What is motivation, and how does it show at work?
Before asking how to keep an employee's motivation from fading, it helps to be clear about what motivation actually is. Being motivated simply means putting in effort to reach a specific goal. In a company, it shows in what people do rather than in what they say: they take the initiative, they persevere when a task gets difficult, they go beyond the strict minimum and they care about the quality of the result.
What is the difference between commitment and motivation?
To build a motivated team, it is worth separating motivation from commitment. Commitment is an employee's attachment to the organization, its culture and the project it stands for. Motivation is more personal: it is linked to what the employee needs from their work and to the goals they want to achieve. Performance, trust, pay and autonomy all play a part. Someone can be loyal to their company and still have lost all interest in their current role, and the reverse is just as true.
Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation
Work psychology distinguishes two main sources of motivation. Intrinsic motivation comes from the activity itself: we do something because it interests us, because we enjoy it or because we feel we are making progress. Extrinsic motivation comes from outside: a salary, a bonus, a promotion, recognition from a manager, or, at the other end, the wish to avoid a sanction.
Both exist in every employee, and neither is better than the other. They do not, however, produce the same kind of engagement. The work of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, who developed self-determination theory, shows that the most lasting motivation is the one a person makes their own: when they understand the purpose of a task and agree with it, even a thankless job gets done with energy. The same researchers also observed that an external reward can, in some conditions, weaken interest in an activity people already enjoyed: they end up working for the bonus rather than for the task.
According to this theory, three psychological needs feed motivation in the workplace:
- autonomy: the feeling of having a say in how you do your work;
- competence: the feeling of making progress and succeeding at what you take on;
- relatedness: the feeling of being connected to others and mattering to your team.
For managers, the lesson is simple: a bonus is no substitute for meaningful work, real room for manoeuvre and a team where people feel they belong.
What are the main levers of employee motivation?
There are many factors behind workplace motivation. As early as 1959, the psychologist Frederick Herzberg proposed a distinction that is still useful. Some factors, such as pay, working conditions or relations with management, cause dissatisfaction when they are missing, without motivating anyone when they are present. Others, such as achievement, recognition, interesting work or responsibility, are genuine drivers. This is one of the reasons why overly mechanical models, such as Maslow's famous pyramid, are treated with caution today.
Financial factors
This is the pay employees receive in return for their work. Individual pay, which became widespread from the 1990s onwards, helps to retain people. The fairer pay is perceived to be, the more it supports motivation at work, and employees often read it as a sign of recognition from their manager too.
Non-financial factors
These cover a wide range of things: performance, autonomy, the way tasks are shared out, teamwork, the trust a manager places in people, and the resources available to do good work. Recognition from the employer is a particularly powerful example.
Among these non-financial factors, six motivation levers come up in most organizations:
- recognition: a specific thank-you at the right moment often counts for more than an annual bonus;
- autonomy: set the expected result and let the person choose the route;
- purpose: knowing what your work is for, whether for the client, the company or society;
- growth: learning, building skills and seeing a way forward in your career;
- team climate: trust, mutual support and the quality of day-to-day relationships;
- working conditions: suitable resources, a sustainable workload and a setting where people can do their job well.
As you can see, motivation at work takes many forms, specific to each company and, above all, to each person. The lever that energizes one employee leaves another cold. This is where Eduard Spranger's framework comes in.
Eduard Spranger's six motivations
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the German philosopher and psychologist Eduard Spranger described six broad attitudes that shape our choices. Each of us combines them in our own order of priority:
- theoretical: the need to understand, to learn and to get to the bottom of things;
- economic: the need for a return, whether on time, money or effort;
- aesthetic: the need for balance, harmony and work done well;
- social: the need to help others and see them grow;
- political: the need for influence, responsibility and a say in decisions;
- religious: the need for meaning and consistency with one's convictions, with no link here to religious practice.
Motivations you cannot see
These motivations shape behaviour, but they are not easy to spot. Unlike behavioural styles, they cannot be observed directly: behaviour describes how someone acts, motivations explain why they act.
By measuring them with a questionnaire, management can set fairer objectives. What is the point, for example, of offering a large bonus to someone whose dominant motivation is theoretical? It will improve neither their productivity nor their results. A person's engagement grows above all when they feel their manager is offering an environment suited to what drives them: a financial bonus will suit people with a strong economic motivation, while those with a strong theoretical motivation will thrive on analytical assignments, with the chance to explore a complex question in depth.
The manager's role: adapting to what motivates each person
Motivating employees is first and foremost a management skill. A manager who knows what motivates their team can:
- assign work according to what drives each person, not only according to their skills;
- choose the right form of recognition: a bonus for one, an expert assignment for another, a new responsibility for a third;
- present the same objective from several angles: the figures, the impact for clients, what people will learn along the way;
- stay connected with those who work away from the office, since keeping a remote team motivated calls for specific rituals and attention;
- spot the early warning signs of demotivation, when someone has drifted away from what keeps them going.
One common trap remains: projecting your own motivations onto others. A manager who is strongly results-driven tends to assume that everyone is spurred on by targets and numbers. Understanding what drives you is the first step before trying to motivate anyone else.
Measuring motivations: appraisals, internal moves, recruitment
A motivation questionnaire gives people a shared vocabulary to talk about what drives them. Its first use is development: an annual review, a mid-year check-in, coaching for a manager. It also informs internal moves, so that HR does not offer a role "as a reward" when that role offers little of what motivates the person. Before a move, it helps to identify the position that will genuinely suit them.
In recruitment, it can enrich the interview: you form hypotheses about what the candidate is looking for, then test them together. It should never be used to screen candidates out, and candidates should be told how the questionnaire will be used before they answer it.
In every case, the earlier the tool is used, the better: it is far easier to adjust a role, an assignment or a form of recognition than to repair motivation once it has gone.
Frequently asked questions about motivation at work
What are the main factors of motivation at work?
Recognition, autonomy, purpose, the chance to grow, a good team climate and pay that feels fair come up almost every time. Their weight varies from one person to another, which is why the same motivation plan produces very different effects across a team.
What are the different types of motivation?
The most common distinction contrasts intrinsic motivation, driven by interest in the activity itself, with extrinsic motivation, driven by an external consequence. Self-determination theory refines this: between the absence of motivation and intrinsic motivation, it describes several degrees of extrinsic motivation, from simple pressure (acting for a reward or to avoid a sanction) to full endorsement, when the person has made the reasons for the task their own.
How can you motivate employees without raising salaries?
By using the non-financial levers: recognize the work done in specific terms, give people room for manoeuvre, explain what each assignment is for, open up opportunities to learn and look after the team climate. Pay remains a source of dissatisfaction when it feels unfair, but on its own it rarely keeps people motivated for long.
How can you tell that an employee is losing motivation?
The first signs are often subtle: fewer initiatives, withdrawal in meetings, slipping deadlines, a more cynical tone, sometimes more absences. Rather than interpreting, the most effective approach is to talk about it in a one-to-one and look for what the person is missing in their current role.
How do you find out what motivates an employee?
Start by listening: ask them about the project they are proudest of and why, what gives them energy and what wears them down. A motivation questionnaire inspired by Spranger complements this conversation: it puts words to what drives the person and gives you a starting point for discussion, without ever replacing it.
This article was written by Marc Prager.