The Myth of Motivation

How can employees be motivated? Not at all!

A great deal has already been written about human motivation and especially the motivation of employees. The best and shortest summary of it is by Douglas McGregor, who significantly influenced my work on the Manifesto for Human(e) Leadership with his book “The Human Side of Enterprise” and his Theory X and Theory Y:

The answer to the question managers so often ask of behavioral scientists “How do you motivate people?” is, “You don’t.”

Douglas McGregor, 1966. Leadership and motivation: essays

Of course McGregor does not mean that people are generally unmotivated. We all have experienced what it is like to be enthusiastic about something and to burn for something, and to be able to work on it or play with it and get into that state that the psychologist and author Mihály Csíkszentmihályi described as “flow”. So this human motivation exists without a doubt.

But that was not the question at issue either. The question was, how can one arouse motivation in other people? And according to Douglas McGregor, there is only one correct answer to this question: Not at all! Real motivation always comes from within. External…