Extrinsic motivation refers to behavior that is motivated by the prospect of earning a reward or avoiding a punishment. Intrinsic motivation refers to behavior that is motivated by the desire to do something for its own sake. There is no obvious external reward for behaving a certain way.
Understanding extrinsic and intrinsic motivation
Extrinsic and intrinsic motivation are core components of self-determination theory, which links human motivation, personality, and optimal functioning.
The theory suggests both forms of motivation have the power to shape who people become and how they behave.
Self-determination theory is based on motivation research performed by psychology professors Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci. In their 1985 book entitled Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human
Behavior, the pair defined extrinsic motivation as a drive to behave based on external sources and resulting in external rewards. These sources may include employee evaluations, accolades, rewards, or simply a desire to earn the respect of others.
Intrinsic motivation, on the other hand, is based on internal drivers of motivation such as personal values, interests, or a sense of morality.
Examples of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation
Here are a few examples of the two types of motivation.
Extrinsic motivation
Going to work because you want to earn money.
Studying because you want to earn good grades.
Shopping at the same supermarket chain to benefit from a loyalty program.
Attaining a specific degree to make your parents proud.
Cleaning the house before a partner arrives home to avoid a confrontation.
Intrinsic motivation
Learning about personal development with a goal to improving yourself.
Reading about a topic because you are curious or passionate about it.
Traveling to experience different cultures.
Cleaning the house because you find the process cathartic.
Participating in a team sport for camaraderie and not to win an individual award.
Which form of motivation is preferable?
It may appear at first glance that intrinsic motivation is the more preferable form of motivation. Depending on the situation, however, one or both forms of motivation are most effective.
In a workplace setting, management frequently uses extrinsic motivation to motivate their employees with rewards, bonuses, and other incentives.
This is particularly useful when the employee is required to learn a new skill or encouraged to discover more about a subject they are not acquainted with.
While this approach is undoubtedly effective, leaders should ensure the employee can work on something they are passionate about to increase the likelihood of long-term success.
Extrinsic motivation can also be useful in situations where an individual needs to complete a task they consider unpleasant.
That is, in any situation where intrinsic motivation is impossible to summon.
Having said that, extrinsic motivation should be avoided in any situation where the individual is intrinsically motivated.
Studies have shown that offering excessive external rewards for an already internally rewarding behavior can reduce intrinsic motivation.
This phenomenon, known as the overjustification effect, results in the activity feeling more like “work” and less like “play.”
External motivation and fixed mindset
When trying to improve oneself, it’s critical to understand the difference between a growth and a fixed mindset.
fixed mindset believes their intelligence and talents are fixed traits that cannot be developed. The two mindsets were developed by American psychologist Carol Dweck while studying human motivation.
Both mindsets are comprised of conscious and subconscious thought patterns established at a very young age. In adult life, they have profound implications for personal and professional success.
Individuals with a growth mindset devote more time and effort to achieving difficult goals and by extension, are less concerned with the opinions or abilities of others. Individuals with a fixed mindset are sensitive to criticism and may be preoccupied with proving their talents to others.
Oftentimes, when the behavior is primarily driven by external motivators, this might lead to a fixed mindset.
In short, you do things because you think those make you look good in the eyes of others.
This kind of external motivation might be great as a short-term propeller, yet it needs to be channeled over time into internal motivation to build a growth mindset.
Indeed, we all might be driven by internal motivation in an ideal world. Yet, the real world is more blurred than that.
In fact, also negative, external feelings (such as envy, anger, the feeling of betrayal, revenge, or wanting to look good) might actually work well to give you the motivation to do things that otherwise you would not have done.
Yet, over time, if those external negative feelings do not transform into something else (like intrinsic motivation to build something that you’re proud of), that might prevent real personal growth, as it keeps you in a fixed mindset!
Internal motivation and growth mindset
For the sake of channeling short-term external stimuli into long-term internal well-being, therefore, is critical to enable a growth mindset to kick in.
That often takes time, yet when that happens, you learn to move from external motivators to internal ones.
That in turn leads to a scenario where you can finally channel short-term feelings into long-term success!
Key takeaways
Extrinsic motivation refers to behavior motivated by the prospect of earning a reward or avoiding a punishment. Intrinsic motivation, on the other hand, refers to behavior motivated by the desire to do something for its own sake.
Examples of extrinsic motivation include studying to achieve good grades or shopping at the same supermarket chain to earn loyalty points. Examples of intrinsic motivation include traveling to experience different cultures and cleaning the house because the task is cathartic.
