Motivation and Work

Motivation and Work Alex, Ebony, Sana, Trea, Tre

Perspectives on Motivation • Instinct: A complex behavior that is rigidly patterned throughout a species and is unlearned. • Drive-Reduction Theory: The idea that a physiological need creates an aroused tension state (a drive) that motivates an organism to satisfy the need. • Hierarchy of needs: Maslow’s pyramid of human needs, beginning at the base with physiological needs that must first be satisfied before higher-level safety needs and then psychological needs become active.

Homeostasis: A tendency to maintain balanced or constant internal state; the regulation of any aspect of body chemistry, such as blood glucose, around a particular level. • Incentive: A positive or negative environmental stimulus that motivates behavior.

Optimum Arousal • A high increase in arousal can lead to an increase in curiosity. One is more likely to involve themselves in risky situations if they have a high increase in arousal. We aim to seek optimum levels of arousal to satisfy our needs. • To satisfy our increase in optimum levels of arousal, we need to experience stimulation. • An example to describe regulating arousal and stimulation is when we are bored and stressed. When we are bored we lack stimulation and we need to increase our arousal to a certain optimum level. Although when we are stressed we have too much stimulation and we need to decrease our arousal to a certain level.

Instincts and Evolutionary Psychology • 5759 supposed human instincts • Psychologist view human behavior as directed by: -Physiological needs -Psychological wants • Genes predispose species’ typical behavior

Drives and Incentives • Instincts Theory replaced by Drive-Reduction Theory -When a physiological need increases, so does a psychological want -Psychological aim is homeostasis • Pushed by our need to reduce drives • Pulled by incentives • Individual learning histories influence motives -Past experiences or preconceived notions can influence our motives • Drives are stronger when there’s both a need AND an incentive

HUNGER

Hunger (Physiological) • Ways we regulate hunger: • Caloric intake • Glucose: The form of sugar that circulates in the blood and provides the major source of energy for body tissues. When its level is low, we feel hunger. • Body Chemistry and the Brain (lateral hypothalamus versus ventrome-dial hypothalamus)

Physiological (con’t) • Set point: The point at which an individual’s “weight thermostat” is supposedly set. When the body falls below this weight, an increase in hunger and a lowered metabolic rate may act to restore the lost weight. • Basal metabolic rate: The body’s resting rate of energy expenditure.

Psychological • What influences taste preferences? • Carbohydrates and emotions (body chemistry) • Location and culture (environment) • Acceptance of new or unfamiliar foods

Psychological (con’t) • Anorexia nervosa: An eating disorder in which a normal- weight person diets and becomes significantly underweight, yet still feeling fat, continues to starve. • Bulimia nervosa: An eating disorder characterized by episodes of overeating, usually of high-calorie foods, followed by vomiting, laxative use, fasting, or excessive exercise.

Sexual Motivation • Researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson recorded the physical responses of volunteers who were involved in intercourse. With their data and results, they came up with a 4 stage cycle that occurred in both males and females known as the Sexual Response Cycle.

Sexual Response Cycle • - Excitement Phase: genital areas are swelled with blood; breasts enlarge • - Plateau Phase: blood pressure, breathing, and pulse increase; sperm becomes engorged in penis; clitoris retracts • - Orgasm Phase: muscles contract all over the body; woman’s arousal facilitates conception between penis and uterus, which creates a pleasurable feeling • - Resolution Phase: males go through a refractory period where he is incapable of another orgasm

Another aspect Masters and Johnson looked into was the incapability to complete the Sexual Response Cycle known as Sexual Disorders. Sexual Disorders are problems that consistently impair sexual functioning. For men, this includes premature ejaculation and erectile dysfunction; and for women, this includes orgasmic disorder, or having trouble with producing orgasms. • Causes of Sexual Disorders – emotional relationship between two partners during intercourse • Solutions – Behaviorally Oriented Therapy, where men learn to control ejaculation and women train themselves to produce an orgasm; Viagra.

Hormones and Sexual Behavior • Our sex hormones have 2 effects on us. They: • - Direct the physical development of males/female sex characteristics • - Activate sexual behavior • Males have testes that help manufacture testosterone, the male sex hormone. Females become sexually receptive in heat when the female hormone estrogen peaks at ovulation.

Teen Pregnancy • Researcher K.T. Call compared American teens to European teens and discovered that although American teens have lower rates of intercourse, they have higher rates of teen pregnancy and abortions.

