Lecture

Hello, Ken Gangel again talking to you. It’s interesting for me to speculate on how people listen to these lectures, whether this is in your automobile or whether you’ve got a Walkman covering your ears at this point, or whether you’re sitting at a desk surrounded by books and papers and whatnot, one never knows. I do a radio broadcast, and I always like to speculate on how people listed to that as well.

Wherever you are, we are beginning right here, lecture 12. You have the outline and all of the materials necessary for us to talk about the leader as motivator. I think effective Christian leaders work hard to stimulate spiritual growth in people’s lives individually and collectively. That’s a process that’s intentionally relational. The productivity and effectiveness of the team directly relates to the kind of leadership we provide. Authoritarian leaders or autocratic leaders, we have often called them, press on with ideas and concepts regardless of what the group thinks or feels. Dissatisfied minority members either cause trouble in the group or they leave it. A free-reign leader, on the other hand, can allow the pendulum to swing too far to the other side. She sees herself only as a catalyst and can allow the group to wander aimlessly, up and down the bypaths of their own discretion, sometimes with minimal productivity. Group members may blame the leader for this lack of productivity, as well as becoming discontented with the group and with their own positions.

Perhaps the most crucial concept of motivation, and it’s one we have used with regularity, reminds us that motivation springs from the inside. It is not created externally. If you hear nothing else I say on this tape, can you remember that? Motivation springs from the inside. It is unleashed. It is not created externally. We always talk about motivating people. What we really do is facilitate their own motivation. We put them in touch with things that capture their attention and interest.

Part of our problem here stems from our failure to understand the difference between the way children and adults learn. We practice pedagogy, the art and science of teaching children, rather than andragogy, the art and science of teaching adults, and frankly it carries over into the way we work at motivation.

What are the factors in motivation? We begin our understanding by recognizing that there is a cause and usually an identifiable one for the way people act and think. Behavior directly results from value systems. Secular sociologists argue that one’s value system comes from environmental influence produced largely from factors outside of himself, but the Christian knows that a biblical value system emanates from what an individual believes and has committed himself to. In a very real sense, Christian leaders help people minimize the external influences that seek to condition behavior, and boy there are thousands of them today. We could break them down into specifics, but just think in terms of the mass media and the culture and the whole social climate of postmodernity and so on. These external influences can be mitigated because they do condition behavior, usually negative behavior. What we want is for ourselves and the people we lead to yield to internal motivations. Obedience to Christ. Commitment to the will of God. A recognition of discipleship responsibility. I’m talking about the fruit of the Spirit here, not the gifts of the Spirit.

Now we want to suggest that we should not try to find only one cause of any given behavior, but rather recognize the complexity of factors which produce behavior. If we can recognize what makes a person do what he does, we may be one step closer toward unleashing motivation which will help him do what he should do. The should be can be defined variously here, either as what the leader wants him to do, what you and I want, or what is right according to biblical and spiritual standards. I would hope that we would chose the latter more often than the former.

Motivation is inseparably related to personal goals. Let’s start with that as we talk about factors. Motivation is inseparably related to personal goals. The name Carl Rogers is synonymous with the nondirective approach to counseling, and in a helpful booklet entitled A Therapist’s View of Personal Goals, he deals with the basic ontological questions of life. Based on experience with his clients, he examines the matter of personal goals and how people set out to achieve them. He talks about dimensions of human existence, and he borrows that concept from the research of Charles Morris.

And Rogers is not happy with the choices of Morris, and he adds his own using the words of Kierkegaard, interestingly, “to be that self which one truly is.” The wording of Kierkegaard and Rogers. In effect, self-actualization, according to Rogers, is the goal of human endeavor.

Despite the freedom we find so attractive in Rogers, he doesn’t quite make his way to the team goal so strongly emphasized in our studies together, but he sets the psychological framework in which a group of people with various skills and at various levels of spiritual maturity, different abilities, different personalities, can engender motivation as they work toward a group goal.

