Patients are motivated or not for medical, rehabilitative or other interventions. Is “motivation” a term used consistently by different professions and persons? Is “motivation” composed by a mixture of enduring and / or situative components? How appropriate is it to use a composite term instead of its particular components? In case the term “motivation” is used as a promoting or inhibiting personal factor, how can you demonstrate that its lack or existence is not your personal subjective impression but would be objectively reproducible by a third person. Do you have a need to score the intensity of “motivation” within a few minutes you have during a consultation?
My hypothesis: there are other mostly temporary external and less enduring personal factors which compose what we call motivation in habitual language use. Do you agree or disagree? Which exactly are the enduring personal factors as a possible component of motivation? How useful do you think it is to use the term “motivation” instead of describing those other factors in a medical expertise?
Dear Wolfgang,
You're touching on a long-standing debate. Not even within psychology is there a consensual definition, let alone a "grand unified theory". Work motivation, to use but one example, if it is ever defined at all in papers, is often referred to as "a set of energetic forces that originate both within as well as beyond an individual's being, to initiate work-related behaviors, and to determine its form, direction, intensity, and duration" (Pinder, 1998, p.11). Indeed, whilst the early theories in the 1940s and 1950s (e.g., Maslow, McClelland) invoked intrinsic needs as the primary drivers of motivation, later theories (e.g., Vroom, 1964) assumed an expectancy-by-subjective value calculus, with expectancy and value both driven by internal-personal and external factors. In the 1970s, Hackman and Oldham emphasised the importance of external factors in the form of job characteristics. In contemporary work, both internal and external factors are taken into account when explaining work motivation. As far as I can see, the situation is similar in other areas, e.g. Educational Psychology.
When we consult companies, we therefore work eclectically, taking a broad range of internal and external factors in sight to get to the resources people have to boost their motivation.
If you would like to find out more, I can point you to specific papers.
Best,
Christian.
Dear Christian,
thanks a lot for your explanations. Motivation, its lack or its necessary promotion are serious constellations for the prognosis of sociomedical recommendations to claim for social benefits or procedures like rehabilitation. As member of the editorial board of a pending German (nonprofit) scientific journal on “rehabilitative legislation and practice” I intend to install a column “questions and answers of the (medical) expert to the legally trained expert” and vice versa. Therefore I may ask you whether you would like to write a short expertise in response to the hypothetical question from the viewpoint of the legal profession asking the (medical) expert how he is handling some specific questions on motivation in his work. Since I am cautious about the copyright for a possibly following print in a paper-based journal I will put the question in the dataset file as “work in progress”. I hope this works.
Sorry, I was wrong. My subject is in the project file.Using it for the first time I had some difficulties in handling it.
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