Understanding Motivation

While motivation is one of the most frequently researched topics, there exist many theories and ideas about how employee motivation works. Some argue that motivtion is an exclusively individual trait, such as the old saying "You can bring a horse to water, buy you can't make it drink".
It is the environment that will empower employees to motivate themselves. Another approach argues that different people are motivated by different things and a 'one sizes fits all' approach will not work. 

Money, fear, job satisfaction, incentives and perks, flexible timing, training and learning and various other tools are used at random by firms in the belief that a combination of these tools will motivate their workers. These tools in isolation indeed motivate people for a short while or even slightly longer. It is probable that one or two in combination will definitely work for an individual as long as all areas are covered. There is nothing wrong with this formula, but none of these tools work in isolation within the environment and culture of an organisation. So, as we explore and document the concept of motivation, we need to keep in mind that the level of motivation varies both between individuals and within individuals at different times.

We define motivation as the processes that account for an individual's intensity, direction and persistence of effort towards attaining a goal. while general motivation is concerned with effort towards any goal, we will narrow the focus to organisational goals in order to reflect our singular interest in work-related behaviour.

The three key elements in our definition are intensity, direction and persistence. Intensity describes how hard a person ties. This is the element that most of us focus on when we talk about motivation. However, high intensity is unlikely to lead to favourable job-performance outcomes unless the effort is channelled in a direction that benefits the organisation.
Therefore, we consider the quality of effort as well as its intensity. Effort direct towards, and consistent with, the firm's goals is the kind of effort managers are seeking. Finally motivation has a persistence dimension. This measures how long a person can maintain effort. Motivated individuals stay with a task long enough to achieve their goal.