Top Intrinsic Motivations to Build a High-Performance Culture
What is motivation?
Motivation gets us to initiate behaviours. Then, it guides us towards our goals and completing our tasks. In very simple terms, it’s what makes you act. It’s why you learn skills to progress your career or network to make valuable connections. Overall, motivation contains the emotional, social, biological and cognitive drivers that spur your behaviour. So, it’s often used to explain what starts, directs and maintains our actions – even if it’s somewhat of an invisible force. Since we can’t see, hear, taste or touch motivation, we need to make some assumptions about why people do things. In short, we need to make observations about their intrinsic motivation or extrinsic motivation.
What is intrinsic motivation?
Intrinsic motivations are the reason we change or make new behaviours for personal enrichment. It means we’re not getting our drivers from anyone else or any perceived rewards. Ideally, you’re making changes or doing an activity because you find it personally satisfying.
In that way, you’re not looking for a reward like money. When you learn a language, you’re doing it because you want to communicate with people from another country, and it makes you happy to expand your knowledge. You’re not expecting a medal for it. The act is the reward. That’s intrinsic motivation. At the core, intrinsic motivation is a purer form of stimulation than extrinsic because it doesn’t require anyone or anything outside of yourself to create behaviours.
What is extrinsic motivation?
Extrinsic motivation is the outside forces that make you act. First, this could be for rewards or to prevent a bad consequence. When you do tasks at your job to get your paycheck, this is an extrinsic motivator.
But just because it’s external doesn’t mean it’s a tangible reward. Beyond money, awards, gifts, and the like; extrinsic motivation also includes titles, praise, and fame. However, that’s not an exhaustive list and anything that encourages you to do a behaviour that originates outside of yourself is an extrinsic motivator, not an intrinsic motivation.
Workplace extrinsic and intrinsic motivation examples
Intrinsic motivation is better than extrinsic
Lots of studies back up the reasons why intrinsic motivation is better than extrinsic motivation:
- The Journal of Applied Psychology found, “intrinsic motivation strengthened the relationship between prosocial motivation and the performance and productivity of 140 fundraising callers. Callers who reported high levels of both prosocial and intrinsic motivations raised more money 1 month later, and this moderated association was mediated by a larger number of calls made.”
- Featured in the ASPA, they determined that “intrinsic motivation is substantively associated with both employee satisfaction and turnover intention. It also reveals that the three conditional factors interact with intrinsic motivation. Managerial trustworthiness and goal-directedness increase the leverage of intrinsic motivation on employee satisfaction, whereas extrinsic rewards expectancy decreases the leverage.”
- In a master’s thesis on student motivation, it was noted that “intrinsically motivated students experience school success because they display [behaviours] such as choosing challenging activities and spending more time on tasks. The use of rewards undermines intrinsic motivation and results in the slower acquisition of skills and more +errors in the learning process.”
- In a Sri Lankan public sector study, they found “there is a positive relationship between extrinsic reward, intrinsic reward and employee performance.” In the study, the difference in impact was a .06 deviation between intrinsic and extrinsic motivators.
- Workstars shared, “when employees are intrinsically motivated, they show 46% higher levels of job satisfaction and 32% greater levels of commitment to their jobs.”
How to nurture intrinsic motivations to drive employee engagement
Having a working environment that’s intrinsically rewarding is a goal for all organisations. Here’s how nurturing each type of intrinsic motivation can help you create a high performance culture:
#1. Recognition-based motivation: the importance of having their accomplishment recognised by others
If you want a shiny new job title, you’re probably motivated by recognition. It’s the motivator that gives us a feeling of accomplishment when others see the status we’ve earned. Overall, it’s an achievement-based motivator. In brief, we can pull this lever when we shout about the achievements of our teams. Every award, status bump or accolade can be noted and praised to give our teams that much needed motivation. Ideally, the goal is to recharge that team member and help them feel noticed.
