MBA Boot Camp: Motivation & Human Behavior (7.2)
Concepts & Vocabulary
Extrinsic Motivation: Doing something to earn a reward or avoid a punishment (e.g., a bonus, fear of being fired).
Intrinsic Motivation: Doing something because it is personally rewarding or interesting to you.
Psychological Safety: A shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking (e.g., you won't be punished for admitting a mistake or pitching a wild idea).
Core Lesson: Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory
Why do people work hard? The immediate assumption is "money." But organizational psychology proves this is only half true.
In the 1960s, Frederick Herzberg developed the Two-Factor Theory, a staple of MBA programs. He divided workplace factors into two buckets:
Hygiene Factors (The Baseline): Salary, job security, basic working conditions. If these are bad, employees are dissatisfied. But if you make them great, it doesn't magically create motivation. It simply creates a lack of dissatisfaction. It brings them to "neutral."
Motivators (The Engine): Challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth. These are the only things that actually make employees work harder and care more.
The MBA Marketing Insight: Marketers use this exact psychology on consumers. A discount code is an extrinsic motivator (it gets a quick sale). But building a brand community (like Harley Davidson or Lululemon) taps into intrinsic motivation, creating lifelong loyalty that competitors can't steal with a simple price cut.
Application & Reflection
This was something I experienced directly during my seven years as the director of Lodi Public Library. I looked for ways to cut costs and improve our community engagement so that we would have leverage to ask for more money from the city, which I could use for operational costs, like wages. I also looked at how to improve basic workday conditions, buying better chairs for the circulation desk and staff workroom, creating a file share to make it easier to share documents with one another, and removing sources of conflict at the desk (e.g. we went fine free, we removed the $2 charge for lost library cards, we added scan-to-email functionality on the copier, etc.).
Those helped to get things to a good neutral.
But I also gave employees autonomy over more tasks, sought their creative input regarding renovations, collection development, and program development, recognized their good work using our internal blog, staff meetings, and through birthday/Christmas gifts, and gave them training opportunities if they were interested in developing a skill or idea.
This approach meant that everyone worked hard and was happy, which was not only satisfying to me, but also good for the community.
