Motivation and work: the importance of task, organization and goals

Companies are always looking for motivated people, yet the results do not seem encouraging. Several studies have shown that the percentage of motivated employees is very low. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report (average of the 2023–2025 surveys), 11% of employees in Italy say they are engaged in their work, against a European average of 12% and a global average of 20%. In periods of high unemployment and greater uncertainty in the world’s financial markets, many employees feel stuck in their jobs, unable to find an alternative to their current position or too frightened to accept one.

Can the many books, courses, theories, and professionals in the field improve this figure when working and social conditions are frustrating?

Before answering this question we need to be clear about what motivation means and about the tools for measuring it.

Motivation: the force that leads an individual to engage in a given behavior directed toward a purpose. Motivation is thus an internal state of the individual that activates, directs, and sustains over time their behavior toward a goal. Without motivation, we could not meet any of the challenges life sets us (https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/motivazione_(Dizionario-di-Medicina)/).

This is a good definition because it gives a sense of how complex these studies are: motivation is present in everything we do, personal and professional. Every task we perform needs adequate motivation; within the workplace, therefore, motivation is not a constant value but changes as a function of many variables.

We would be unlikely to find the same level of motivation for every task we have to perform in our job; in the work setting we simplify by considering overall motivation tied to a global objective. This simplification, however, raises further measurement problems: the same test administered during different activities within the work context produces appreciably different results (the specific activity I am engaged in shapes my overall judgment). Another measurement error arises when success is used to gauge motivation: achieving a result at work depends on many things, and only some of them can be correlated with motivation (which also feeds on the results themselves). Focusing on the single individual while leaving out the day-to-day context, the groups they belong to, the environment, and the organization would lead us to motivational initiatives with poor results. Over the years there has been a succession of task-centered theories of motivation, some of which have had a considerable impact on organizations.

Taylor regarded money as the main motivation for workers, whom he considered interchangeable (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management). Outdated as it is, this approach is still widespread in companies.

How can we work on the task to improve the worker’s motivation?

Job characteristics theory (Hackman and Oldham) is a theory of how to design work so that it is motivating, enriching tasks in ways that make them more rewarding and interesting.

It defines five job characteristics:

• Skill Variety: The degree to which a job requires different activities and the use of several skills and abilities, as opposed to elementary, routine jobs.
• Task Identity: The degree to which the job involves completing a whole, identifiable piece of work, from beginning to end, with a visible outcome.
• Task Significance: How much the activity affects the lives of other people.
• Autonomy: The worker’s level of independence and discretion.
• Feedback: How much the worker is informed about the results of their performance.

These characteristics produce three psychological states capable of improving results at work:

• Experienced Meaningfulness of the Work: The person experiences their work as intrinsically meaningful and can present its value inside and outside the company.
• Experienced Responsibility for Outcomes of the Work: The degree to which the worker feels responsible for the results of the work.
• Knowledge of Results of the Work Activities: How much the worker knows about the quality of their performance.

This model can produce internal work motivation, satisfaction, and higher quality and quantity of work. A meta-analysis of 259 studies, covering 219,625 participants, found that motivational job characteristics explain 25% of the variance in subjectively rated performance (Humphrey, Nahrgang, and Morgeson, 2007).

As for the relationship with the employee (regardless of the task), one of the most widely used approaches is goal setting (Edwin A. Locke and Gary P. Latham), often paired in company practice with the SMART criteria, an acronym proposed by George T. Doran in 1981: goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, and realistic, with a specific time frame in which to accomplish them.

Specific, ambitious goals lead to a higher level of performance than easy or general goals. This is the conclusion the two authors draw from thirty-five years of research: in the meta-analyses they summarize, the effect of goal difficulty on performance ranges from 0.52 to 0.82 in standard deviation units (Locke and Latham, 2002). When the individual accepts the goal, has the ability to attain it, and has no conflicting goals, there is a positive linear relationship between goal difficulty and performance.

According to Locke, then, workers need to:

• know the goal and know how to reach it;
• accept the goal as something worth working for.

Performance improves further when:

• The goals are public and explicit.
• Expectations about the effectiveness of one’s own action are high.
• The goal is assigned by a person the worker respects.

A large part of the effect of motivation on results therefore depends on factors tied to the organization, the task, and the goals. The priority for anyone aiming to improve the motivation of their people must be to pay close attention to these three factors; otherwise, motivational efforts aimed at the worker will produce modest results.

(Alberto Viotto)