On Motivation

By Matthew Mohr

FARGO – Most people have heard the two basic forms of motivation are reward and fear. Reward is based on the idea for doing something you get what you want, or you get more than the next person who choses not to do the task or does the task with poor results. Fear motivation is based on the idea if you don’t do something you will get punished or possibly lose out.

Each person values different things in different ways. Some types of rewards will inspire one person to higher performance while the same reward may be unimportant to another. Employee compensation is generally considered a significant factor in creating motivation for individual success within an organization.

I was in a meeting recently which we discussed employee compensation. As the meeting progressed, it became evident most of the business owners had different ways of determining compensation for their employees but all had the same results in mind. Each wanted great employee performance, high wages which were earned, and wage rates which allowed the enterprise to be profitable. Not one business owner in the meeting had unfair compensation plans or was striving to make excessive profits by demanding extreme work from their employees.

A large part of our national economy has been built based on a combination of reward and fear motivation. Employees promise of prosperity or rewards for high performance was seen as a way for the individual to “get ahead” and the business to be profitable. The fear side, stemming from the great depression in the 1930’s was based on if a person didn’t do the job, they could get fired, lose their income and as a result not be able to pay rent or put food on the table. After World War II, some employers certainly took advantage of the fear of not being able to provide for one’s family and in the process some employers created bad work environments.

For many years individual recognition was lacking within many businesses and as the lack of employee recognition became known, a new industry was developed to fill this need. Employers began providing rewards for accomplishments ranging from years of service to top performance and even “employees of the month.” The chosen employee of the month often was granted (temporarily) a choice parking spot. Other employees often resented this recognition so the employee of the month has essentially been abolished. Today, many forms of individual employee recognition are part of nearly every business but don’t appear to hold the same value in the employee’s eyes and as a result, do not always enhance individual motivation.

If one were to survey a group of “baby boomers” about team recognition and participation awards the answer would most likely be rather negative. Responses such as it’s stupid to reward everyone for just showing up and possibly not doing anything and we created a monster by telling the participants they did great by just being in the game even if they lost horribly. I had this situation backfire on me a short while ago. Business performance had been excellent so I provided an award to the top performers and to my great surprise, with the exception of a few, the award recipients did not appreciate the award and the handful of younger top performers felt everyone deserved the award and were embarrassed by the individual recognition. The attitude made me really upset. It struck me as the difference between being happy to play in the game versus the attitude of coming to win the game. Just showing up rarely leads to real success.

Motivating people to chose to win has definitely changed over the years and it is a moving target which is hard do hit. We all want to succeed and discovering what motivates people to succeed as employees is not easy.