Why Motive Matters to Performance
‘Primed to Perform’ explains the six types of motivation
After a brief hiatus away from books to optimize my life by vacationing in the fictional worlds of Ready Player One and the first two Harry Potter books, I’m back on track in an attempt to find all the confirmation bias in Primed to Perform by Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor.
They have taken the seemingly abstract concept of “culture and motivation” and organized in a simple structure and have been able to systematically apply it to businesses to improve employee performance and customer satisfaction.
What if you knew the science behind the magic — a science so predictive and powerful that you could transform your organization? What if you could use cutting edge psychology to unlock people’s innate desire to innovate, experiment, and adapt? In Primed to Perform, Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor show you how to do just that. The result: higher sales, more loyal customers, and more passionate employees. — from Amazon Description
Sounds too good to be true.
Doshi and McGregor have coined the organization of this concept, The Motive Spectrum, which includes the six types of motivation divided into two categories: Direct Motives and Indirect Motives.
Typically, direct motives increase performance and indirect motives decrease it. The more directly connected your motive is to the activity itself, the better your performance becomes.
As someone with an inclination to procrastinate, I am amazed when I get in the zone and am able to really focus on a task. Thinking about those motives in this context reenforces a concept to focus on doing more of the activities that bring me joy and less of the miserable ones. That is something I have been working towards in the last year or so. It is amazing how much a difference that makes in my motivation.
Below is a chart showing where each motive falls on The Motive Spectrum and how it relates to the activity itself.
Direct Motives
Theses are the good ones. Performance enhancing motives.
- Play — The most powerful motive. Play occurs when you’re engaging in an activity simply because you enjoy participating in that activity. The type of things that pop you right out of bed because you are so excited to do it. For me, some examples might include running [or watching really fast people run on my computer], reading or writing. For my bride, it might be baking. These are the types of activities you love doing for no external reward, just the satisfaction of the task itself.
- Purpose — One step away from motivation of purely doing the activity; purpose is driven by the outcome of that activity. The example they use in the book is nursing. Nurses probably don’t always love the activity of dealing with sick patients, changing bedpans and being around sick people all day but they value the impact that they are making. Another example might be doing chores around your house. You aren’t exactly jumping for joy to scrub toilets, mop floors or clean the kitchen but you love the feeling of living in a clean house.
- Potential — This is slightly less potent than purpose and play because it generally doesn’t have to do with the work itself or even the immediate outcome. You are motivated by the potential of your work leading to something you believe is important, such as your personal goals. Often these are “stepping-stone” type of situations. Maybe you’re in a job you don’t love because you need to get the experience so a gatekeeper (hiring manager) will hire you for your dream job. HR always seems to be a stickler for experience.
Play, purpose and potential are direct motives because they are most closely aligned with the work itself. This results in a higher level of performance and, if the work itself is fulfilling and motivating, it makes that success more sustainable.
Indirect Motives
These are the motives that diminish performance.
- Emotional Pressure — This is where things take a turn. Emotional pressure is the first indirect motive. This basically is the guilt, shame and fear of disappointing someone which keeps you from being terrible at your job but not quite enough to motivate you to be amazing at it. This is also tied to your identity and other people’s perception of you and has very little to do with the actual work, itself.
- Economic Pressure — Historically, businesses and managers have been using this form of motivation since the beginning of time. The company entices you with an agreed upon sum of money/perks/stock options/bonuses/etc. and you do your job. On the negative side of economic pressure, you perform out of fear of being fired. This doesn’t have to be money, either. They gave the example of a boy scout going for a merit badge in chess when he is purely motivated by the badge, and doesn’t really care for chess contrasted with a scout who is fascinated by chess and doesn’t care about the badge and is motivated by play. The boy motivated by play will be far more successful than the boy who will do just enough to get his badge. But who can blame him? Chess is lame.
- Inertia — The most indirect of all the motives. This is doing what you are doing whatever you are doing simply because you did it yesterday. People stay in a job or stay in school because they’ve always done it and can’t think of a reason to leave. Has nothing to do with the work, your identity, and not even really motivated by money. As destructive as this might be, it is surprisngly, quite common. The authors say that in their research, they found that a, “…large proportion of the employee population feels like they work in their job for no good reason.”
Great, now what?
The book goes on to detail not just why people perform relative to their motivations but how to setup your company culture to optimize that performance.
Armed with this information, there are basic principles to help people get the most out of themselves and their employees. And the book is full of great examples of doing just that. Giving purpose and play regardless of the task.
Most importantly, doing what you can to minimize indirect motives where possible, and increasing the direct motives.
