How to get intrinsic motivation into your organization?

Being intrinsically motivated means you engage in something because it is  personally rewarding to you and fulfills your expectations, values or beliefs. You do something without expecting external rewards, incentives or pressure.

Why should you have intrinsic motivated people in your organization?

When you do something intrinsically motivated, you are very likely in line with your expectations, values, beliefs. You do something that you actually like to do. This is a desired motivation to have in any organization because, you are very likely happier and more satisfied with your work. If that is the case you are also very likely more engaged and with that more productive and creative in your work. All of this is advantageous for organizational performance.

Organizations usually (still) reward people with compensating time spent at work with money and similar incentives.There are several studies in settings like workplaces that reveal that such kind of rewards normally undermine what they should improve, performance. With that kind of rewards people temporarily change behavior and become compliant to their job description. Such rewards, or extrinsic motivators, do not change the attitudes that determine our behaviors or increase commitment.

How to increase intrinsic motivation of people in your organization?

According to Daniel Pink’s book – Drive: the Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us there are three factors to intrinsic motivation at work: autonomy, mastery and purpose. From experience I pretty much agree to these 3 factors when it comes to intrinsic motivators. So if we want to increase intrinsic motivation, and with that organizational performance, we need to somehow work with these three factors. Let’s first see what they actually mean (dictionary definitions):

automony = the right or condition of self-government

mastery = comprehensive knowledge or skill in a particular subject or activity

purpose = the reason for which something is done

Assuming you want to get better with providing people autonomy, enable them for mastery and giving them a purpose, you probably need to change something. If not, you are ahead of the mass and probably work in a comfortable setting. Let’s look at specific things you could do. 

Hiring

In hiring usually a lot of attention is paid to peoples skills and some attention to something like cultural fit. If you want to hire intrinsic motivated people, you should pay more attention to their expectations, beliefs and values and see whether they are in line with those of your organization. Skills, if not fully present, can and will be acquired to a certain extend by an intrinsic motivated person. Expectations, Values and beliefs don’t change so easily. It is important that you have a strong vision, purpose and values in your organization that not only exists on power point but is actually lived by the people. Only then you can match potential candidates with it. Hiring under such conditions makes it more difficult I belief, as matching skills are easier to find than matching values and believes. Nevertheless, considering the well being and performance of an intrinsically motivated individual it is worth paying attention to these factors from the very beginning of the relationship.

Leadership

Once you have hired intrinsically motivated people, you want to ensure that they remain intrinsically motivated. Probably you also transition your organization and want to arouse intrinsic motivation for people who lost it somewhere on their professional journey.

For that you need leadership that provides autonomy, where people and teams have enough context / information and are empowered to make their own decisions instead of just execution someone else’s. You also need to offer challenges and goals to be accomplished or help your people to discover them on their own. Without the possibility to improve there is not much room for mastery and accomplishments. The third factor to be covered is purpose. If it is not clear to people how they contribute to your organization’s goals, they tend to be less engaged. Therefore you better connect individuals to your organization’s purpose, for example by showing the link of people’s personal goals to organizational goals.

There are many other aspects in organizational leadership, just pay attention that the activities you do are not violating the three factors, autonomy, mastery and purpose.

What else?

I’ve emphasized on hiring and leadership with the goal of getting intrinsically motivation people into your organization. I’m also aware that this is just a small piece of activities that need to be covered in an organization. Intrinsic motivation brings a lot of benefits into your organization but is not the only thing to pay attention to. Getting autonomy assured people need to take responsibility and become accountable, just to mention one important aspect. There are many traps to step into when it comes to autonomy, mastery and purpose and it needs to be properly balanced with other goals of your organization.