Motivation and Work

In the last chapter we discussed a number of theories of motivation. These may be divided (following Campbell et al., 1970) broadly speaking into content theories (relating to what the motivation is about: food, sex, money, etc.) and process theories (relating to how the motivation is aroused, main tained, satisfied, etc.). In view of the multiplicity of content theories, the inconclusiveness of research aimed at establishing a satisfactory classification system (or taxonomy) and the consequent complexity of the task of relating particular motives to work criteria, industrial psychologists have, at least since 1960, preferred to make use of process theories in their thinking and research. Consequently in this chapter we shall place more emphasis on these (Sections 7.2 and 7.3). Since some of the work on content theories has been discussed in the previous chapter (Sections 6.6 and 6.7) we shall not dwell on them at length here except to consider (in Section 7.4) the potential use fulness of this kind of theory for the work situation in view of some of the limitations of process theories.