Vroom, Vroom, Motivation

Re-posting from 2006

Over the last four or five months I’ve noticed that my motivation about a few things has been really up and down and all over the place. I had some business opportunities that I really didn’t pursue with anything like the vigour they deserved, other things I’ve been pointlessly chasing like mad and a whole lot of stuff I’ve just been plain avoiding!

And I had an email from a friend yesterday that reminded me that our last face-to-face conversation had included a throw-away comment about one of the more useful motivation theories – the “Expectancy Theory”. I thought I’d take a look at this again and see if it confirmed some of the suspicions and instincts I had about why my own motivation had been so up and (mostly) down just recently.

Incidentally, if you ever needed an extra reason to examine motivation, the Expectancy Theory was first developed by a guy called Victor Vroom; I can’t think about it without my right foot pressing an imaginary gas pedal, “vroom, vroom”.

This is all summarised, bowdlerised and plagiarised by me, so don’t rely on it to pass your exams or anything, but here goes:

Motivation is the force that directs your behaviour; initiates it, determines some of your behavioural choices and influences the persistence (or otherwise) of that behaviour.

According to Expectancy Theory, your motivational force is derived from three related pairs of perceptions, where you might ask yourself:

• Effort/Performance – to what extent do I believe that the effort I put into something will lead to a good performance at it?
• Performance/Outcome – to what extent do I believe that a good performance at something will lead to the outcome I want?
• Outcome/Value – to what extent do I believe that the successful outcome is of value to me?
  

And as I went through trying to make sense of this theory, at least one thing became clear for me about the business opportunity I so half-heartedly followed. I never believed that this would come-off, regardless of how well my end of things went. The link between performance and outcome just wasn’t there for me.

And actually, I’d have been much better served by recognising this upfront and either taking steps to increase the linkage between good performance and outcome or, and I really believe this was the case here, just passing it by altogether, putting no further effort in and finding something better instead.

How about you?

What are you working on (or avoiding) right now, where one or more of these linkages is not in place

And, bigger question, what end of the chain do you start at when deciding what to do – “effort/performance” is the “I do it because I’m good at it” end, whilst “outcome/value” is the “I do it because it’s important to me” end?