Intrinsic & Extrinsic Motivation

Intrinsic & Extrinsic Motivation

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Introduction

Motivation is one of the most enticing concepts in psychology. Through proper motivation, an individual can achieve things that are hard and sometimes impossible to achieve. It reflects the desire to achieve something, the more the desire to achieve the more the motivation is. Without proper motivation, a student will feel hard to learn and understand a particular topic. Same goes to an employee at a workplace, that if he is not motivated he will not be able to perform with his best efforts. Remember that without motivation it's always difficult to achieve a certain goal.

Discussion

Motivation itself is divided into 2 types namely Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation which are discussed below.

Intrinsic Motivation: This motivation deals with the internal desires to perform and achieve something. An individual will perform particular activities in order to compensate with the following factors like challenge, curiosity, control, fantasy, competition, cooperation or/and recognition. Sometimes, many or all of these factors might be interlinked with each other in order to achieve a particular outcome (M V Covington, 2001).

The advantages of using intrinsic motivations are that, their effects are long lasting as compared to extrinsic motivation which is discussed later on. Furthermore, intrinsic motivations are less costly and sometimes costs nothings as compared to extrinsic motivation. Research also shows that students and individual that are intrinsically motivated perform better as compared to those who are not (Lei, 2010).

However, it should be noted that with its advantages, intrinsic motivation has its own share of disadvantages. In order to encourage intrinsic motivation, the educator must have an in depth knowledge of the students which in most of the cases is quite impossible. Different individuals are motivated with different intrinsic factors and it's hard to understand and identify these factors. Furthermore, intrinsic motivation develops over the long run and is incompatible with short term goals (Lei, 2010).

Intrinsic motivation is really important as without it, an individual will not strive to achieve a particular outcome. For example, a student will not be able to perform his best in exams if he is not motivated intrinsically. If he does not challenge himself or others then, he won't strive to be the best among other students and so he might score low and at worst fail without this motivation within him.

Extrinsic Motivation: This motivation deals with the factors that are somewhat unrelated to a particular task ...