WORKING OUT THE WANTS AND NEEDS THAT MOTIVATES YOUR TEAM MEMBERS

Psychologist David McClelland has introduced 3 acquired needs in his theory on motivations for human behavior which proposes that individuals have three basic drives: affiliation, power and achievement. In this article, our focus would be on the need for affiliation. We would describe this need for affiliation in three sections:-

• What is the need for affiliation?
• Characteristics of affiliation in the workplace
• Role of affiliation in the workplace

1) WHAT IS AFFILIATION?

The affiliation motivation theory is defined through the desire of an individual to belong to a group or organization. Since the development of this theory, it is widely used by organizations to capture how well employees are likely to contribute to team efforts. The practice of this theory helps an organization to achieve workplace goals by identifying how these motivations could affect team members.

An affiliation motivation provides encouragement among co-workers to build close relationships with one another while communicating clearly. It is the task of an individual in the management role to identify individuals who are highly motivated by affiliation as this would help them achieve their goals.

2) CHARACTERISTICS OF AFFILIATION IN THE WORKPLACE

An individual who is motivated by the need for affiliation would be at ease in forming strong personal relationships, prefers certainty, cooperates well with others, agree with group decisions and identifies the positive characteristics of team members^.

There are varying methods to help the management to identify some characteristics of motivation through the need for affiliation among the team members. These characteristics are:-

• The capability of cultivating an honest and open rapport
• Inclined to working in a highly cooperative work setting
• Have a higher-performing result when working in small projects involving a group of people

3) ROLE OF AFFILIATION IN THE WORKPLACE

Affiliation is guided by two factors which are perception and intuition. These factors affect how employees perform in the workplace.

• Perception: Have you given a thought to how you see and evaluate the world around you? Have you wondered why it differs among different individuals?

Perception is as simple as our view and thoughts on everything around us including our workplace. Individuals who is guided by affiliation motivation would focus on their perceptions of other people.

• Intuition: How do you process your judgment and decision making?

Intuition is the process that an individual engages in when processing judgment. They utilize their underlying perceptions to make decisions that are guided by their intuition. Similar to perception, an individual guided by affiliation motivation commonly utilize their intuition to develop and sustain healthy relationships with their co-workers.

These 3 steps would guide you to apply affiliation motivation in your workplace:-

• Identify the motivation need of your team members and observe if they respond to affiliation motivation
• Practice team building activities to cultivate healthy social interaction among employees to communicate and learn about one another
• Shift focuses on group success instead of individual success. For an instance, assign team goals and quotas. Subsequently, reward the team when goals are achieved so they are highly motivated and shares the reward of their efforts together

As an HR consulting organization, we at Alchemy Resources pay huge importance and have implemented these practices in our own workplace. We have developed a profiling tool to help you identify the motivators of your team members. At ARSB, we have designed our training intervention strategies using the given methods and have executed our training programme using Learning Management System (LMS) through both synchronous and asynchronous.

Contact us at enquiries@alchemyconsultancy.asia to find out more information about our profiling tool and how we may work together to conduct a training programme to improve performances and achieve your company’s goals.

References:

Indeed Editorial Team (2021). A Guide to Affiliation Motivation. Retrieved from https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/a-guide-to-affiliation-motivation