Motivation derived exclusively through intrinsic means may appear to be the most desirable outcome. In reality, however, some situations are unpleasant for whatever reason and require extrinsic motivators to assist in their completion. Each form of motivation is context-dependent, with some situations requiring a mixture of both approaches.
Herzberg’s two-factor theory argues that certain workplace factors cause job satisfaction while others cause job dissatisfaction. The theory was developed by American psychologist and businessmanagement analyst Frederick Herzberg. Until his death in 2000, Herzberg was widely regarded as a pioneering thinker in motivational theory.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs was developed by American psychologist Abraham Maslow. His hierarchy, often depicted in the shape of a pyramid, helped explain his research on basic human needs and desires. In marketing, the hierarchy (and its basis in psychology) can be used to market to specific groups of people based on their similarly specific needs, desires, and resultant actions.
Extrinsic motivation refers to behavior that is motivated by the prospect of earning a reward or avoiding a punishment. Intrinsic motivation refers to behavior that is motivated by the desire to do something for its own sake. There is no obvious, external reward for behaving a certain way.
Theory X and Theory Y were developed in the 1960s by American management professor and social psychologist Douglas McGregor. McGregor believed there were two fundamental approaches to managing people in the workplace to get things done and benefit the organization. Theory X and Theory Y are theories of motivation used by managers to increase the performance of subordinates.
The ERG theory was developed by American psychologist Clayton Alderfer between 1961 and 1978. The ERG theory is a motivational model based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The ERG theory is based on an acronym of three groups of core needs: existence, relatedness, growth.
Groupthink occurs when well-intentioned individuals make non-optimal or irrational decisions based on a belief that dissent is impossible or on a motivation to conform. Groupthink occurs when members of a group reach a consensus without critical reasoning or evaluation of the alternatives and their consequences.
The idea behind the wheel of life is credited to self-improvement pioneer Paul Meyer who founded the Success Motivation Institute in 1960. Despite numerous interpretations of the wheel of life in more recent years, each version shares the common purpose of personal transformation.
Hackman and Oldham’s job characteristics model is a framework that businesses use to design jobs that facilitate employee motivation.
Hackman and Oldham’s model is based on the idea maintaining motivation in the workplace lies in the job itself. While mundane tasks were found to decrease productivity, more varied tasks had the opposite effect.
Hackman and Oldham identified five job characteristics that enrich a role and cause employee motivation, satisfaction, and performance to increase: skill variety, task identity, task significance, task autonomy, and feedback. These factors are linked with three psychological states that improve an employee’s motivation in the workplace.
The Premack principle posits that an individual will perform a less preferred activity (low probability behavior) to obtain access to a more preferred activity (high probability behavior). The Premack principle was developed after a study of capuchin monkeys conducted by David Premack in 1965. Premack later conducted a similar experiment with children and found that irrespective of their preference between pinball and candy, they would perform the less desirable activity to get what they wanted. The Premack principle can also be useful in some workplace scenarios as an employee motivation tactic.
Agile leadership is the embodiment of agile manifesto principles by a manager or management team. Agile leadership impacts two important levels of a business. The structural level defines the roles, responsibilities, and key performance indicators. The behavioral level describes the actions leaders exhibit to others based on agile principles.
Adaptive leadership is a model used by leaders to help individuals adapt to complex or rapidly changing environments. Adaptive leadership is defined by three core components (precious or expendable, experimentation and smart risks, disciplined assessment). Growth occurs when an organization discards ineffective ways of operating. Then, active leaders implement new initiatives and monitor their impact.
Developed by business consultants Kenneth Blanchard and Paul Hersey in the 1960s, delegative leadership is a leadership style where authority figures empower subordinates to exercise autonomy. For this reason, it is also called laissez-faire leadership. In some cases, this type of leadership can lead to increases in work quality and decision-making. In a few other cases, this type of leadershipneeds to be balanced out to prevent a lack of direction and cohesiveness of the team.
Distributed leadership is based on the premise that leadership responsibilities and accountability are shared by those with the relevant skills or expertise so that the shared responsibility and accountability of multiple individuals within a workplace, bulds up as a fluid and emergent property (not controlled or held by one individual). Distributed leadership is based on eight hallmarks, or principles: shared responsibility, shared power, synergy, leadership capacity, organizational learning, equitable and ethical climate, democratic and investigative culture, and macro-community engagement.