Five Factors that Contribute to Teen Pregnancy • - Ignorance: mistaking ideas about birth control, overestimating other’s sexual activity that leads to misperception and influence on their behavior • - Guilt Related to Sexual Activity: Sexual inhibitions can reduce sexual activity; but it also reduces attempts of birth control and teens may hesitate to carry condoms • - Minimal Communication about Birth Control: teens feeling uncomfortable talking to others about contraception, teens who are open to talk to other people are more likely to use contraceptives • - Alcohol Use: sexually active teens are usually alcohol using teens and those who use alcohol prior to sex are less likely to use condoms • - Mass Media Norms of Unprotected Promiscuity: an average hour of TV time in three major U.S. networks contain around 15 sexual acts and/or words that involve unmarried partners

Four Factors That Help with Teen Abstinence • High Intelligence: teens with higher than average test scores will delay sex because they are more focused on future long-term achievements • Religiosity: Actively religious teens reserve sex for marital commitment • Father Presence: a father’s absence has linked to sexual activity in girls • Participation in Service Learning Programs: teens that volunteer as tutors, teachers, or take part in community projects have lower pregnancy rates

Sex and Human Values • Researchers try to keep their work about sexuality value-free since values are both personal and cultural. The significance about sexual intimacy is its expression of our profoundly social nature. Sex at its human best is life uniting and love-renewing.

Stimuli External Stimuli Imagined Stimuli • Many studies say men become aroused when they see (pornography), hear, or read erotic material • Women (surprisingly) inhabit the same amount of stimuli as men when they’re given the same amount of stimuli • Women – Amygdala • Men – Erotica • People may find such (things) pleasing of disturbing (just like food) • With more exposure, any erotic stimuli habituates (lessens) • The brain is the most significant sex organ • Our imagination can influence sexual arousal • People with a spinal cord injury (no genital sensation) can still feel sexual desire • Genital arousal accompanies all types of dreams, when most dreams aren’t sexual • Dreams = Sexual Imagery = orgasms + wet dreams (nocturnal emissions) -> occurs when no orgasm hasn’t occurred recently. • Previous Sexual Activities + Fantasies = More Attraction. women/men have had sexual fantasies • Sexual active people • 95% or have more sexual fantasies

Studies indicate that about 3 or 4 % of men and 1 or 2% of women are homosexual, and that sexual orientation in enduring. • Research doesn’t support cause /effect links between homosexuality and any of the following: A child’s relationship w/parents, father-absent homes, fear of other genders, childhood sexual experiences, peer relationships, or dating experiences.

The Need to Belong • Social bonds boosted our ancestor’s survival rate.Attachments served as a powerful survival impulse. • Cooperation in groups enhance survival. • We are innately social creatures. • People in every society belong to groups.

Wanting to Belong • We spend a great deal of time thinking about actual and hoped-for relationships. • When relationships do form, we tend to feel joy. • Kennon Sheldon and colleagues (2001) • South Korean and American collegians • Satisfaction of self-esteem and relatedness- belonging

Acting to Increase Social Acceptance • When we feel included, accepted, and loved by those important to us, our self-esteem increases. • Mark Leary says that self-esteem is a gauge of how valued and accepted we are. • Most of our social behavior aims to increase our belonging or social acceptance. • To avoid rejection, we generally conform to group standards and seek to make favorable impressions.

Maintaining Relationships • We promise to call, write, text. • Parting makes one feel distressed. • Attachments can keep people in abusive relationships. • When something threatens or dissolves our social ties, anxiety, loneliness, jealousy, and guilt overwhelms us.

The Pain of Ostracism • Sometimes, the need to belong is denied. • Social psychologist Kipling Williams and his colleagues have studied such experiences of ostracism- of social exclusion- in both natural and laboratory settings. • Worldwide, humans use ostracism to control social behavior, with punishing effects (ie. Children: timeout, Adults: imprisonment). • To experience ostracism is to experience real pain.

Motivation at Work • If we are not satisfied with certain aspects in our life, we tend to change our workplaces. • It is likely that whatever causes us distress, socially, is our work. • People tend to categorize their work into three categories; a job, a career, or a calling. • A job is where you make money, but it is not always positive or fulfilling to the worker. • A career is a chance to advance from one position to a higher one. And a calling is fulfilling, it makes money, and it is a socially useful activity. • A calling gives you the highest level of satisfaction with your work and life because that is what one enjoys doing and is good at.

