SCIENCE OF MOTIVATION

The speed of change makes every day a challenge, especially when it comes to people—minds, thoughts, and social and professional behaviors. We live in an era of constant innovation, with increasingly complex needs and tighter deadlines and costs. For the success of any business, it is crucial to empower people, as they are the ones who develop ideas, assign values, sell products, create relationships, and generate profitability. Investing, respecting, and, above all, knowing how to motivate your employees by providing tools adapted to real needs becomes the closest and most effective path. Knowledge encourages the improvement of best practices in management, maximizing the results of your products and services.

However, even today, many people and companies resist and do not adapt to a new reality. It is common for people to be evaluated based on numbers—numbers that mistakenly determine how much life is worth, such as goals, results, targets, percentages, among others, used as evidence of what we live and how we live. People and companies are becoming old at an increasingly younger age, and the most dangerous thing to define the future is precisely accepting the aging of ideas, practices, and models. They let the obvious dominate and imprison themselves in it, due to the lack of audacity to do things differently, seek new knowledge, and build their own story from the real necessary motives.

Similarly, in the business world, the need for a redefinition of purposes and values has become evident, initiating a social change in capitalism where part of the market begins to recognize the importance of behavioral factors in work relationships for business success. Successful businesses are the result of people, and for employees to give their best, an effective motivational management model, differentiated, and a favorable environment for professional development are necessary.

In this sense, within science, numerous studies allow us to understand what motivates people to be the best they can be. Studies on Motivation began around 1945 with Gestalt psychologist Karl Dunker, who identified the need for a new approach to human perspectives. Dunker coined the term “functional fixedness” to describe the difficulties in visual perception and problem-solving that arise from an element in a situation already having a function (fixed), which needs to be changed for correct perception or to find the solution to the problem. His most famous experiment was the “candle problem.” Dunker asked his students for an intelligent response to a problem that required seeing beyond obvious answers, systemic thinking, and creative use of one’s senses to solve it. He realized that people could improve creative performance when there were no rewards. Since then, numerous studies have been conducted to understand what effectively motivates people. Daniel Pink specializes in motivational behavior, and in his book “Drive 3.0,” he presents various studies that prove that the reward and punishment-based motivation model is no longer effective. Among the studies cited, he describes the continuation of Dunker’s studies by Canadian scientist, psychologist, and professor Sam Glucksberg, known for his work on figurative language: metaphors, irony, sarcasm, and idioms. Glucksberg used Dunker’s experiments to continue his studies on creativity, focusing on the power that incentive can bring to people. In these studies, he wanted to demonstrate how a financial reward determination for a specific problem resolution could help or hinder finding a solution. After numerous tests that required groups to use creative cognition, the results were much more efficient, agile, and intelligent when there were no increases, promotions, or punishments. Now, when tests did not require cognitive intelligence, there was an improvement in performance, according to the time to find a solution, much more significant when using financial motivation.

Pink describes in his book that, contrary to what many think, the existing market pattern that relates financial reward to achieved results such as bonuses, commissions, trips, prizes, among others, believing it to be an effective incentive policy that motivates people to challenge thoughts and accelerate the creative process, achieving extraordinary results, is not true. It is not how the human mind works. In studies conducted over the past 40 years, reproduced many times in various countries around the world in search of more effective ways to incentivize professionals and teams, it has been proven that incentives can often harm, block creativity, and blind thinking. These incentive contingencies of the type “if you do this, you will get that,” work for certain circumstances and not for others; for many tasks, they are really inhibitors of results, hindering them. This is one of the most robust findings in social sciences and also one of the most ignored.

Another study cited by Pink was the work of Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics, born in New York and teaching at Duke University. Considered one of the greatest economists of our time, he and his team conducted a study with MIT students that required creativity, motor skills, and concentration, dividing their studies with and without rewards. The conclusions are exactly the same—namely, for mechanical tasks, rewards did make a difference; the higher the values, the higher the performance! Now, for cognitive skills, the higher the reward, the lower the efficiency of the groups.

Motivation studies have been conducted in various countries worldwide, whether poor or rich, and the results have been repeated. Such studies were conducted at the renowned London School of Economics (LSE) or at Carnegie Mellon University, sponsored by the Federal Reserve, which presented similar results. In

 all cases, financial incentives for activities requiring cognition resulted in a negative impact on overall performance.

