Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation
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Motivation is the process of inspiring people into actions that aid in accomplishing their goals. One of the vital management functions is to create that willingness among the employees to carry out duties at their best ability. Therefore, motivating employees has become a crucial goal for many organizations. Employees can be motivated by several factors like the money motive, job-satisfaction, recognition, teamwork, success, and etcetera in a workplace context. Motivation can be categorized into two types; intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (Legault 2016).
Definitions
Intrinsic motivation refers to those activities an employee does because he enjoys the action itself. It is that love of the work, that is, doing the work simply because it satisfies you internally or you enjoy it. You would do the job equally, even if you were not being paid for it.
On the other hand, extrinsic motivation refers to any other reason for doing a job besides the joy of performing it. It is now the compensation we get as a result of doing a job. Examples of these motivators are the salaries, allowances, recognition, and award trips awarded while in the position (Kuvaas et al. 2017).
Examples of how each motivation is applied to the workplace
Intrinsic motivation in the workplace is significant because you don’t need a supervisor to push you to do what you are supposed to when you are intrinsically motivated. You have the motivation readily within yourself. An intrinsically motivated employee is likely to be finishing his tasks on time, and you always find him readily available in his office, carrying out well the tasks obliged to do. Extrinsic motivation is applied in the workplace in the form of a paycheck, career advancement, annual appreciation days, recognition, and year-end-bonuses. These rewards don’t satisfy an employee’s needs, and for that reason, an employee needs to sacrifice his time and energy to perform an irrelevant task. Extrinsic Consequences include wasted opportunity and monetary loss (Bear et al. 2017).
Advantages of intrinsic motivation
Enhances innovation
Employees motivated from within by their goals and ambitions tend to be more creative. Employees are flourishing on personal accomplishments and development of their careers, trying to make significant and innovative contributions to crucial action for the satisfaction of accomplishing something meaningful in their firms.
Lower labor costs
Intrinsically motivated employees reduce labor costs to the organization as less working time is spent by the management working on motivating the employees. Now the managers have much time to significant other productive activities. This attempts to help small enterprises run with very few supervisors, thus maintaining the enterprise lean and reducing labor costs. These employees try hard to solve problems they encounter within the workplace on their own without involving the requirement of management’s assistance. They are likely to pursue new projects alone without the guidance of supervisors.
Advantages of extrinsic motivation
Operational control
The use of extrinsic motivation in the workplace allows for broader control over operational processes. This is so because such employees need very close supervision to maintain high job performance, making them always watch closely and guide the employees as they work. However, this type o close supervision may not be preferred by some employees. Still, others do well under such supervision while receiving time to time guidance and encouragements from their supervisors.
Personal limits
The use of money incentives boosts every employee’s motivation, stimulating them to break their performance records and achieve new production levels. Inspiration by incentives usually fits best to both extrinsic and intrinsic employees.
How a leader would use these factors as a motivational tool
For proper and efficient employee motivation, a leader needs to study the employees’ motive, which motivates him more? Is this employee inspired from within himself, or he is motivated by money? Once you assess this, you know that employees expect extrinsic motivation from you as their leader. Ensure every employee receives his monthly salary on time, be offering them time to time bonuses, and often recognize and appreciate them whenever they perform a good job. That way, every employee will be purposed to perform even better, which is what motivation in the workplace is expected to achieve (Bear et al. 2017). As a leader, you should influence your followers; in this case, the employees, because that is what good leadership is. As a leader, be intrinsically motivated and influence your followers as well to be intrinsically motivated. Influence them to like everything they like not to find their jobs so irritating but instead enjoy while working. Money is an acceptable motive but should not be the principal motive for comfortable working.
References
Bear, G. G., Slaughter, J. C., Mantz, L. S., & Farley-Ripple, E. (2017). Rewards, praise, and punitive consequences: Relations with intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Teaching and Teacher Education.
Kuvaas, B., Buch, R., Weibel, A., Dysvik, A., & Nerstad, C. G. (2017). Do intrinsic and extrinsic motivation relate differently to employee outcomes?. Journal of Economic Psychology, 61, 244-258.
Legault, L. (2016). Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.