Extrinsic Motivation

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Extrinsic Motivation

By Peace | April 17, 2006

Extrinsic motivation is when I am motivated by external factors, as opposed to the internal drivers of intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation drives me to do things for tangible rewards or pressures, rather than for the fun of it. For example, Supermarkets use loyalty cards and discounts, airlines use air miles, companies use bonuses and commissions. Extrinsic motivation is everywhere.

There are two types of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation is by far the better of the two because it motivates people to achieve goals from within themselves, not because of a prize they want or a punishment they want to avoid. After years of study on the subject, scientists could still not find a way to enhance intrinsic motivation in people. Intrinsic motivation not only makes people perform well and more accurately, but the people do not expect anything for doing it- the activity in itself is the reward.

Extrinsic motivation is getting more common in the modern society, using bribes and threats as weapons for getting things done. Volunteer services are scarce and more people expect higher salaries because of greed. Unlike intrinsic motivation, which comes from inside, extrinsic motivation is created from external factors. Extrinsic motivation, whether it be in the form of threats or bribes, do not work as well as intrinsic, but they get the job done, which is why most people use extrinsic strategies in life. Because so many people use extrinsic motivation as the way around intrinsic, people have grown to used to and expect answers involving extrinsic factors when asked to perform tasks.

Traditionally, extrinsic motivation has been used to motivate employees:

Tangible rewards such as payments, promotions (or punishments).
Intangible rewards such as praise or public commendation.

Within economies transitioning from assembly lines to service industries, the importance of intrinsic motivation rises:

The further jobs move away from pure assembly lines, the harder it becomes to measure individual productivity. This effect is most pronounced for knowledge workers and amplified in teamwork. A lack of objective or universally accepted criteria for measuring individual productivity may make individual rewards arbitrary.

Since by definition intrinsic motivation does not rely on financial incentives, it is cheap in terms of dollars but expensive in the fact that the inherent rewards of the activity must be internalized before they can be experienced as intrinsically motivating.

However, intrinsic motivation is no panacea for employee motivation. Problems include:

For many commercially viable activities it may not be possible to find any or enough intrinsically motivated people.

Intrinsically motivated employees need to eat, too. Other forms of compensation remain necessary.

Intrinsic motivation is easily destroyed. For instance, additional extrinsic motivation is known to have a negative impact on intrinsic motivation in many cases, perceived injustice in awarding such external incentives even more so.

Application
You can offer positive motivations such as rewards and other bribery or you can use negative motivation such as threats and blackmail. Either way, extrinsic motivation is crude, easy and often effective. However it focuses people on the reward and not the action. Stop giving the reward and they’ll stop the behavior. This can, in fact, be useful when you want them to stop doing something: first give them extrinsic rewards for doing the unwanted behavior, then remove the reward.

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