Short talk: Psychology of motivation

Motivation: the factors that direct and energize the behaviour of humans and other organizms. This very simple definition of motivation presented in Feldman‘s book „Understanding psychology“.

Motivation is a term that refers to a process that elicits, controls, and sustains certain behaviors. Motivation is a group of phenomena which affect the nature of an individual's behaviour, the strength of the behaviour, and the persistence of the behaviour. For instance: An individual has not eaten, he or she feels hungry, as a response he or she eats and diminishes feelings of hunger.

Motivation has biological, cognitive, and social aspects, and the complexity of the concept has led psychologists to develop a variety of approaches. All seek to explain the energy that guides people‘s behavior in specific directions. There are many approaches to motivation: physiological, behavioural, cognitive, and social. According to various theories, motivation may be rooted in a basic need to minimize physical pain and maximize pleasure, or it may include specific needs such as eating and resting, or a desired object, goal, state of being, ideal, or it may be attributed to less-apparent reasons such as altruism, selfishness, morality, or avoiding mortality.

The latest approach in developing a broad, integrative theory of motivation is Temporal Motivation Theory (TMT). Integrating theories of motivation, introduced in a 2007 Academy of Management Review article, it integrates into a single formulation the primary aspects of several other major motivational theories, including Incentive Theory, Drive Theory, Need Theory, Self-Efficacy and Goal Setting. The original researchers note that, in an effort to keep the theory simple, existing theories to integrate were selected based on their shared attributes, and that these theories are still of value, as TMT does not contain the same depth of detail as each individual theory. However, it still simplifies the field of motivation and allows findings from one theory to be translated into terms of another.

Despite all theoretical backgrounds and definitions motivation has another aspect. I would like to talk about motivation as most of us understand it in our daily life‘s context.

Motivation is literally the desire to do things. There is the difference between motivated actions and waking up before dawn to pound the pavement and lazing around the house all day. Motivation is the crucial element in setting and attaining goals.

It looks like motivation is quite a big problem in our society nowadays: we hear that even small children are not interested to learn something new or play with their peers, teenagers do not attend schools and show bad results, adults in the offices and factories work without energy and inspiration – all of them are experiencing lack of motivation. So this problem is a challenge for psychologists in almost every area of their daily work or scientific studies.  The question is can we control motivation and how can we do that?

Some researches show that is possible to influence your own levels of motivation and self-control. The others say that control of motivation is only understood to a limited extent. There are many different approaches of motivation training, but many of these are considered pseudoscientific by critics. To understand how to control motivation it is first necessary to understand why many people lack motivation. To understand motivation, human nature itself should be understood.

And  if we start looking deeper into the practical side of motivation we will find plenty of hand books, internet websites, lecturers, teachers or even schools or clubs which will offer us enormous quantity and types of advice, different motivational strategies how to keep ourselves  motivated or become a leader who could motivate others.  We should think critically and be careful not to waste or time and money on meaningless and useless ideas as I have mentioned before in some point of view motivational training is considered as pseudoscientific. 

References:

 Robert S.Feldman. Understanding psychology. 8^th edition, 2008. Mc Graw Hill.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/motivation (viewed at 2012.04.17)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation (viewed at 2012.04.17)

http://www.accel-team.com/motivation/index.html (viewed at 2012.04.17)            

Picture references:

http://junkmiles.org/tag/motivation/ (viewed at 2012.05.12)

http://www.lifeinpalawan.com/other/effective-self-improvement-motivation-techniques.html  (viewed at 2012.05.12)