by J. Henry Stewart

Created on: September 18, 2009

Jocelyn clutched her head tightly with both hands. Sales were down, there were no new products in the pipeline and her right hand man had just left the company for a competitor. She did not understand why none of her employees seemed to be motivated to make the extra effort.

Good managers can avoid being in Jocelyn's situation by applying the following notes on motivation.

A Carrot and Stick

Extrinsic motivation means that concrete rewards are given or specific penalties are meted out to subordinates. Jocelyn had instituted a bonus system, that is she paid extra money to members of her team who sold the most products.

The problem seemed to be two-fold with such a system. Firstly, it encouraged individualism instead of a team approach. Secondly, she had unwittingly created pirates as demonstrated when her best salesman left the company for a five percent raise from the competitor.

The team idea seemed to be completely dead for those who worked under Jocelyn. Their meetings were a disaster, as individuals came and went as they pleased, arrived late to meetings, took phone calls and otherwise showed great disrespect to each other.

Jocelyn should have instituted a minor negative extrinsic motivation in this case, by making each team member who disobeyed the meeting rules sing a song or tell a joke. The shame factor would have worked wonders to keep her workers in line.

Feelings Matter in Business

Jocelyn had recently learned about intrinsic motivation and she thought maybe it was time to implement a plan that used this concept. She had learned that people will do certain things for other reasons beside money - specifically because they like to do these things.

For example, she found that one of her staff really enjoyed talking with customers face-to-face, while another subordinate like writing reports and sending clear emails. She realized that if she adjusted the jobs of each - if she made a team out of these two workers - they would minimize the parts of the jobs that they disliked, and would be able to complete the tasks that were more tolerable according to their unique skills and personality make-ups.

Internal motivations are more powerful than extrinsic ones, and Jocelyn wanted to take advantage of this fact. She realized that although most folks would rather be on the beach than at work, there were still areas of each person's work life that could trigger an intrinsic motivational response.

A Deeper Meaning

The strongest motivator in business or elsewhere if when a coworker loves a particular person. This love could be the love of a parent to child, the love of friends or romantic love. Jocelyn understood that nepotism rules canceled the possibility of the first and last, but if she could find which individuals were fast friends, she might be able to squeeze an extra few percentages of productivity out of them.

Jocelyn looked for people who seemed to like each other and who also had complementary or supplementary skills. She found one pair and one set of three employees who she put on projects. However, this transcendental motivation only worked for a few of her employees. The rest had to be motivated extrinsically (money) or intrinsically (personal feelings).

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