Management Practice and the Politics of Motivation

This article is concerned with the manager whose interest in people being “motivated” constitutes a wish to see that not only is a job done, or done faster, but that the people concerned are committed to it, committed, in that for them, the quality of the outcome matters. How well they do the work is at least as important as the fact of its completion. Yet the managers who are concerned to generate commitment, continue to ask “What motivates people?” when so much appears to have been said or written on the subject. This persistence suggests that the question is one to which they have still not found an answer they can be happy with. The theme of this paper is that the explanation for this persistence is to be found, not in the limitations of the various motivational theories, but in the politics of the managers' role. In order to find out just why this question is asked so persistently, an approach is first summarised which provides a way of understanding motivation by exploring managers' own experience of commitment to their work.