Week 5 Intrinsic & Extrinsic Motivation and Goal Setting

This week’s lecture covered two topics, these being Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation and Goal Setting.  As I was sitting in the lecture I remembered a time of when I went to a job interview for a managers job.  I was asked the question, as some of the tasks within the store are very monotonous, how would I go about motivating my staff?  At the time I was unsure of how to answer this question. The first thing that came to mind was by offering incentives and giving praise.  This would have been effective enough but as I now have a deeper understanding of extrinsic motivations which is summarised below

Motivation

There are two types of motivation Intrinsic and Extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation is a spontaneous activity, which is done purely out of self-interest.  Intrinsic motivation is the best type of motivation as it leads to persistence, creativity, deeper processing and finally optimal functioning and well-being.  Extrinsic Motivation is an activity undertaken as the result of a form of incentive such as going to work to get paid.

There are three factors that influence extrinsic behaviour these being incentives, consequences and rewards

Incentives precede behaviour and excite or inhibit behaviour, such as saying to an employee they can leave early if they finish off their task.

Consequences follow behaviour to either increase or decrease behaviour and can be either reinforcers or punishers

Reinforcers work by offering something after behaviour to increase the frequency of that behaviour, such as telling an employee that they have done a good job after they have done a certain task to promote more of that work. However, reinforcement varies greatly as there are six characteristics of reinforcers that must be taken into consideration, which are strictly subjective, these being,

• Quality
• Immediacy
• Person/reinforcer fit
• The recipients need for that particular reward
• Its intensity and
• The recipients value of the reinforcer

Reinforcers can be either positive or negative. Positive reinforcement is the addition of something to increase behaviour, such as giving compliments or rewards where as negative reinforcement is the avoidance of something which increases behaviour, such as the presence of the manager initiates workers to look busy to avoid getting into trouble.

Punishers are the opposite of reinforcers as they decrease an undesired behaviour, such as being warned about improper use of the Internet in the workplace, which will hopefully decrease the amount or type of internet surfing.

Rewards is the offering from one person to another in exchange for service or achievement such as offering a prize for participating in a contest.  A distinction to be made about rewards is that all positive reinforcers are rewards but not all rewards are positive enforcers this is because not all rewards act at increasing behaviour.

Dopamine is released and the behavioural activation system is activated when we receive rewards, however this only occurs if the reward is unexpected. – this makes me think of a the other day when I went to the bank. I checked my account and found that I had $3000 in there, this was a shock to me as I had not deposited the money myself, but then realised that my tax return had come in. As this was unexpected I was very excited and felt a buzz sensation run through me.

Punishers are ineffective at motivating behaviour especially spanking. Spanking has adverse short and long term effects such as aggression from observation learning, strained parent-child relationship, poor mental health and poor moral internalisation which ultimately leads into adulthood – I find this very interesting considering that many speakers particularly psychologists that come on the morning shows such as Today tend to say that its ok to spank your child when as matter of fact it would not have any positive effect on the child’s behavioural outcome.

Rewards can be effective but also come at a “Hidden Cost”.  If extrinsic rewards are given for behaviour that was intrinsic then the there will be a decline in the intrinsic behaviour.  They also interfere with learning as the reward interferes with the deeper processing of the information.