It is essential to understand that all social psychology studies described on Motivation converge with the science of the mind that defines today’s Well-being Neuroscience, the particular bias that has important answers to understand what quality of life is. Neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel, Ph.D., has become one of the leading experts in well-being health and neurological understanding of reward. In her clear and objective definition, she mentions that the conception is to understand that Well-being is interconnected with feeling good, being a set of mental and physical characteristics in concise duality. According to Suzana, Well-being includes the feeling of controlling your life, from simple decisions to those that impact the future; control is linked to stress, the less control, the higher the stress in life. She also emphasizes freedom of expression, social interactions, fundamental for human survival (For example, affection makes all the difference in a person’s life, from birth, and this only happens with social interaction). Finally, well-being is linked to social interaction being useful to others, being able to help, feeling useful is one of the greatest rewards in life, clear evidence of being alive. Life stagnation is depressing, it is harmful because humans were programmed to be useful.

Neuroscience proves that well-being activates our reward neurological system. Understanding this system provides a real unveiling of the neural capabilities we possess. Humans perform any action for gains; that is, Motivation is needed to succeed in any action. All this has to do with the reward system; it is crucial in allowing our dreams to be achieved, goals, objectives, determinations to be realized in the set of possibilities that life provides.

“The science of the reward system in the brain” was first described by James Olds, an American physiological psychologist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, around the 1960s. By definition, its activation is very understandable, considering human social evolution; there is a constant quest for the new, knowledge, conquest, and challenge. The motivational pleasure of waking up and battling goes beyond survival, as the brain, in its perfection, stimulates the reward area precisely to fight, challenge, and overcome the daily battles, and, within the possibilities, to always be the best one can be. Suzana Houzel describes in her book the most important stimulators of the reward system, ranging from the most primitive such as sex, affection, and food to the inclusion of control over life and one’s decisions; the respect for being useful and the awareness of being part of something greater that requires efforts and challenges, especially those that require the use of intelligence. This leads to the same results found in decades of motivational studies.

That’s why knowing how to motivate people has become the key factor for success and makes all the difference in the results achieved. Stimulating people with better rewards or threatening them with harsher punishments no longer works. Today’s world demands that human actions be connected around a desire to do things because they are important, bring satisfaction, are interesting, and because they are part of something larger. Daniel Pink says in his book that the motivator should always revolve around 3 elements:

– Autonomy: Desire to direct our own lives.

– Mastery: Desire to continually improve by doing something that truly matters.

– Purpose: Desire to do what we do to serve something larger than ourselves.

The most interesting thing about all this is that, despite the intrinsic knowledge of science, there is still a great disconnect between what science knows and what businesses do. We are in the 21st century, where companies are being run by people educated in the 20th century, but many of them are using theories, techniques, and tools from the 19th century, with a positivist mindset and a different reality in goals, needs, and characteristics of people and the market.

The great attribute of leadership is precisely the ability to inspire, motivate, animate ideas, people, and projects, and it is evident that the world is increasingly in need of creative and innovative leaders with conceptual skills. There is an overflow of ready-made answers and unfounded ideas, regressive, presented by numerous “gurus” who have nothing new to offer. Think about your own work, does it require dedication or also intelligent, insightful solutions? Successful companies are those that over time become old and wise, but never old. These companies do not stay the same; they transform and evolve according to need and, above all, seek knowledge. The world is changing at such a speed that, if you are not attentive, you lose track of events and, above all, professional and social needs.

Therefore, this article invites reflection on the concept of Motivation. Companies that follow science do not age but refine themselves, innovating in their competencies. Apparently, perhaps to survive in the 21st century, it is necessary to seek the common good while doing things well, gaining more and more space in the hearts of your team, profiting from passion and well-defined purposes, paying less attention to your individual interests than to the interests of all, and believing that the complete well-being of an individual depends on the well-being of all. It seems accurate to state that in this century, companies will be judged by their ethical commitments, their focus on people, and responsible relationships with the natural environment.

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Hello, I’m Marcello de Souza! I started my career in 1997 as a leader and manager of a large company in the IT and Telecom market. Since then, I have been involved in major projects structuring, implementing, and optimizing telecommunications networks in Brazil. Restless and passionate about behavioral and social psychology. In 2008, I decided to delve into the universe of the human mind. Since then, I have become a professional passionate about unraveling the secrets of human behavior and catalyzing positive changes in individuals and organizations. A Ph.D. in Social Psychology, with over 25 years of experience in Cognitive Behavioral Development & Human Organization. With a broad career, I highlight my roles as:

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