re paying them to do it for us. Pay could be considered a motivator here if you were looking at the content theories—a subsistence motivation or something like this. But Hertzberg wants us to remember what we’re trying to do here. We want them to be doing the thing for us. If we don’t pay them enough, they might try to go do the thing for someone else. Or, if the pay is good, but the thing is not motivating, then they might go do something else even if the pay is less good, because it’s satisfying, and that makes their dissatisfaction with the pay less important. Pay is a hygiene factor here—it reduces dissatisfaction in doing the thing you want them to be doing, but it’s not the motivator—it’s not doing the job of satisfying them.

Another model that concentrates on maintenance, taking into account all the focus the content theories placed on our interpersonal needs, is the Job Characteristics Model. To quote myself, it:

describes three things we need to make us happy in the workplace:

1. Meaning – a job needs to provide us with a sense of purpose and movement towards a goal; be they personal or otherwise.
2. Responsibility – a job should provide us with scope to be responsible for and take ownership of the work we produce.
3. Knowledge of impact – we need to be able to see that impact of our work. If what we do makes no difference, we have no reason to do it.

Here, we see some of the same elements of the process theories we talked about earlier, but places the emphasis on how well the person can see their own role in making their desired outcomes come into being. Without that perception, motivation can’t be maintained, because it’s out of the person’s control. Equity theory, which is usually considered a process theory, makes a related point, in that people won’t continue to feel motivated if they think what’s going on isn’t fair.

The last model is a model that wouldn’t fit anywhere if I hadn’t had the very clever idea of coming up with ‘maintenance theories’. It’s the McKinsey Influence Model:

A stylisation of the McKinsey Influence Model. We're more likely to keep doing the thing if we know why we're doing it, see others doing it as well as how they're doing it, have the skills to do the thing ourselves, and have formal mechanisms in place to support us in doing the thing.

McKinsey noticed (I am assuming; I still haven’t read their book) that if the ‘why’ of the thing we’re doing is clear, we’re more likely to believe in it, encouraging us to align our behaviours with our beliefs. Developing our skills and abilities means we’re going to be more confident we can participate in the thing we’re doing. Having role models both helps us orient to whatever target behaviours will help us do the thing quickly, while also making us feel the social pressure to conform. And formal structural mechanisms lend confidence that support is available while we’re at it.

Unlike the other two classes, content and process theories, I think each model in our ‘maintenance theories’ brings out a unique point, probably because I’m not trying to summarise the better part of a century of overlapping theory, but telling you exactly what I think. Hertzberg tells us that some content is going to be motivating, while other content is merely going to stop us from being de-motivated while we’re pursuing the motivations. The Job Characteristics Model tells us that a personal perception of control and impact is a critical factor in keeping us interested. And the McKinsey model describes the structure that should surround the content and processes that motivate us.

¶Outro

As I said upfront, motivation is a sprawling literature. Part one was all about the lazy approaches to this mess—a haphazard collection of binaries describing what motivates us. The sticky-tape solutions we’ve looked at here probably show you why the lazy approach is so popular. How do you group your motivational content? What aspects are important? Which are actually responsible for the motivational process? And what factors are maintaining them?

I probably haven’t answered any of that for you. So it’s lucky that that was never my plan—I was just writing this to remind myself why I stopped paying attention to motivation research in the first place.

But, I think, largely, what we can take away from this is that nothing here is particularly proscriptive. Like using the dichotomies in part one as a checklist, we can use these theories as a list of considerations. A prompt to remind us what kinds of things motivate people, and when. Or to help us identify why motivation might be failing us. Trust me, if you do that, you’ll be doing more intellectual work than any of the management consultants whose blogs populate the reference section of all the Wikipedia pages I linked to. Take heart from that, if nothing else.