8.1 An Introduction to Motivation 奶 outcomes,just that they believe they can control their fates.Xenikou(2005)also found a posi- tive relationship between an optimistic view of life(called a positive attributional style)and work motivation among Greek managerial and nonmanagerial employees.Further,she dis- covered that this optimism seemed to diminish with organizational tenure such that after four years with an organization,employees tended to grow more pessimistic in outlook. The personality-motivation connection is an important one.Past theories of work moti. vation gave little emphasis to individual difference measures such as personality traits.They tended to take a one-size-fits-all approach.Nor have work motivation theories paid much attention to individual differences in cognitive ability,assuming instead that everyone is smart enough to set and remember goals and to calculate expectancies.Perhaps one of the reasons why the person-as-scientist theories have lost ground to the person-as-judge theo. ries is because not everyone is as intelligent or emotion-free as thescientist"assumed by the theory.As motivation theory evolves into the person-as-judge metaphor,it should be increasingly valuable to look at personality traits in our attempts to understand work moti. vation.Equally interesting is the proposition of Kanfer and Ackerman (2004)that motiva- tion and performance will actually change over time as both cognitive abilities and personality change in middle and later adulthood. MODULE 8.1 SUMMARY Worker motivation has been a key interest for obvious that the individual is not perfectly rational 1-0 psychologists for almost a hundred years. in gathering and using information.Instead.the The earliest I-O theories of motivation were individual is influenced by social information in anchored in the notions of instincts.The term the form of attributions involving the intentions "instinct"was gradually replaced with terms of others(the person-as-judge metaphor). such as"need.""motive."and"drive." Early and modern approaches to motivation are Weiner suggested that the best way to understand based on the premise that increasing the amount the wide variation in motivational theories,as of time and effort that an individual devotes to a well as of the evolution of motivational thinking. task (ie..task motivation)will result in higher is through one of two metaphors:the person as levels of individual performance and increased machine and the person as scientist.Within these productivity for the organization.A basic model two metaphors.certain submetaphors have for considering the role of motivation in perfor- emerged as motivational theory has matured. mance is:Performance =(Motivation x Ability)- Situational Constraints Modern motivational theory views the individual as an active information gatherer (the scientist In recent decades.personality characteristics metaphor)rather than as a passive respondent to have become more important in the study of either internal or external stimuli (the person-as- work motivation. machine metaphor).Further,it is increasingly KEY TERMS motivation field theory person as judge instincts group dynamics work-life balance need person as machine locus of control drive person as scientist behaviorist approach limited rationality