Zigzag and Zeitgeist: motivation in organizations

摘要

In a recent book (Apter, 2018), I present a set of ideas about motivation and personality that are based on a theory with a strange name: reversal theory (Apter, 2007). These ideas have been applied in a number of areas, such as sports coaching and classroom management. An area of particular influence has been organizational development, and applications have been made in a number of settings including banking, Pharmaceuticals, journalism, retailing, nursing homes, the travel industry, and many others, especially in the UK, the USA, and France. The central insight of this theory, the idea from which everything else stems, is that individuals' personalities are ever-changing: they are always on the move, psychologically speaking. They are dancers rather than statues. Certainly, there are some things that remain more or less the same over time, such as habits of various kinds, and strongly held beliefs. But, a whole set of different ways of seeing the world are shuttled between by people in the course of everyday life. Thus, same person - you or I - can be playful and joking one minute and deadly serious the next; respectable one minute and outrageous the next; caring one minute and bullying the next; selfish one minute and self-sacrificing the next. These are the kinds of reversals that the reversal theory is referring to, and the different ways of seeing the world are called motivational states - because they are at base about the different things that we want at different moments.