#2. Challenge-based motivation: the importance of exceeding goals
When you set a goal for yourself and surpass it, doesn’t that feel good? Challenge-based motivation is just that. It’s creating a stretch goal that’s pretty hard to achieve and then working hard to get there. Now, this can’t be an impossible goal. We want a challenge, not a pipedream. But when your team member does prove up to the challenge, we want to offer performance feedback too. This can work to boost their self-esteem as well. Overall, this is an effective rinse and repeat motivator as new goals can be set after meeting the first.
#3. Power-based motivation: the importance of having control over themselves and their environments
Many humans love to feel in control. That’s okay. When you’re shaping events in your company and your environment and you like the way it feels, that’s power-based motivation. Overall, it’s natural and healthy. A great way to harness this is through succession planning and remit enrichment. Reinvest in your team members who want to change the world by not allowing this power-based motivator to stagnate. Also, think laterally about adding power to your structure. You can do this by associating yourself with a change agent like a charity organisation or a community-based event calendar.
#4. Mastery-based motivation or competence-based motivation: the importance of performing work activities well
When you fly through a task like it is second nature and people come to you for advice on how to do things in your area of expertise, it feels great. If that’s the sort of thing that gets you going, you might have mastery or competence motivation. Being seen as an expert is a powerful motivator. It encourages you to build skills and hone your craft. You can encourage this in your teams by offering training paths and skill-building resources. In general, tapping into his motivator arms your teams with the knowledge and problem-solving ability it takes to navigate workplace obstacles.
#5. Reward-based motivation or incentive motivation: the importance of achievement
The intrinsic part of this extrinsic motivator is the emotion around it. When you get a prize, you feel pride, satisfaction and accomplishment. That’s the intrinsic motivator that encourages you to go for that award again and again. To fuel this motivator, make sure that all rewards are shouted about to give your team that good feeling they want to feel again and again. As always, tie it to meaningful goals for a double-whammy of effective motivation. Remember, the rewards need to be seen as high-value to drive this reward-based motivational feeling.
#6. Cooperation-based motivation: the importance of gaining satisfaction from helping others
When you help others or work together to solve a common goal, then that positive feeling is the cooperation-based intrinsic motivation driver. Simply, you need to provide an opportunity for groups to work alongside each other towards key goals. Team members motivated by these drivers will spur others on through the satisfaction they get from achieving as part of a team. Other ways to push this driver are volunteer or charity programmes which similarly boost this feeling of helping others. In short, any collaboration in any form can result in positive action from people with this intrinsic motivation.
#7. Competition-based motivation: the importance of having a healthy competition
We all compare ourselves to others. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Seeing great traits in others and wanting to emulate them to be better ourselves is a great motivator. Similarly, winning against another individual or team in a scored challenge helps improve our mental health. So, it’s not any wonder that competition-based motivation is a strong driver. This intrinsic motivation kicks in when you’re encouraged to meet a stretch target and pitted against other groups on time or on a success/fail basis. Successful ways to track this are with leader boards that all participants can see.
#8. Curiosity-based motivation: the importance of novelty
When something in the physical environment grabs your attention, that’s sensory curiosity. Similarly, when something about the activity makes you want to learn more, that’s cognitive curiosity. But both types of intrinsic motivation are powerful. New things, novel things that you’ve not seen or heard about before have a natural draw. Overall, that’s curiosity-based motivation in a nutshell. Provide your teams with the opportunity to seek out the unusual, out of the ordinary and unique. That change from the everyday will spur them to learn more. In short, breaking out of their routine is a great motivator.
#9. Affiliation-based motivation: the importance of association
For people with affiliation-based motivation, it’s not what you know but who you know. In these people, coffee brunches with the boss, being pulled into special projects with management and 1-2-1 meetings with leadership are fuel for their creative fires. In brief, they need to connect with senior management in real and tangible ways. Additionally, when their work is appreciated by company leadership, this further boosts their intrinsic motivation. This driver encourages people to make career moves to become those very people in positions of power themselves.
#10. Attitude-based motivation: the importance of mindset
When you change the way you see the world around you and yourself, you can find goals easier to achieve.
