Work Motivation

Work motivation is one of the most central and highly researched topics in industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology. Even the earliest textbooks in I/O psychology addressed motivation and topics related to it, such as morale, job attitudes, productivity, and job performance. Several definitions have been offered, but the one adopted here was first advanced by the author in 1984: Work motivation originates within and beyond the individual to initiate and determine work-related behavior.

The focus of most attention on work motivation has been on the effort people expend at working, the intensity component of the definition. Yet it is critical to keep the other components in mind to fully understand work motivation. Although an individual may not be working very hard toward the goals others set, the person may have plenty of motivation to achieve goals other than those prescribed by managers or critics (the form and direction components).

It is also important to distinguish between motivation and its antecedents and its consequences, particularly the latter. Observers often conclude that a person's motivation is low (usually implying not enough effort) or misguided (inappropriate goals) on the basis of observing low standards of performance, which is the accomplishment of some standard or criterion. This conclusion is often false, resulting in what social psychologists refer to as the fundamental attribution error—attributing low judged performance to low motivation, a characteristic of the individual. Considerable research and theory show that performance is a multiplicative function of motivation and individual ability as well as the constraints or opportunities offered by the context in which work is occurring. These distinctions are more than a matter of [Page 893]theoretical or conceptual semantics: They have real, important applied implications if one is to understand job performance, employee withdrawal (in its various forms), creativity at work, career choices, and myriad other work-related phenomena. The source of the poor performance is frequently the context or the person's ability to do the job.