Motivational framework

Task motivation

Task (intrinsic) motivation is an important psychological construct in the motivational framework. Task motivation arises from one's propensity to engage in activities of interest and the resultant promotion in learning and development and expansion of the individual's capacities. Task motivation entails "positively valued experiences that individuals derive directly from a task" and conditions specific to the task that produce motivation and satisfaction. People are motivated to perform a task when they engage in an activity simply for the satisfaction inherent in the behavior. This satisfaction can arise from positive feelings of being effective or being the origin of behavior. Task motivation is critical for high quality performance. The literature on the impact of task characteristics on work performance indicates a need for identifying factors that affect task motivation.

Task motivation is influenced by the following five factors: user perception of a task, users' motivational orientation, decision environment, task characteristics, and task/user characteristics (ability, knowledge, and experience).


Perception of task

The four components of the Perception of Task Value scale are interest, importance, utility, and cost. The motivation theory suggests that task motivation is high when a task is perceived to be high in interest, importance, or utility, or the cost of engaging in the task is low, and vice versa.

Individuals experience interest when their needs and desires are integrated with the activity. From this perspective, interest is the driving mechanism for all actions, including cognitive activity. A person is said to be experientially interested when a certain quality of attention and sense of delight is present. Interest leads to the performance of intrinsically motivated behaviors. In this respect, interest and intrinsic motivation are considered to be synonymous. Consistent with the definition offered by Sansone and Smith, this chapter defines task (intrinsic) motivation as a person's experience of interest in an activity.

The importance component pertains to the importance of performing well in an activity. Importance is also related to the relevance of engaging in an activity to either confirm or disconfirm salient features of a person's actual or ideal self-schema. A task is deemed to be high in importance if it allows individuals to confirm salient attributes of their self-schemata (e.g., competence in the domains of sports or arts). When users perceive a task to be personally important, they become motivated by the task, leading to increased task motivation.

The utility component refers to the importance of a task for the pursuance of a variety of long-term or short-term goals without any regard for a person's interest in the task. The utility factor relates to a person's extrinsic reasons for engaging in an activity; that is, a person may engage in a task not for its own sake but to obtain desired goals. Utility can also be viewed as perceived usefulness of the task for goal attainment (e.g., individuals’ belief about how the task can assist them to attain specific goals such as career prospects or outperforming others).

The cost of engaging in a task is affected by the (1) amount of effort necessary for succeeding, (2) opportunity cost of engaging in the activity, and (3) anticipated emotional states such as performance anxiety, fear of failure, or fear of the negative consequences of success. A negative relationship is proposed to exist between the value of a task and the cost/benefit ratio in terms of the amount of effort required for doing well in the task. The opportunity cost of a task refers to the time lost for engaging in other valued alternatives. Further, a person may experience anxiety, fear of failure, or fear of the negative consequences of success in the course of a task engagement.


Motivational orientation

Individuals may be intrinsically motivated (i.e., perform a task for the sake of interest), extrinsically motivated (i.e., complete a task for the sake of extrinsic incentives) or have no motivation for doing a task. Individuals have a desire to perform well either for internal (e.g., interest or enjoyment) or external (e.g., to impress others or to attain goals) reasons. A person’s baseline attitude toward an activity can be considered as a trait. Researchers have treated the intrinsic-extrinsic motivational orientation as a stable individual difference variable. This means that an individual can walk into a situation with a specific motivational orientation. The type of motivational orientation (i.e., intrinsic, extrinsic, or both) determines a person’s initial task motivation. Motivational orientation has an impact on the final and type of motivation in a specific task. The Work Preference Inventory (WPI) has been developed to assess the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation of individuals. This scale directly assesses the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation of individuals, assumes the coexistence of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and incorporates a wide range of cognitions and emotions proposed to be part of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Chan’s motivational framework suggests examination of the impact of motivational orientation (a trait variable) on task motivation (a state variable).


Decision environment

The decision-making process is frequently influenced by factors in the environment. These factors have an impact on the behaviors of decision makers. Factors in the decision environment (i.e., reward, justification, accountability, and time constraint) have an effect on task motivation. Task motivation is expected to be high when individuals are (a) provided with rewards that do not undermine their interest in a task (b) required to justify their performance in the task, (c) held accountable for the outcome of their decision performance, or (d) required to complete the task in a specific time frame. Task motivation is predicted to be low when the above decision environmental factors are absent.


(a) Rewards

Factors affecting motivation, and thus effort and performance, are difficult to consider without also considering the reward structures that are in place for effort and performance. While rewards are primarily viewed as necessary to provide extrinsic motivation, a meta-analysis of 128 well-controlled experiments examining the relationship between rewards and intrinsic motivation reveals significant and consistent negative impact of rewards on intrinsic motivation for interesting activities. This effect may be due to reward-oriented individuals being more directed toward goal-relevant stimuli, and the rewards actually divert such individuals' attention away from the task and environmental stimuli that might promote more creative performance. Indeed, rewarded individuals "work harder and produce more activity, but the activity is of a lower quality, contains more errors, and is more stereotyped and less creative than the work of comparable non-rewarded subjects working on the same problems". On the other hand, there are many positive effects on performance derived generally from the introduction of rewards. Rewards can be used to motivate individuals to spend more time on a task and influence their focus on the task.


(b) Justification

The impact of justification and accountability on the decision makers' behaviors has been studied extensively in the judgment and decision making literature. Existing studies have used justification and accountability interchangeably. One explanation for the lack of distinction between these two constructs is the expectation of similar effects of justification and accountability on behaviors. Justification is defined as the need to justify one's decisions; this definition is very similar to the definition of accountability offered by Kennedy. Thus, the distinction between justification and accountability is unclear.

