Designing for motivations
Motivation is ubiquitous. The nature and degree of our motivation impacts how we engage in our work, in health-related behaviour, in volunteer opportunities, and even in our intimate relationships. Motivations are everywhere in our life!
Typically, people assume the best way to motivate people is the carrot or stick. Think bonuses at work in response to meeting KPIs, or working only when the boss is watching to prevent punishment.
However, research shows that while carrot and stick might drive motivation in the short-term, they have negative consequences.
How can we support internalised motivations?
Self-determination Theory, is a theory of motivation which has been tested in various contexts for over 40 years. It's rigorous, the theory has been carefully constructed and has been cited over to 50,000 times by researchers. Self-determination Theory has shown that:
“the best way to support motivations is to harness and build on peoples' basic psychological needs. These needs are autonomy, relatedness, and competence.”
People want choice, initiative and ownership (autonomy), they want to feel belonging, connected, and that they matter to others (relatedness), they also want to accomplish something or to learn on the job (competence or mastery). When these needs are satisfied, we are more likely to have an internalised motivation. An analogy is to think of these needs as like water and sunlight to a plant. Satisfying these needs allows us to flourish. When these needs are compromised we can feel controlled or pressured (absence of autonomy), unsupported (absence of relatedness) or ill-equipped or bored by the task at hand (absence of competence).
Good management or good program design creates the circumstances that support need satisfaction and hence fosters conditions for motivation from inside. Need satisfaction also supports well-being. That is, people perform better and feel better when their basic psychological needs are met. This has been proven in tens of thousands of research studies. By contrast, environments that make people feel controlled or when people don’t see the relevance of their work, where there is low trust or care between people, or where a task is too easy, or too hard, thwarts our psychological needs.
In 2021, I completed my doctoral research exploring the motivations of community volunteers who managed rural water supply. These volunteers’ motivations were critical. If they had low- or poor-quality motivations, it meant the only water supply might break down, resulting in no water and walking for many hours to the next nearest water supply. Volunteers’ motivations and their basic psychological need satisfaction were assessed using interviews and surveys.
Based on this research, several recommendations were made as to how interventions or projects could be implemented to support the volunteers’ motivations. For example, approaches that support autonomous motivations in this context include: emphasising the importance of a functional water supply to members’ and their community; the promotion of positive relationships between the volunteers and water users, community leaders and donors; supporting volunteers’ confidence and capacity to complete maintenance, and helping them build linkages with external support.
Want to know more?
“Self-determination Theory provides concepts to create practices and environments that promote both well-being and high-quality performance.”
If you are interested in learning more about motivations, or would like to understand how to support motivations in your context, please get in touch. Small is Beautiful has tools and methods to asses motivations and basic psychological needs, and experience in designing approaches to foster more internalised motivations, . We have also written more on the types of motivations here. We can also recommend the following resources:
This video on Dan Pink's bestseller called Drive
The Center for Self-Determination Theory has many articles and research on motivations
Photo by neom @unsplash