Micromanagement is about tightly controlling or observing employees’ work. Although in some cases, this management style might be understood, especially for small-scale projects, generally speaking, micromanagement has a negative connotation mainly because it shows a lack of trust and freedom in the workplace, which leads to adverse outcomes.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs was developed by American psychologist Abraham Maslow. His hierarchy, often depicted in the shape of a pyramid, helped explain his research on basic human needs and desires. In marketing, the hierarchy (and its basis in psychology) can be used to market to specific groups of people based on their similarly specific needs, desires, and resultant actions.
The Eisenhower Matrix is a tool that helps businesses prioritize tasks based on their urgency and importance, named after Dwight D. Eisenhower, President of the United States from 1953 to 1961, the matrix helps businesses and individuals differentiate between the urgent and important to prevent urgent things (seemingly useful in the short-term) cannibalize important things (critical for long-term success).
Moonshot thinking is an approach to innovation, and it can be applied to business or any other discipline where you target at least 10X goals. That shifts the mindset, and it empowers a team of people to look for unconventional solutions, thus starting from first principles, by leveraging on fast-paced experimentation.
The theory was developed by psychologist Edwin Locke who also has a background in motivation and leadership research. Locke’s goal-setting theory of motivation provides a framework for setting effective and motivating goals. Locke was able to demonstrate that goal setting was linked to performance.
Herzberg’s two-factor theory argues that certain workplace factors cause job satisfaction while others cause job dissatisfaction. The theory was developed by American psychologist and businessmanagement analyst Frederick Herzberg. Until his death in 2000, Herzberg was widely regarded as a pioneering thinker in motivational theory.
The term lessons learned refers to the various experiences project team members have while participating in a project. Lessons are shared in a review session which usually occurs once the project has been completed, with any improvements or best practices incorporated into subsequent projects.
Growth engineering is a systematic, technical approach to the improvement of conversion and the user experience. Combined with business engineering it helps business people build valuable companies from scratch.
Retrospective analyses are held after a project to determine what worked well and what did not. They are also conducted at the end of an iteration in Agile project management. Agile practitioners call these meetings retrospectives or retros. They are an effective way to check the pulse of a project team, reflect on the work performed to date, and reach a consensus on how to tackle the next sprint cycle.
Andy Grove, helped Intel become among the most valuable companies by 1997. In his years at Intel, he conceived a management and goal-setting system, called OKR, standing for “objectives and key results.” Venture capitalist and early investor in Google, John Doerr, systematized in the book “Measure What Matters.”
Cog’s ladder is a model of group development. The ladder was created in 1972 by Procter & Gamble employee George Charrier to help management at the company understand how teams worked to make them more efficient. Cog’s ladder is a model of group formation and behavior that is used to help businesses understand how a team can work to achieve its goals.
The GRPI model was created by American organizational theorist Richard Beckhard in 1972. Although the model is almost 50 years old, its simplicity and effectiveness mean it is still in use today. The GRPI model is a tool used by leaders to diagnose the cause of team dysfunction and increase productivity, quality, and efficiency through four key dimensions that cause conflict: goals, roles, processes, and interactions.
High-performance coaches work with individuals in personal and professional contexts to enable them to reach their full potential. While these sorts of coaches are commonly associated with sports, it should be noted that the act of coaching is a specific type of behavior that is also useful in business and leadership.
The OSKAR coaching model was developed in the early 2000s by organizational theorists and authors Paul Z. Jackson and Mark McKergow. The OSKAR coaching model is a solution-driven method used for managerial coaching in the workplace. In their book titled The Solutions Focus: Making Coaching and Change Simple, the pair layout a framework to help coaches implement training sessions that are focused on solutions and not on problems.
The training of trainers model seeks to engage master instructors in coaching new, less experienced instructors with a particular topic or skill. The training of trainers (ToT) model is a framework used by master instructors to train new instructors, enabling them to subsequently train other people in their organization.
Though no single individual can claim to have created the GROW model, writers Graham Alexander and Alan Fine together with racing car champion John Whitmore played a significant part in developing the framework during the 80s and 90s. The GROW model is a simple way to set goals and solve problems during coaching sessions through four stages: goal, reality, options, and will (way forward).
The Ulrich model helps large or complex organizations with many business units organize their human resource function. The Ulrich model was named for management coach David Ulrich after the release of his 1996 book Human Resource Champions: The Next Agenda for Adding Value and Delivering Results.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
