In societies where uncertainty has reached new heights both at organizational and individual levels, it might be increasingly difficult to find a common ground between leaders and their workforce to build together of better future for them. It is therefore not surprising that managers and HR people strive to find an effective way to reverse this trend. Practically, the majority of them focus their attention on the concept of motivation through this question: How employees’ motivation can be aligned with an organization’s mission and strategy? In this question, motivation is typically conceived as a manageable variable essentially depending on rational factors such as wages levels, working conditions and feedbacks on performance. However, although interesting, this approach falls short of providing managers and HR people with a powerful frame of analysis.
Indeed, the rationalization of employees’ motivation appears too narrow to do justice to the complexity of people and situations. A way to broaden the scope of this issue is to join the concept of will to that of motivation. Inspired by the work of Schopenhauer, the will draws attention to the importance of individual substance over skills and experience. In essence, the will is the inner driver of people’s professional engagement over a long period of time. It is the energy of action fuelled by an irrepressible desire to bring a vision to life. By contrast, motivation is mostly triggered by external factors, and hence is inherently rational, instrumental, and ephemeral. From this distinction, motivation is alien to the will. For instance, someone can be motivated to do something because of an expected reward, yet without long lasting excitement and personal engagement. By contrast, someone who has the will to do something is typically fully and lastingly engaged – both heart and mind – in achieving a task or a goal.
As a result, a better future for organizations may rely as much on skills and experience as on a “convergence of wills” between leaders and their workforce. Hence, many questions arise. For instance: How to deal effectively with a profound divergence between wills and strategy? To what extent organizational performance can be improved in isolation from what leaders and employees want to be in this world? Are companies and their HR departments appropriately equipped to make such a convergence happen? Arguably, with the advent of corporate social responsibility, these new challenging questions may appear sooner than expected on the agenda of organizational leaders.
Visit here for more information about motorala case.