Motivation Theory

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What is the reason behind certain behavior of an individual? What initiates an individual to do something either that is good or bad? How do people succeed in reaching goal? These questions certainly deal with motivation as motivation provides base for a person’s action, desires and needs. Motivation encourages us to move towards certain goals that may be due to rewards, incentives, and or driving forces. It is a presumed internal or external force that energizes or encourages certain actions. For instance, a baby eats a whole glass of milk after the mother promises to provide a candy bar afterwards. Thus, motivation is an activating action that stimulates people to do something. In general motivation is the process of starting, directing and …show more content…

These theories are evolved to identify and explain the need that influences the human behavior. It is focused to answer these main questions: what forces within people, or within their environment, leads to motivation? What process of the mechanism are involved in motivational behavior? Most of the general theories of motivation emphasizes four basic qualities i.e. activating- which stimulates us to do something, directive- which guides our behavior towards meeting specific goals or needs, sustaining- which helps us to sustain behaviors until we reach our goals and motivating- motives that differs in strength depending on the person and situation.
According to an article on Cherry (2016), the researchers have developed a number of theories to describe motivation and each individual theories tends to be rather limited in a scope.
The Humanistic theories of motivation are based on the idea that people also have strong cognitive reasons to act in order to meet their needs, which is illustrated in Abraham Maslow 's hierarchy of needs which presents different motivations at different levels. According to the Drive theory of motivation, people are motivated to take certain actions that is caused by unmet needs. For example, you might be motivated to drink a glass of water in order to reduce the …show more content…

It is mainly essential in the workplace, it is helpful also in leadership. For example, you might be motivated to go to work each day for the monetary reward of being paid. The expectancy theory of motivation suggests that when we are think of future, we develop expectations. We want positive outcome. We want to make the future as imagined which leads people to feel more motivated to pursue those likely outcomes.
According to Sarah Grison, Michael S. Gazzaniga (Psychology in your life, page no-317), Motivation has two different theories i.e. intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic means internal desire to find out new things and challenges, to observe and to gain knowledge and to analyze one’s capacity. Such motivation is long-lasting and self -sustaining. It is a natural motivational tendency and is an important element in cognitive, social, and physical development. For example, a girl loves dancing because she enjoys dancing which motivates her to participate in dance competitions. Extrinsic motivation is usually the external forces that influences somebody to do something. Rewards and punishments are the extrinsic motivation. John participated in dance just to win the trophy is an example of extrinsic

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