I watched a Ted talk of Dan Ariely, a well-known behavioral economist that teaches at Duke University. He talked about his point of view of the motivation theory of workers, and he showed the audience the importance of how the workers view their work, and the results have shown that whether the work is meaningful has created a large impact on motivation. People are willing to work with less payment if they think their work is meaningful, versus people are not willing to work with a higher payment if they perceived their work as meaningless.

Towards the end of the video, he concluded his presentation by this formula:
Motivation = Payment + Meaning + Creation + Challenge + Ownership + Identity + Pride, etc

The theory behind triggered me to reflect on student’s learning motivation, and I found that the motivation between studying and working are actually compatible. We’ve been learning how extrinsic and intrinsic motivation has to work together to achieve the greatest level of motivation. And that works the same in the education system. Let’s just talk from a student’s perspective, the extrinsic rewards in the education world would be the grades that every student is looking for. Why do students care about their grades so much? If there is no such a thing called “ranking,” “graduation with honor,” or the general society perspective about smarter people gets a higher grade, will the students still be so concerned about their grades and try to get into top universities? I think that recognizing student’s hard work by ranking them, differentiating college levels, etc are just like the recognition program in the workplace. They certainly help to create motivation to students to get higher grades because the intrinsic reward is adding meaning to the extrinsic reward to let it be more powerful.

Going back to the equation, the components are highly related to each other because those that follow behind are the effects of recognition. I can easily take out an example of myself that I experienced the increase of motivation after getting into UBC. Not only because it is a Univeristy with a good reputation, but also the challenges, pride, identity, etc that comes along. I feel that I am part of the school and honored to be one of the students in here. I am sure if I did not come here, I would be much less motivated to study, even though it might be easier to get good grades in other less competitive school. And this is what Professor Ariely was talking about earlier; people would be less motivated to get a higher payment if their work is meaningless to them.

Langton, Robbins, Judge, Organizational Behaviour, 7th edition, p. 174

https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_what_makes_us_feel_good_about_our_work?language=en#t-1194827