When being purposefully engaged one experiences flow, a completely involved/focused state of consciousness when diminished awareness of self and time, resulting from optimal engagement of one’s skills. • During flow, or being in the zone, one is most likely to say, “Where did the time go?!” Exhilarating flow within an activity fully engages our skills. When someone is purposefully engaged and doing what they enjoy, their quality of life increases. • Industrial-organizational (I/O) psychology is the application of psychological concepts and methods to optimizing human behaviors in workplaces.

There are 3 subfields of I/O psychology. • Human factors psychology explores how machines and environments can be optimally designed to fit human abilities. • Personnel psychology applies psychology’s methods and principles to select and evaluate workers, and focuses on identifying and placing well suited candidates. • Organizational psychology considers how work environments and management of styles influence worker motivation, satisfaction, and productivity, and often modifies jobs to boost morale and productivity.

Task leadership: Goal-oriented leadership that sets standards, organizes work, and focuses attention on goals. • Social leadership: Group-oriented leadership that builds teamwork, mediates conflict, and offers support. • Achievement motivation: A desire for significant accomplishment: for mastery of things, people, or ideas; for attaining a high standard.

Harnessing Strengths • Identifying your strengths and weaknesses allows you to set personal goes which enables one to flourish at work. • We tend to perform well at jobs that deal with what we enjoy and what we are good at. • Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton stated that the first step to a stronger organization is creating/instituting a strengths-based selection. Matching one’s strengths to certain works is the first step towards workplace effectiveness. Identifying effective and non-effective people in a role is a way to try to measure performance as objectively as possible.

Do Interviews Predict Performance? • Interviewers tend to feel confident about their ability to predict job performances from an unconstructed, get-acquainted, informal interview. However, these interviews are not as reliable as they think they are. Studies showed that focusing more on the interviewee’s overall evaluation is much more reliable than evaluating hand-written applications or parts of an interview. Formal interviews create the least amount of bias possible.

The Interviewer Illusion • There are 4 factors that explain overconfidence in an interviewer to make false accusations on the interviewee. • -The interviewer does not ask about the interviewee’s good intentions, rather they ask more about the work and habitual behaviors. • -The interviewers follow the successes of their careers of the ones they have hired rather than the rejected ones. Interviewers focus more on a perfect candidate than one that can make minor mistakes that can shape them into becoming a more successful worker. • -Interviewers believe that what the interviewee is like in the interview is what they get, however people can change and we do not always get what we see. • -Preconceptions and mood of the interviewer reflect on the interviewee’s chances of getting the job. Interviewers tend to take their bad moods out on applicants, or, if they find the interviewee to have similar personalities as them, they are more likely to get the job.

Structured Interviews • Structured interviews offer a disciplined method of collecting information. This is an interview process that asks the same, job-relevant, questions to all applicants, and each applicant is rated on an established scale. • A structured interview tries to reduce bias. It tends to be more accurate than an unstructured interview because it is more reliable and focuses more on the job itself. • Unstructured interviews ask irrelevant questions, questions that do not focus directly on the job itself. In this type of interview, not all applicants are asked the same questions.

Appraising Performance • Performance appraisal serves organizational purposes on who to retain, how to reward/pay people, and how to better manage employee strengths with promotions/job shifts. • There are three types of appraisal methods. • The first is a checklist, where supervisors check behaviors that describe the worker. • The second are graphic rating scales, where a supervisor checks how dependable and productive someone is. • The third are behavior rating scales where a supervisor checks behaviors that best describes the workers performance. • Another type of feedback is 360-degree feedback where you rate yourself, your manager, and other coworkers and vice versa. This results in open communication and a complete appraisal. • However, performance appraisal can be bias.

Organizational Psychology: Motivating Achievement • Motivation matters just as much as the appraisal of work and the matching of talents to work. • People with high achievement motivation achieve more. • School performance, attendance, and graduation honors reflect self-discipline more than intelligence. • Herbert Simon that world class experts invest at least 10 years of hard work—40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year. • Higher achievers are likely to be distinguished by their discipline over their natural talent. • Achievement involves more than raw ability.

Satisfaction and Engagement • Employee satisfaction is a priority concern for I/O Psychology. -Decreased job stress feeds improved health. -Modest positive correlation between individual job satisfaction and performance. -Three types of employees: • Engaged: Working with passion and feeling a profound connection to their company or organization. • Not-Engaged: Putting in the time but investing little passion into their work. • Actively Disengaged: Unhappy workers undermining what their colleagues accomplish.

Motivation and Work