Expectancy Model of Motivation 4

In the last byte we were discussing the Expectancy theory of motivation. In today's byte, we look at some of the issues with motivation when we consider expectancy theory to be explaining the behavior of people.

If one is to carefully think about the source of what could lead to a not so motivated performance and then map it over the expectancy model of motivation, we realize 3 possible causes for these motivational problems:

1. A disbelief in a relationship between effort and performance
2. A disbelief in a relationship between performance and reward
3. Lack of desire for the rewards offered

Let us take the scenario of a sales person and explore these in greater detail. If the sales person doesn’t believe that doing more calls will result in higher sales, then he/she could be shown how to distinguish departments with high probability sales opportunities from those with low probability sales opportunities. This could motivate the individual to perform better at the sales task.

Let’s take an extension of the sales person's scenario - where he/she believes that the relation doesn’t exist between the performance and rewards, i.e. the person doesn’t believe that an increased sale doesn’t result in over al higher commission - this could be simply solved in a session which highlights the relation using graphs or numbers!

Research has indicated the theory is pretty accurate in predicting job satisfaction. But this theory is inherently a bit complex and hence makes it a bit difficult to test the model!