My friend, Hal Wood of Advisory Management Services in Kansas City, distinguishes between traditional and teamwork approaches to leadership motivation. In structure, for example, traditional approach has formal and rigid lines of authority. In teamwork, there’s loose, flexible, task-oriented, mission-driven kinds of things. In motivation, the whole idea is to do it for the company or maybe to do it for the profession. In teamwork, it’s to do it for the team or to do it for the Lord, or even in the proper sense, to do it for one’s self. That sounds selfish, but let me ask you, wouldn’t it be to the benefit of an individual to grow in prayer life, to become more effective in evangelism, and these are individual goals. They don’t just serve the church or the group or the team, they serve one’s self, and in some cases, motivation for self-improvement is a very valid and viable point.

Second thing here is that motivation depends upon information. Remember that the Christian leader is bringing the necessity of appealing always to biblical motives, not to serving the company or not even to serving self, but certainly walking in the will of God and following biblical patterns. Now there’s a great deal more than information involved in this when we say motivation depends upon information. We need to communicate a distinct philosophy of ministry in which people have had a voice and now they’re committed to it. They’ve committed themselves to it. Some churches are almost like propaganda mills in the way they promote local or denominational programs and belief systems. Others work at giving ministry back to the people, and that is a distinctly biblical pattern.

Some say that every Christian leader is engaged in public relations. Some claim propaganda even enters in. That’s a very, very different word. Propaganda, which tries to influence public opinion by promoting a special interest, has predetermined ends and engages in manipulation processes. Propaganda merely provides a means to an end. Generally, it cares not whether the result obtained may be detrimental to some groups or to some members of the group. Propaganda is classic Madison Avenue. You turn on your television for half hour and watch the commercials. A lot of people turn off the commercials, and maybe that’s a good idea, but if you’re studying propaganda, watch the commercials and see how the whole system is based on the idea of convincing people to go out and buy what they don’t need and what they can’t afford and what they really don’t want. That’s what propaganda is doing on television programming.

Public relations, on the other hand, has a respect for truth. Christian colleges and seminaries have public relations departments. They’re not interested in propaganda, or shouldn’t be. Public relations goes about its task with dignity and good manners. It recognizes its responsibility to various publics involved, and, no doubt, there are propagandists in churches and Christian organizations, but the spiritual role of leadership motivates through the communication of accurate information to all. We make needs known. We clarify objectives, and ministry proceeds on the assumption that people respond spiritually, intelligently, and willingly when they feel a part of the ministry philosophy.

Next, motivation involves the changing of group attitudes. Human attitude is cognitive, affective, and conative. The cognitive has to do with mental recognition of facts. The affective with feelings, and the conative with resultant actions. Sometimes we call these three actions intellect, emotions, and will. Leaders who motivate people must deal with all three of these aspects of attitude before we see results. Conative takes it a step beyond will and talks about how you do it.

Attitudinal changes increase as ego involvement of group members decreases. In other words, as people become less self-centered, they become more motivated toward participation in group activities and, therefore, toward satisfactory achievement. But remember, overt conforming behavior does not necessarily imply attitudinal change.

Now what about attitudinal change? How does it take place? What goes on here? What do we do to bring about attitudinal change toward motivation? Attitudinal change increases when people spend time together. It’s more likely as similarity among members of the group decreases. Homogeneity tends to stagnate, so thought patterns conform if everybody thinks alike. Also attitudinal change increases as opportunities for interaction increase. A church member who dislikes African Americans or Caucasians might change that attitude if he has an opportunity to spend some time with those groups.

Attitudinal change increases or decreases in response to events outside the group. A board member may be open-minded or hostile at a board meeting depending on the kind of conversation he had with his wife just before he left home. An attitudinal change directly relates to group crises. If some outside force threatens the existence of the group, a change of attitude on the part of some members may be necessary to defend the structure of the group, and people who were scrabbling and quarreling just a moment ago, now in the face of an outside force, join hands. Take a look at the Epicureans and Stoics and the apostle Paul on the other side in Acts 17.

We’re still talking about motivational principles here. Let me draw again from the research of Buchanan and talk about some conclusions he makes. “Understanding one’s motivation,” he says, “helps one to understand other people.” If we know something about ourselves, it will help us to understand them. And then, “Motivation, like growth, is inherent within people,” and you’ve heard me say this before and now I’m quoting Buchanan, “The task to the leader is not so much that of motivating others, as it is unleashing and helping to harness the motivation already there.” And then, third, “We all respond to a situation as we see it.” So one way to influence another person’s behavior is to help that person get a more accurate view of reality, and, of course, this applies as well to our own behavior.

