The Hidden History of Motivation

Did you know that something sinister lurks behind "motivation" in the workplace? What is motivation about really? What is it a sign of? And why there is an entire self-help industry catering to motivating employees?

First, consider that the concept of "motivation" practically did not exist prior to year 1900. Take a close look at the notion of motivation, where it came from, and what brought it into existence. You'll be surprised! My inquiry started with a simple question: why do employees need motivation to work? Aren't we supposed to work a job that we love?

Motivation became suddenly important precisely at the turn of the 20th century. The Google Book Ngram Viewer has a puzzling story to tell us about the usage of the word "motivation". Take a look:

Although earliest occurrences of the word "motivation" date back to the 1870's, its usage sharply surged exponentially at around year 1900, all the way to 1980, at which time it flattened. Google's book scans stop at 2009, and regardless of how accurate or inaccurate they are, this is too remarkable of a surge to ignore.

This turn of the century surge correlates with the beginnings of the "second industrial revolution", a period that saw the emergence then rapid increase of books on motivation.

So, if "motivation" is a product of the industrial revolutions, why does today's professional development industry still enact its methods and speak its language? We are well into the digital age with digital natives running the workplace, not industrialists or boomers. Perhaps, just perhaps, new standards of workplace values are in order so that we produce the qualities congruent with the age.

See, well into the offices of the 1970s, efficiency and performance were the necessary qualities to instill into people and the organizational culture for the sake of increasing productivity. The reason? Because human labor was still an impactful factor on production; workers needed to be motivated to increase their performance and complete their tasks efficiently; a machine-like value inherited from the first industrial revolution. As we headed into the eighties, a substantial economic phenomenon occurred: productivity kept improving at formidable rates because we were well into the age of computers and industrial automation; US wages flattened because companies began to outsource their labor in addition to replacing human performance with machines; and as we can deduce form the graph above, the motivation industry flattened with the wages.

Today we are in the digital age, an age marked not by the need for high labor performance and efficiency, but an age marked by a succession of radical (disruptive) innovations and a stagnant employment market marked by a general dissatisfaction with the job. Therefore, resilience, not efficiency, and enthusiasm for work, not spinning faster completing tasks, are the valued currencies of the digital age. These are the two values that stand to bring freedom and prosperity to people in the digital economy because now we must adapt to the new magnitude of performance and efficiency brought forth by digital technologies.

But the digital economy is not headed in the direction of wellness and prosperity for the majority of the inhabitants of planet Earth. Bosses and managers today still behave as those of the early 1900's, they still use the industrial-age key to motivation, that people are motivated by their fears, wants, hopes, preferences, beliefs, and want for immediate gratification. So they externally evoke employees into excitement based on such motivators. This has been known in management circles, and psychologists have a name for it: “extrinsic motivation.”

Today, the challenge is to transform the work environment from workplace to workspace to include all the magnificent freedoms and capabilities that digital technologies hand us. We must exploit them for our benefit, wellness, and a life of prosperity free of toil, drudgery and struggle.

So how will we cause this transformation?

First, we must re-think the "workspace" and respect its new nature: a networked environment that must be highly adaptable to rapid change. A distributed environment that no longer requires the management and bureaucracy that were needed during the pre-Computer and pre-Internet industrial age.

Second, we must recognize the workspace not as a shoe-box looking building with cubicles and equipment, but as a social organization that invites ambition, enthusiasm, and leadership.

And finally, we need to turn attention to the person, the individual, the Self, and start to awaken innate powers that we all share, powers such as the desire to accomplish, autonomy, and a mood of iconoclasm required to purge values that are no longer needed in the workplace, values at odds with our innate powers because they were shaped according to machine-like behavior.

Now, this is all easier said than done because each of these three transformative actions represent radical shifts in how we think about our work environment. They require true knowledge of how to transform a workplace at odds with our innate powers, to one that is congruent with modern times.

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