What drives you to come to work every morning? Do you deeply love your work? Or is it rather all about the money? And if you are a manager or business leader, what do you think motivates your employees to show up every morning?

Motivational theory distinguishes between two types of motivation, extrinsic and intrinsic motivation:

• Extrinsic motivation comes from outside the person. It is based on the “carrot or stick” method, where a person is rewarded for exhibiting desired positive behaviors (the “carrot”) and is punished for negative behaviors (the “stick”). Financial rewards such as bonuses, salary increases or promotions are positive extrinsic motivational factors.
• Intrinsic motivation comes from inside the person. Here, people engage in their work for the challenge and the enjoyment. In other words: The work itself is motivating. Intrinsic motivation arises when individuals feel both self-determined and competent. It is furthered through other motivational factors such as recognition, responsibility and growth potential.

The relation between creativity and the two main motivational drivers has been the subject of many research studies. All brought the same result, which the Harvard psychologist Teresa Amabile summarized in the Intrinsic Motivation Principle of Creativity: “People will be most creative when they feel motivated primarily by the interest, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself — and not by external pressures.”

Extrinsic motivational factors have been found to be counterproductive to creativity and innovation for three reasons: First, people may be afraid to show initiative and take risks, as they might “feel the stick” if a project goes wrong. Second, the prospect of a “juicy carrot” may lead strongly financially driven employees to prematurely implement a half-baked, lower-quality idea rather than taking the time to develop a better but more time-intensive idea. Third and probably most important: Money by itself does not make employees passionate about their work.

So here is your first important learning point to take home: A business leader who wants to promote creativity to arrive at meaningful innovation results needs to focus on intrinsically motivating their employees by providing them with interesting, meaningful work challenges.

What are meaningful challenges? Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explains this through his concept of flow (or optimal experience). He studied the conditions when people feel happiest and most satisfied. Surprisingly, indulging in pleasurable activities does not make people happy in themselves, as it does not produce psychological growth or add to the complexity of the person.

Instead, people were happiest when they enjoyed pursuing a challenging activity that matched their skill levels, resulting in the state of flow that emerges on the boundary between anxiety (caused by inadequate skill levels) and boredom (due to an insufficient challenge).

In this state of optimal experience, according to Csikszentmihalyi, a person has “a sense that one’s skills are adequate to cope with the challenges at hand, in a goal-directed, rule-bound action system that is so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems. Self-consciousness disappears, and the sense of time becomes distorted. An activity that produces such experiences is so gratifying that people are willing to do it for its own sake, with little concern for what they will get out of it, even when it is difficult, or dangerous.”

All research in this area further revealed that a flow activity provided “a sense of discovery, a creative feeling of transporting the person into a new reality. It pushed the person to higher levels of performance, and led to previously undreamed-of states of consciousness. In short, it transformed the self by making it more complex. In this growth of the self lies the key to flow activities.”

As a business leader, you can create meaningful work challenges for your employees by setting an ambitious, motivating goal for a clearly defined activity or project. However, ensure a fit between skill levels and the tasks required to succeed in the endeavor to make the work enjoyable for your staff.

Let’s tie our learning together in a few action recommendations to business leaders who want to raise motivation and innovation-readiness:

• Find out what mainly motivates your employees; seek their input to identify challenging projects and inspiring goals to raise the intrinsic motivational levels.
• Create a harmonized, integrated system of ambitious but realistic goals that inspire your managers and employees to move toward achieving your vision as an innovation leader.
• Charge HR to profile the existing skills and knowledge levels of your employees. Then, invest in training to enable your employees to develop their skills and to close knowledge gaps based on both their job requirements and interests. Understand that as the performance levels and complexity of your employees grow, so will those of your company.
• Consider implementing the practice of regular job rotations every few years to systematically provide new challenges for your employees, prevent boredom and entropy from setting in, and to intensify cross-divisional (or cross-functional) collaboration.

© Dr. Detlef Reis 2008. This article was published in parallel in the Bangkok Post under the same title on 23 May 2008. As the original manuscript was lost, this text follows the version printed in the Bangkok Post.