Another principle, motivation arises from what leaders give, not from what they take. Motivation techniques betray a leader’s ministry philosophy, as well as leadership style. When we act as though people should serve us, we take from them whatever they give and use it for the good of the organization or, God forbid, for the enhancement of our own personal goals.

Paul says clearly that motives are as important as actions (2 Corinthians 8:12; 2 Corinthians 9:7). The example of Jesus with the disciples repeatedly demonstrates a giving kind of leadership. Arlo Grenz offers a beautiful list of responses groups should be able to make when leaders unleash biblical motivation. They should be saying things like: You’ve given us a sense of belonging, and you’ve thanked us for our efforts. You’ve showered us with attention. You’ve taken interest in our personal lives. You’ve praised, recognized, and rewarded our achievements. You’ve been careful not to criticize too much. You’ve remained loyal to us in defeat, as well as in victory. You’ve encouraged us, and so on.

We need to dig in a little deeper here and look at some classic motivational theorists. Sorry about this, but this kind of psycho-philosophical sociology needs to be foundational to our understanding of motivation, and we start with Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. Maslow’s almost a household word. You may know of all of this stuff already.

According to Maslow, humans are perpetually wanting organisms. The wants stem from five basic human needs of relative predominance. The hierarchy concept reflects Maslow’s belief that when a lower need is satisfied, it disappears. It’s replaced then by a higher-order need. He considers gratification as important as deprivation since it releases people from dominance by a lower order and enables them to concentrate on more social or higher-order needs. Once the need has been satisfied, it is no longer a need, so it exists only then in potential fashion and emerges perhaps at a future time.

Maslow’s hierarchy arranged in order from lower to higher includes the following needs: physiological, safety, belongingness and love, esteem, and self-actualization. Maslow would argue that the order is not fixed. There are always exceptions, but that describes the overwhelming majority of persons encountered in his research. Physiological needs deal with subsistence, hunger, thirst, sleep. They are relatively independent of each other and of other issues in the motivational process. A person could be completely dominated by a single physiological needs, such as hunger. When one faces an angry rattlesnake, for example, it doesn’t seem consequential that you might be hungry, so then you move to the second level when physiological needs are satisfied; safety needs emerge. You’re hungry? Hey, we’ll put you in front of this rattlesnake and then see how hungry you are.

Love, affection, I should say, and belongingness needs emerge when the physiological and safety needs are fairly well gratified. They demonstrate a desire for affectionate relations with people in general, but specifically a longing for group acceptance or group membership and the involvement with what sociologists like to call the “significant other.” The next step up in the hierarchy is the esteem need level. Satisfaction of this need can be derived from self-respect or self-esteem as a feeling of adequacy accruing from achievements and accomplishments, prestige, status, and appreciation, so when all these lower needs are satisfied, the need for self-actualization emerges. Then it becomes the significant in the motivational process. It represents a longing for self-fulfillment, a desire to become everything one is capable of becoming.

So once again, an analysis of secular theoretician like Maslow has to stand up to the light of the New Testament, and within that framework, it offers some striking insights. Surely we understand James to be saying that talking theology to a starving man is nonsense (James 2:14–20). He recognizes his need for inner peace and eternal salvation only after physiological and safety needs have been met. On the other hand, an organization does not motivate people by offering them additional fulfillment of needs already met. When people have enough to eat, they’re not impelled by the offer of more bread: “Here, take home another loaf of bread today.” “Hey, I just bought three yesterday at the grocery store. I don’t need any more.” But can Christian ministry, if we go to the top of Maslow’s pyramid, can Christian ministry be self-actualizing? Can it discourage a pastor or missionary ready to quit, find themselves in that position because no one has taught them to think of their service as self-actualizing? Do some Christian service dropouts develop a distorted slave to the church concept of their tasks? Is it possible that ministry roles have very little self-actualizing potential? I don’t know. I think maybe it is.

