What really unleashes our potential

For nearly 300 years, most of our working lives have revolved around lessons from the industrial age. At the beginning of this time, people were just numbers trimmed for productivity. Self-management and entrepreneurial thinking of the individual had no place, and certainly not an understanding of how we tick psychologically. Workers were seen as pawns to be used and not as players with their own responsibility or even their own motivation.

However, this assumption has increasingly faltered in recent decades. The American engineer and founder of ergonomics Frederick Winslow Taylor laid the foundation for this at the beginning of the 20th century. He believed that work consists mainly of simple, not particularly interesting tasks.

The only way to get people motivated to do these tasks is to make them palatable with appropriate incentives and to closely monitor the process. That was the birth of management as we still know it in many places today. One thinks, the other does. One decides, the other executes.

For the person to carry out the instruction of his own accord, all he needs is a fair wage, and for him to excel he needs an incentive too. What was special about Taylor’s approach was the realization that he could motivate these people to do better by also offering the prospect of wage increases. The pioneer has thus brought the system of external incentives into the modern economic world. Performance pays off, and that motivates. Suddenly the chess piece became a player pursuing his own goal.

This school is firmly anchored in people’s minds to this day. Rewards are considered an extrinsic means of motivation and are also and above all effective in undemanding routine work that is determined by others. Nevertheless, the image of the donkey with the carrot in front of the nose forces itself on many people. Such carrots in the form of money, as we now know, only provide short-term motivation. In the long run, they act more like drugs: you have to keep increasing the dose to feel anything at all.

Intrinsic motivation, that which comes from within, is now considered to be of greater importance. Above all, creative and knowledge workers need inner impulses in order to be able to work with motivation. Researchers like Harvard Business School’s Teresa Amabile have even discovered that external incentives, whether rewarding or punishing creative work, can be devastating.

These activities are usually about solving new problems or creating something that the world can no longer do without. However, the desire to develop the best solutions cannot be forced by external influences. Of course, just like a supermarket cashier, an art director of an advertising campaign needs a fair wage to live his life. Above all, however, creativity needs freedom to develop, and not a monetary bonus system.

In contrast to Taylor’s time, when people mainly did routine work in factories, the job has now become more complex, interesting and self-determined for many professionals – and is therefore more fun. Taylor’s assumption, on the other hand, is that work is no fun. The theory of motivation therefore developed further. Today we know about the power of both external and internal incentives.

“We have three basic innate psychological needs: competence, autonomy and belonging.”

External incentives can now be easily brought about – a secure job, a fair wage and perhaps even a bonus or two at the end of the year. For both individuals and organizations, the question is how intrinsic motivation works. It is worth taking a look at the scientific work of behavioral scientists Edward L. Deci and Richard Ryan. The former is considered the founder of research on intrinsic motivation. Both have invested a lot of time in the related self-determination theory over the past 30 years.

It states that we have three basic innate psychological needs: competence, autonomy and belonging. Competence means that we feel capable and therefore want to learn. Autonomy means that we want to make decisions independently and be responsible for the consequences. Belonging means nothing more than wanting to feel connected to a group or cause.

According to Deci and Ryan, when these three needs are satisfied, we are motivated to work and also happier. Intrinsic motivation is in full swing. However, if these needs are slowed down, it visibly disappears. This also closes the circle as to why extrinsic means of motivation tend to do creativity a disservice: Bonus systems presuppose a form of surveillance according to Frederick Winslow Taylor. This is at the expense of the idea of ​​autonomy.

If people are not productive, companies still fall back far too often on reward systems instead of identifying the actual problem and finding out where the problem is: Does a team member feel underchallenged, determined by others or not even a part of it? Asking these questions, answering them, and changing the circumstances is a much more difficult task than simply saying: For ten projects completed, you get a bonus of ten percent of the wages, but for less than five, the bonus is completely eliminated.

It is obvious that the quantity is increasing. However, how such a system affects the quality of creative work remains open. If you believe Deci and Ryan, rather negative.

“Those who are motivated overcome crises. Those who are not motivated are more likely to drop out in a crisis.”

Self-determination is therefore an essential factor for intrinsic motivation, another is recognizing the meaning of a task. Meaningfulness has been driving people since ancient times and has always led to the question of all questions: Why am I here? In his bestseller “Start with Why”, the book author and work expert Simon Sinek has transferred this question to the modern world of work and deals with it in the context of the success of individuals and organizations.

He came to the conclusion that the extraordinary can only happen when people are convinced that their actions make sense. University of Chicago psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi agrees, saying that purposefulness provides the activation energy for our lives.

Those who are motivated also overcome crises. Those who are not motivated are more likely to drop out in a crisis. It is no coincidence that more and more people have taken the corona crisis as an opportunity to reinvent themselves professionally or at least to seriously think about it. According to a study by the job and career portal Stepstone among 28,000 working people, one in four has decided to change jobs against the background of the pandemic.

The reasons that the survey brought to light read like something out of the handbook of motivation research: the participants stated that Covid-19 made them question the benefits of their job and thus the meaning behind it all. Other participants asked themselves whether they still felt fit for the future job-wise and therefore sufficiently competent.

Many participants also felt badly supported by their employer with regard to their own needs and had no opportunity to become active themselves. In this respect, self-determination was not far off either. The result is that people give up. The top 3 reasons therefore include three that clearly demonstrate that people could no longer muster any inner drive for their previous job.

Companies are therefore well advised to listen better and to respond to the basic psychological needs of their employees. What we need is a more modern awareness of the fact that individual initiative and personal responsibility are at the heart of human action, and a basic attitude that is shaped by the belief in people’s self-determination. They often carry more potential than they can show in many organizations. Motivation cannot be prescribed.