Decision makers are constantly faced with the need to justify their decisions or to account to their sources for their decisions. Justification refers to the process that individuals experience to provide support or reasons for their behavior. Since individuals only need to provide justification for their behavior, they are not held responsible for the outcome as long as they are able to provide reasonable justification for their behavior. In contrast, when individuals are held accountable for their behavior, they are responsible for the outcome; that is, they will either be rewarded for a positive outcome or punished for a negative outcome. In this respect, two definitions of justification offered in the literature can promote understanding of the distinction between justification and accountability; that is, justification is "the act of providing evidence to support one's judgments or decisions", or "the actual physical and/or mental process of explaining a judgment".


(c) Accountability

Accountability is a "pre-existing expectation that an individual may be called on to justify his/her judgments to a significant other". This implies that an important element of accountability is a person's responsibility for an outcome. In most business contexts, individuals are frequently expected to account for their decisions both to themselves and to others. Some research evidence suggests that accountability can have an effect on decisions. For example, business students show significant recency effect (i.e., they place more weight on evidence received later in a sequence) while this behavior is not observed with the auditor participants; however, the recency effect is absent when accountability is imposed on the business students.


(d) Time constraint

Time has frequently been used as a surrogate measure for cognitive effort or decision performance. For example, individuals in the highest time constraint condition exhibit more consistent performance than other groups when information load and presentation format in the context of a simple audit task are examined. The more consistent results obtained in this study can be attributed to the use of relatively simple strategies by the participants to reduce the effects of time constraint in the decision environment. Time constraint has also been reported to exert a negative impact on a judgment task relative to a choice task. Research can promote understanding of the effect of time constraint on task motivation.


Task characteristics

Task motivation is affected by characteristics of a task such as complexity, difficulty, structure, ambiguity, and novelty. Task motivation is expected to be high when a task is less complex, difficult, or ambiguous or has more structure or novelty, and vice versa.


(a) Complexity

Task complexity can occur at the stages of input, processing, or output and may relate to either the amount or clarity of information. At the input stage, the amount of information can vary in terms of the number of alternatives, the number of attributes on which each alternative is compared, and attribute redundancy. Clarity of input may be reduced by relevant cues that are not specified or measured well, inconsistency between presented and stored cues, and presentation format. Processing can be complex when the amount of input increases, the number of procedures increases, procedures are not well specified, and the procedures are dependent on one another. Internally inconsistent cues or low or negative cue validities in nonlinear functions may reduce clarity and increase processing complexity. Complexity may also increase with the number of goals or solutions per alternative (i.e., the amount of output), and indefinite or unspecified goals (i.e., lack of clarity in output) created by the environment or by a person's lack of familiarity with the goals.


(b) Difficulty

Difficulty can be defined as the amount of attentional capacity or mental processing required for doing a task. Task difficulty increases with increased similarity of the alternatives and this hampers a person's ability in discriminating the alternatives from one another. A task is high in difficulty when a person perceives a tremendous amount of cognitive effort in information processing. The level of difficulty of a specific task has an effect on task motivation. Individuals are unlikely to be motivated by a task when they perceive the task to be difficult and vice versa. It is important to distinguish task complexity from task difficulty because these two constructs are not synonymous. That is, a complex task may involve an increased number of steps but it may not require increased cognitive effort to process the information (i.e., the task can be low in difficulty).


(c) Structure

Structure refers to the specification level of what is to be accomplished in a given task. A task can be classified on a continuum that indicates the degree of structure. A highly structured task requires a person to follow a predefined procedure for completing an activity. A task is highly unstructured when a predefined procedure for performing an activity is absent.


(d) Ambiguity

DSS use is reported to be influenced by task ambiguity. Although no significant difference in decision performance is found for both the DSS and non-DSS groups in relatively unambiguous decision situations, the DSS group outperforms the no-DSS group in relatively ambiguous decision contexts. Research is needed to provide insight into the impact of task ambiguity on task motivation and the resultant effect on motivation to use a DSS and DSS use.


(e) Novelty

Most conceptual definitions of creativity include the novelty characteristic. Creativity is enhanced when novelty is present in a task. Individuals are most creative when they are motivated by a task and task motivation is further increased when the task entails a certain degree of novelty. Future work can facilitate understanding of the long- or short-term effects of the novelty characteristic on task motivation.


Task/User characteristics

Task/user characteristics refer to the users' ability, knowledge, and experience in a given task. These characteristics are discussed in the context of Libby's model. Ability relates to the users' capacity to engage in information processing activities that lead to problem solving; knowledge pertains to the information stored in memory; and experiences refer broadly to the task-related encounters that provide users with an opportunity to learn. Chan's motivational framework suggests that the users' ability, knowledge, and experience in a task have a positive effect on task motivation. That is, users with high ability are expected to be high in task motivation because their increased capacity in information processing results in effective and efficient problem solving. Users with low ability are predicted to be low in task motivation because of their limited capacity in information processing which in turn impairs their ability to solve problems. Users who are knowledgeable may possess essential information in memory that allows them to do a task effectively and efficiently; consequently, their task motivation is expected to be high. Less knowledgeable users may be low in task motivation because they do not have the necessary information stored in memory that permits them to carry out the task effectively and efficiently. Experienced users with task-related encounters are stimulated by the opportunities to learn and this increases their task motivation. Since less experienced users tend to have fewer task-related encounters and fewer opportunities to learn, their task motivation may be low.