There are different ways of thinking about motivation. One method divides motivation into two: extrinsic and intrinsic. In the case of extrinsic motivation, the drive to do something arises from the outside and people perform an activity in order to earn a reward or avoid a punishment. You do your job better than anyone else in your department just to get praise from your boss on the next weekly meeting – this is the result of extrinsic motivation. When motivation arises from inside the individual, it is called intrinsic. In this case the reward lies in the activity itself, it is personally rewarding. People do something because it is challenging, fun and interesting. For instance, you keep on improving your Excel table, because you enjoy the process and the use of a well thought through tool creates a positive feeling. Your efficiency improves – you save time and are able to analyze data in more detail leading to better understanding of your financial results. (SOURCE).

A way to look at intrinsic motivation is that it consists of three elements (I have mentioned these before in a previous article “How To Motivate Your Employees”) that are needed in order to make up an effective operating system. Two of those elements or blocks are autonomy (which I have talked about in another article “Autonomy for Better Results”) and purpose. The third one is mastery, the desire to get better at something that matters to us. When people play the guitar on the weekend, develop games or even set up sites like Wikipedia and share it with others for free then it may seem strange because there is not any monetary reward in any of these activities. Yet they continue doing it for the pure satisfaction itself. There can also be the desire to become the very best of doing something, but I do not think it has to be there always. I find self-development a much bigger motivator.

Mastery takes time, practice, knowledge and instruction. It has its setbacks. It is the ability to know how to use certain skills in any specific area. Why is this good in a workplace? Because people trying to get better at something become more creative, they find new ways and solutions to perform an action faster and more efficiently and to top it all off, they enjoy doing it. Being innovative is something that is looked for in employees. Like I mentioned, mastery takes instruction and that is something the employer can do. Just be sure not to push it too much or the employee may start resenting the activity that he would have enjoyed doing.

I am going to end this article with a suggestion to a TED talk. Traditional rewards are not always as effective as we might think. Daniel Pink, a career analyst, assesses the old stick-and-carrot way and offers a way forward in his talk “The Puzzle of Motivation. “

By Joosep K. Kuljus