My brother-in-law tells hilarious stories of his days as a factory worker putting screws in refrigerator doors all day long. It’s hardly a task calculated to produce self-esteem or belongingness for self-actualization. Well, how do we help people understand that Christian ministry is not the theological equivalent of putting screws in a refrigerator door on an assembly line? Good question? Maslow would say, “I have no theological answer for you, but if you’ll take a look at what self-actualization means within the framework of your theology and theism, you’ll come up with an answer.”

Let’s move to Herzberg. Herzberg’s motivation hygiene theory. Frederick Herzberg was professor of psychology at Western Reserve University. He served also as research director of the Psychological Service of Pittsburgh for several years. Primarily toward his orientation toward mental illness and health care, he developed the motivation hygiene theory, his words of course, and he detailed it in three books. Actually, the three books represent three stages in the development of his theory. They detail the gathering of scientific inquiry and data, new research, investigation, and construction of the conceptual theory. The Herzberg study observes that the factors which make people satisfied with their jobs are not the same as those that make the dissatisfied. He concludes that

The presence of satisfiers tends to increase in individual satisfaction with our work, but their absence does not necessarily make that worker dissatisfied, merely apathetic. Similarly, the presence of so-called dissatisfiers makes people unhappy or disgruntled, but the absence of dissatisfiers does not necessarily keep them happy.

Now what’s he talking about? Well, he says satisfiers are things like achievement, recognition, work itself, responsibility, advancement. Dissatisfiers are interpersonal relations, technical ability of the supervisor, company policy and administration, working conditions, personal life off the job. Dissatisfiers are things which make people disgruntled, that last list, but the first list, satisfiers, are things that will motivate. That’s what we’re talking about. Achievement, listening, recognition, responsibility, advancement—very, very important.

Strauss and Sales summarize the Herzberg findings in a simple paragraph:

The experiments called the factors which lead to this rather sterile non-involved attitude, hygienic factors since they are used to avoid trouble. We shall accordingly call management, which emphasizes these factors, hygienic management. Such a “be good” policy may provide a pleasant environment in which to work and a considerable around the job satisfaction, but little satisfaction through the job and little sense of enthusiasm and creativity.

Once again, we’re helped by the work of secular research. Christian organizations need to emphasize the satisfiers of achievement, responsibility, and advancement, but surely our primary deficiency doesn’t lie here but in our failure to recognize the presence of dissatisfiers.

How often we concentrate our attention on multiplying and enhancing the satisfiers while the dissatisfiers may be chipping away at the morale and, consequently, the motivation of our people. Surely the Christian leader ought to be concerned with the life of people off the job. Surely it’s consistent with our theology to recognize that the inner factors of a leader’s attitude toward personnel and the leadership team represent a crucial role in service performance.

Let’s move on to our friend Abraham Zaleznik, and the individualistic view. Zaleznik is one of the few management theoreticians who seeks to place responsibility upon the worker rather than constantly harping on changing the organization. His position emphasizes an internal view of humanity. He attempts to show how people by the strength of character and personality remake organizations. The effect of their personality induces a contagious desire to perform, considerably stronger in directing organizations than depersonalized systems such as interlocking committee structures or shared management or so on. Christian leaders nod vigorously when we read that Zaleznik emphasizes that individuality begins in family life. Through relationships people influence others who in turn are influenced by them and so on.

I think Zaleznik’s theorizing is appealing because he focuses on changing people rather than organizations, or maybe I should say, changing organizations by first changing the people who make up those organizations. These are days of new paradigms for ministry, new change in the church, and Zaleznik’s focus, although hardly new, ought to be cautious guidelines on massive restructuring advocated by some writers. According to Zaleznik, leaders who claim organizations can consistently be reformed to suit individuals only exert a new type of stress on the people who still must act within the framework of their own personal problems.

Douglas McGregor—Theory X and Theory Y. Classic motivational theory, which again focuses on individual personality. McGregor argues that management has adopted generally a far more humanitarian set of values. It has successfully strived to give more equitable and more generous treatment to employees, but he says, “It has done all of these things without changing its fundamental theory of management.”

