Cesar Batlle
EDEL 6112
Super. 1, Task 3
5/28/05
Motivational Theorists
The question of what motivates people into action is one that has served as the
catalyst for much research and contemplation. Three of the most interesting theorists on
motivation are Abraham Maslow, Viktor Frankl, and Albert Bandura. While each man’s
theory is uniquely his own, all three have some striking similarities.
Maslow’s theory on motivation is the most widely known. He proposes that
people have a spectrum of potential needs. These needs range from essential needs for
physiological survival, such as hunger, to social needs, such as esteem. According to
Maslow, a person must have the more basic needs met before that person can be
motivated to strive toward fulfilling other needs. In other words, a hungry man can not be
made to concentrate on attaining love or esteem. A desperately hungry man’s entire
conscious and unconscious mind thinks only about meeting his need for food. Hunger
entirely consumes this person. However, those needs that are satisfied do not motivate.
Therefore, if this same man reaches a point where he is always capable of attaining food,
he will become entirely consumed with, and be able to think only about, fulfilling a
higher need; securing safety for example. If that need is met, the man will move up the
hierarchy of needs. The next need is love. So, once a person is able to consistently find
food/water and once they feel safe in their environment, that person will seek loving
relationships, be that through friends, children, or some other set of people who make the
person feel as if they belong. In a society such as ours, where most adults are able to find
nourishment and where society provides a high degree of safety, adults quickly find
themselves motivated primary by the need for love and more up the hierarchy of needs
from there.
It is interesting to note that the emergence of needs is gradual. Maslow writes that
needs emerge “by slow degrees from nothingness. For instance, if prepotent need A is
satisfied only 10 percent; then B may not be visible at all. However, as this need becomes
satisfied 25 percent, need B may emerge 5 percent.” Thus, a need does not have to be
entirely satisfied before the next need begins to emerge. The human mind does not
consciously track the degree to which a need is fulfilled. Maslow states that this
regulation is an unconscious process: “On the whole, however, in the average person,
they are more often unconscious rather than conscious” (p.11). He parallels the mind’s
regulation of needs to the body’s maintenance of homeostasis: If the blood needs more
salt, the man seeks salt; if the mind needs more esteem, the man seeks more esteem.
In this assertion, that man is mainly unconsciously motivated, lies one of the
biggest breaks between Maslow’s theory on motivation and Bandura’s. Bandura believes
that people are mainly motivated consciously; that people can, and mainly do, motivate
themselves through conscious effort. He writes,
Most human motivation is cognitively generated. People motivate
themselves and guide their actions anticipatorily by the exercise of
forethought. They form beliefs about what they can do. They anticipate
likely outcomes of prospective actions. They set goals for themselves and
plan courses of action designed to realize valued futures. (p.3)
Bandura attributes much more of an individual’s level of motivation to the
individual’s conscious thoughts and, in fact, goes on to write that motivation is largely
due to how the person perceives themselves. Those people with high self-efficacy are
much more likely to be highly motivated. In contrast to Maslow’s theory of motivation,
Bandura proposes that motivation is not as dependent on the fulfillment of basic needs as
it is on the individual’s belief in themselves and their ability to succeed. While Maslow
says that people innately desire to earn esteem and self-actualize, Bandura says that
people who believe that they can achieve higher levels of love, esteem, and self-actualize
desire to do so. Those who do not believe they are capable of these things are complacent
after their basic needs for food and safety are met. They do not strive to achieve more.
At this point, one can partially reconcile Maslow’s theory with Bandura’s
because, according to Bandura, it is not so much that people with low self-efficacy do not
have a desire to fulfill needs beyond those two most basic needs, physiological needs and
safety needs, as that these insecure people fear that by pursuing higher needs they
actually stand to lose the safety they have achieved. As Bandura writes, “[P]eople who
doubt their capabilities shy away from difficult tasks which they view as personal
threats” (p. 1). Those who doubt their abilities are not motivated to pursue the fulfillment
of higher needs because they fear that doing so jeopardizes their safety: Failure could
expose them to ridicule, disturb their routine, or cost them their livelihood.
While Frankl is mainly famous for logotherapy and his work as a psychiatrist, a
portion of his thoughts concerning motivation goes hand in hand with Maslow’s and
Bandura’s theories. All three men say that people can be motivated by work. Frankl says
that in our society, where work is so valued, “being jobless was equated with being
useless” (p.142). He goes on to say that “there are three main avenues on which one
arrives at meaning in life. The first is by creating a work or by doing a deed” (p. 146). All
three men say that a job can be highly motivating. Frankl attributes this motivation to the
need people have to give their lives meaning. He says that people often have “enough to
live by but nothing to live for; they have means but no meaning” (p. 142). A job can
motivate a person by giving them goals. As Bandura writes, “A large body of evidence
shows that explicit, challenging goals enhance and sustain motivation” (p. 4). He goes on
to say, “by making self-satisfaction conditional on matching adopted goals, people give
direction to their behavior and create incentives to persist in their efforts until they fulfill
their goals.” Work is also a pathway to self-actualization; a highly motivating and
complex need. Maslow wrote a definition for self-actualization:
It refers to the desire for self-fulfillment, namely, to the tendency
for him to become actualized in what he is potentially. This
tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more
what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming. (p. 8)
Maslow also writes that a person’s work is very often their main path to selfactualization:
Even if all these needs are satisfied, we may still often (if not always)
expect that a new discontent and restlessness will soon develop, unless the
individual is doing what he is fitted for. A musician must make music, an
artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy. What a
man can be, he must be. (p. 7-8)
The fact that work can be motivating can be used to great advantage by prudent
leaders. By aligning the right people with the right jobs and by fostering and nurturing
personal growth through work, leaders can tap into a source of perpetual motivation.
References
Bandura, A. (1994). Self-Efficacy. Encyclopedia of human behavior (Vol. 4, pp.
71-81). New York: Academic Press. Retrieved 5/27/05, from http://www.emory.edu
/EDUCATION/mfp/BanEncy.html.
Frankl, V. (1984). Man’s search for meaning: An introduction to logotherapy (3rd
ed.). New York: Simon & Schuster.
Maslow, A. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50,
370-396. Retrieved 5/27/05, from http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Maslow/motivation.htm.