A negative mindset can hold you back. In fact, it can demotivate you and rob you of other intrinsic motivators. This can cause you to miss out on your dreams and lose happiness. But changing your attitude to a more positive framing is a self-change mechanism that can see you approach challenges as opportunities to prove yourself. In brief, gaining self-awareness over perspective and beliefs that don’t serve you can put you in a good position to overcome almost any goal.
High-engagement culture creation
Here are 9 ways that you can boost the intrinsic motivation of your team to increase engagement:
1. Commit to enriching executive coaching
Providing training to your senior management team on the value of employee engagement and intrinsic motivation is something you need to plan for. When your leaders understand their drivers, they are better positioned to drive engagement with others. An easy way to start is with the four rewards outlined by Ivey Business Journal:
“Committing to a meaningful purpose. Choosing the best way of fulfilling that purpose. Making sure that one is performing work activities competently and making sure that one is making progress to achieving the purpose.”
Coaching will help you embed a powerful reward system like this into your culture.
2. Define your purpose
Look beyond profit. To define a meaningful purpose, look at what your organisation does for its customers or the world. From that driving force, your whole organisation can derive meaning and alignment as you strive towards a valuable goal that you’re all committed to.
3. Drill down on meaning
Once you’ve defined your purpose, you need to apply it to every work task and project. Ask questions like:
- How can we make this meaningful?
- How many ways can we approach this?
- How can we complete this competently?
- How can we be sure we’ve accomplished our goal?
Through consistent intrinsic motivation-based questioning you’re highlighting employee contributions & the four rewards.
4. Don’t neglect your averages
When you measure your engagement, there’s a huge group of people in the middle. In short, what would it do for your organisation if you could bring that large group of indifferent people into the highly engaged group? It would tip the scales, right? So, you’ll want to focus a big part of your training and rewards in the middle ranges.
5. Measure, benchmark and report
You’ll need to create an employee engagement survey. Without it, you’ll have no starting point to measure your progress. Remember to ask questions around all four reward tenets because that will help you move towards self-management. Plus, any low scores across competency, meaningfulness and so on will pull your scores down over time. This is regardless of what measures you take now.
6. Track your real-time performance
For every project related to your core purpose, you’ll want to put real-time tracking in place. This will help you know -while the work is ongoing- if the right intrinsic rewards and desired activities are taking place. Remember question 4? “How can we be sure we’ve accomplished our goal?” Without putting real-time tracking in place, knowing the answer to this is hard. You might consider something like Gamification which makes monitoring and reporting automatic.
7. Use Gamification to meet goals
Gamification can also be configured and updated to push the right intrinsic motivation levers so you hit your targets. You’ll tie the activities and learning directly to your meaningful purpose, structured approach and competency reward questions from earlier.
Then you’ll get reports to ensure you’re achieving the goals you set out to meet. Additionally, Gamification is a driver of further motivators like competition-based, challenge-based, attitude-based, affiliation-based and more
8. Identity intrinsic motivation you need to boost
From your survey, you’ll know where the gaps are. You could boost these 4 intrinsic rewards with these actions.
Meaningfulness:
- Allowing people to be passionate
- Defining what we care about
- Making the work relevant
- Awarding responsibility
- Sharing what the future will look like
Choice:
- Giving authority out
- Trusting our teams
- Alignment of goals
- No unfair retribution
- No info gatekeeping
Competence:
- Anecdotal insights shared
- Getting credit for good work
- Useful feedback on what’s working
- Making sure we’re up to the challenge
- Ensuring standards, not rankings
Progress:
- Working together
- Accurate performance measurements
- Noting levels of accomplishment
- Celebrating those milestones
- Chances to apply what we’ve made
Mix hard and soft levers for a healthy reward matrix that improves intrinsic motivation and grants better employee engagement overall.
9. Make change fun
The change process itself can be engaging. GE did it through their revolutionary Workout programme. In short, these engagement-based change management programmes use the very same 4 reward drivers to identify issues, find solutions that work, apply different competencies and measure it all for a feeling of meaningful progress. So, it’s easy to see how it could be applied to creating an engagement programme itself. Overall, you want to make every project from here on out as intrinsically exciting as possible.
Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation -FAQ
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