Now what are the basic assumptions of Douglas McGregor in Theory X? Well, the average human being has an inherit dislike of work and will avoid it if he can. Because of this human characteristic of disliking work, most people must be coerced, controlled, directed, or threatened to get the job done. And the average human being prefers to be directed, he wants to avoid responsibility to have any ambition, and he wants security above all. Now that’s Theory X. Don’t misunderstand McGregor. He opposes that. He says that is a basically wrong theory of management, and that as long as management holds that presupposition, it can’t develop a genuinely relational context for work motivation and people will respond the way you treat them.

So he suggests that we move on to Theory Y, and we look at such things as the expenditure of physical and mental effort in work as natural. External control and the threat of punishment are not really important always, sometimes, but not always for bringing about organizational objectives. Commitment to objectives is a function of the rewards. The average human being learns not only to accept but to seek responsibilities. So there basically is a good thing going here. I don’t think McGregor is trying to speak theologically. He’s not talking about the sin nature here. He’s just taking a high view of humanity. He’s reacting against the old carrot-and-stick approach to leadership. And he takes a high view of the nature of work, and by the way, that’s very consistent with biblical rubrics as early as the twentieth chapter of Exodus, and maybe as early as God’s activity in creation recorded in the first two chapters of the Old Testament.

Since the publication of McGregor’s work over thirty years ago, we have seen a plethora of variations like Theory Z. I’m tempted to explore some of those, but I have to acknowledge the limited time and just deal with these classic theorists rather than the revisionists.

We need to talk about making the motivation process work. In his book, The Master Plan of Evangelism, Robert Coleman lists eight aspects of motivation used by Christ with His disciples—selection, association, consecration, giving, demonstration, delegation, supervision, and reproduction. Notice personal emphasis in all of these. Christ’s pattern was to build His life into small groups of people rather than spending the majority of His time speaking impersonally to large audiences. So perhaps first in the matter of translating theory into action here is a commitment to discipleship, or the discipleship approach in our relationship to the team. It’s more easily attained in some leadership situations than in others, but that doesn’t make it any less important.

Another factor is a significant program of training for all responsible leaders. I think pastors should constantly be exposing lay leaders to materials in the behavioral sciences and management research. His elders, his deacons need to understand Kouzes and Posner and the work of Koestenbaum and Bennis and Nanus and so on. Things that you’re learning in this series, obviously with a theological interpretation, and we’re talking about a long-term process, not some change event.

The third ingredient of implementation is the matter of managing the motivation. Two aspects of unleashing motivation seem to outshine all others in importance. First, communication must provide thorough information, as I have already indicated, and second, mutual agreement upon goals and standards should pervade all organizational processes. We must know together and we must agree together what we are going to do together.

Consider, also, the participation of as many people as possible in ministry functions. We know that change occurs faster and is more lasting when accompanied by a high degree of interaction among the staff. This obviously forces us to emphasize people rather than programs. It helps us zero in on the matter of God’s design through spiritual gifts and call and empowering. Objectives and needs precede forms. Finally, participation in realistic vision affords a significant motivational source. I’ll talk about vision later, but it certainly fits here as we sink deeper into the knowledge volcano perched precipitately upon the technological landscape. The need for hands-on personal leadership becomes ever more basic to motivation.

If motivation comes from the inside, and it does, then visionary leadership is not the dream of some isolated executive overly preoccupied with the bottom line. In short, the effective team leader for the twenty-first century becomes a leader of leaders. Burton Nanus puts it this way,

Not for him the image of a leader and shepherd of sheep dutifully following instructions. Instead in a pattern now common in innovative companies, the followers are themselves leaders and are qualified professionally as the leaders to whom they report. For those top executives who lead the leaders, vision is the sine qua non without which there could be no common framework and, hence, no collaboration.

So mutual trust and no hope, or I should say, no mutual trust and no hope of organizational progress. Like the Indian scout guiding the cavalry captains, you can only lead by getting out front and showing the way, keeping one eye firmly on the distant horizon and the other looking ahead to avoid traps along the path.

Now let me close where I began. The most important dimension of understanding motivation is that it does not come from the outside, it comes from the inside. Everybody is motivated by something; it might not just be what motivates you. It’s our job as leaders to find out what motivates people, what turns them on, what kinds of ministries they want to be involved in, and help and prepare them for the things for which God has already gifted them