The one thing that most managers get wrong about motivation

“If a boss gives an employee an extra $10,000, they are motivated only until they get used to having that amount and therefore are driven by other factors.” – Nick Greenhalgh, Career Innovations (Management Today March 2005)

Show me the money

It’s reasonable to think that money, benefits and rewards are a motivator of performance . Who, after all, can forget the “Show me the money” scene in the movie, Jerry Maguire. It’s where Rod Tidwell, played by Cuba Gooding Jr. demanded Tom Cruise’s character to increase the value of his contract to a multi-million dollar amount. Tidwell believed that by being paid more, he would improve his performance as a pro-footballer. And this exact same myth continues to be perpetuated in many organisation even to this very day. A situation that is made even worse when you see surveys that still report findings such as the following.

Top motivators in Business (or so some people say)

Money
Work/life balance
Being valued and recognised at work
Doing interesting work
Working with great people

Well I say, don’t always believe what you hear in the movies or read on the internet.

Money is important but it isn’t a motivator

Giving people more money and rewards simply doesn’t boost their productivity. I’m not saying that money isn’t important. Because it is. But it’s not a motivator. Let me explain why by looking at the following diagram.

On the right, is a list of “satisfiers”. They motivate people to produce more. On the left are items such as money and rewards. These are the “dissatisfiers”. Which means that if you already pay people what they consider themselves to be worth, paying them more won’t motivate them to be more productive. But if you pay them less than what they think their value is, it will demotivate them. So the key message here is this.

Pay your employees at least the market or going rate.

However this isn’t the only reason for why money and rewards don’t produce the positive outcomes you seek. For example if you single out just one person for a reward, the rest will think, “the manager doesn’t value my work so why should I even bother working harder.”

Likewise if you give all of your employees a reward for doing a particular job, they tend to spend more time on that task than they do on the others. Its simply a case of “what gets paid, gets done”. So is this what you really want? Or would you rather have people putting their energies into each and everyone of the duties they are tasked to do not just those they get paid extra for?

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