I had a delightful conversation with my friend Kim over breakfast this morning.
For my dissertation, I have been reading literature on motivation, which is what Kim’s hugely interested in and has been spending many many hours on studying. She obviously knows more about motivation and gave me some great ideas.
Long story short, as we were talking, I brought up this idea of looking at intrinsic and extrinsic motivation existing on two separate continua, rather than making up two opposite ends of one continuum. And guess what, Kim had very similar view too!
I haven’t yet got a chance to delve more into literature and see if two continua idea makes sense. But I’m definitely going to spend some time on this!
Yay – another exciting idea. Yes, another idea that’s just added to ‘my 10000000 ideas to explore more’ list. ;p
Might be like positive and negative affect and be orthogonal scales, as it were. After all, there’s no reason that one can be fully motivated in both ways, motivated fully in only one way, or completely demotivated in both ways.
Consider burnout in consultants (e.g., McKinsey). They make incredible amounts of money, have expenses covered, etc., but still burn out in something on the order of two years. On the other hand, there are nurses who make very little (compared to the difficulty of their job and how hard they have to work), but love their jobs and are dedicated to the profession. And then you have CEO’s who are both.
Yeah, those examples are interesting! Are you on AOM-OB listserv? Last year (around this time) there was a pretty heated discussion on this. Interestingly enough, a lot of people on the listserv (who participated in the thread) said they have been very intrinsically motivated, but without extrinsic rewards they would have not been as (intrinsically) motivated. ..