Good morning. The person who has stopped trying did the arithmetic, and it came out at zero.
Leadership.
The Motivation Chain
Think of the person who has stopped pushing — still present, still polite, still delivering exactly what was asked and nothing past it. Three beliefs sit under any effort past the minimum: that it produces the result, that the result produces the reward, and that the reward is worth having. One of the three has gone. They know which one, and you have never asked.
Victor Vroom, an organisational psychologist who spent most of his career at the Yale School of Management, set out expectancy theory in Work and Motivation (Wiley, 1964). The version that reached management teaching multiplies three beliefs rather than adding them: expectancy, that effort will actually produce the performance; instrumentality, that the performance will actually produce the outcome; and valence, that the outcome is worth having to this particular person. Multiply them and a zero anywhere zeroes the lot, which is why the flat person is not running at eighty per cent but at nothing. The trap is answering all three with encouragement. Encouragement only ever speaks to the first belief, so if what broke was instrumentality, because the last person who delivered got nothing, or valence, because the reward on offer is a promotion into work they never wanted, then the pep talk isn't merely useless. It tells them you haven't understood what happened.
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