Leaders and managers spend a lot of time thinking about how to get people to do something, i.e. motivation. Academics and practitioners continue to find the magic formula for motivating people in the workplace.
From one perspective, motivation is defined as something that energizes, directs, and sustains behaviors toward a goal. In that view, motivation is something that is done to someone. From a different perspective explained by Alfie Kohn in his book Punished by Rewards, motivation is something that cannot be forced externally. According to Kohn all we can do is to set up conditions for people to excel by removing constraints and maximizing a person's intrinsic interest and abilities.
