Motivation and Demotivation

Motivation and Demotivation

Motivation is a big topic either in management or human nature aspect. In psychology, motivation refers to the initiation, direction, intensity and persistence of behavior (Geen, 1995). Motivation is acquired working in an organization especially working in a group. Numbers of theories about motivation from various perspectives by different people have applied in practice, such as MaslowЎЇs hierarchy of human needs, HerzbergЎЇs two factor theory and the recently introduced Ў°self controlЎ±. In practice, motivation is not only drove by oneself, but also affected by others. How the external force influences humanЎЇs motivation quite interests me.

Ў°To motivate, donЎЇt demotivateЎ± is an article written by Paul Glen who is an IT manager invited to have a speech about motivation. He didnЎЇt aim to make people cry or tell stories about overcoming cancer but reflect on his experience of working in a team: how active manager do to try to motivate his staff and in contrary how staffs reacted to. He found that team works with intensive motivated manager are not any more successful than those whose manager is less attentive. One thing most manager want to avoid is demotivating their team. He suggest s several things manager has to avoid in order to motivate his team properly and not kill whatever motivation grows. 1), excluding technique from decision making to make technical people fell out of the loop; 2) inconsistency to make people feel insecure.3) excessive monitoring to make people uncomfortable.

Active manager is a key engine for any organization, their intention to motivate people should be admired, however, the extent of actions to do is significant, too slight would be easily to ignore by people and too tight would unconsciously create an uncomfortable atmosphere. It helps me to understand how the motivation works in practice. Whatever how much I understand the motivation in technique including widely used methods and approached. If I have no idea about the influences by external forces, these things in technique tend to be useless.

Paul Glen is an IT manager and his analysis is quite focus on the technical group. Technical group has its own characters with other kind of groups. High proportion of technical personnel involved made the team particular, because most people in the team have technical power and authority in their technical domain, excluding