Self – Motivation Failure – The Era of the Group Motivation
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Motivation – One of the most important tools that allow people to achieve greatness and success. It allows people to pursue goals that might seem impossible to others, and still achieve them. And it’s not just important for achieving life-changing goals or impossible dreams, but it’s also crucial for every-day efficiency, mental stability, and inner peace. Because if you aren’t motivated enough to go to work, do your job, and live a meaningful life, then the simple act of living can become a burden.
Everyone understands that motivation is essential, but one question most people don’t know the answer to is where the motivation should come from? It’s an internal thing, specific to every individual, so it should come from within, right? Self-motivation, as we’ve heard parroted repeatedly.
Wrong. Self-motivation is important, but it’s not the only important source of motivation, especially when it comes to groups.
Group motivation plays a key role in ensuring that individuals, teams, and organizations move in the right direction. It’s no longer enough to oil each cog individually but to design a machine that runs by seamlessly connecting everything.
Different Types of Motivation
Before diving into group motivation any further, we should clarify the differences in self-motivation, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and group motivation.
Self-motivation and intrinsic motivation can be used interchangeably since they both come from within. Extrinsic motivation is an external factor that may be driving you to achieve something, be something, or do something. Group motivation falls under extrinsic motivation, but it also has other factors built into it, like camaraderie, peer-pressure, teamwork, and a sense of being part of something bigger than yourself, etc. All these factors make group motivation a formidable force.
Where Self-Motivation Fails, Group Motivation Prevails
Self-motivation is geared more towards individual achievement, success, and growth. And while it can make people do things that impact others, it’s not very efficient in helping teams and organizations pursue collective goals or move all the individuals towards shared success.
That’s where group motivation comes in. It has several benefits for organizations, teams, and learning groups, such as:
Participation
There are always individuals in any given group who don’t participate and engage like other group members. Whether it’s disengaged students in a class or a de-motivated employee in an organization, such participants can bring the whole group’s energy level down.
If you try to counter it with self-motivation, it will take a lot of time and energy, and the results might not be satisfactory. And since you will be working with multiple individuals, aligning their problems with participation, and hoping for a better collective response might be naïve.
Instead, you can focus on group motivation. When the whole team is focused and geared towards achieving the same goal, even the most disengaged members of the team might be motivated to go with the flow.
Collective Effort
Group motivation doesn’t just nudge members of the team towards making a collective effort; it enhances it. Individually, team members might not be willing to make a maximum effort towards achieving a collective goal (whether it’s a school sports tournament or a corporation’s sales goals). But through group motivation, the whole team can be motivated to go all-in, or even go the extra mile to achieve something. That’s because individual participants may feel like they are letting their colleagues/team members down by not giving it their all.
The collective effort, energized by group motivation, is likely to be several times more potent towards achieving a collective goal than focusing on each member separately and working on their self-motivation.
The Bigger Picture
Members of a team are usually blind towards the bigger picture. That’s partly because they are not allowed to understand the big picture, and mostly because they simply aren’t motivated. Why would a team member look beyond the scope of their responsibilities and duties? What’s in it for them?
This is why, even when they perform at optimal levels (or even brilliantly) as individuals, collectively, they might be lagging behind. But if they are motivated as a group, made to feel like a group, and are guiding to move in coherence towards the same goal, they will start looking beyond their individuality. They will see the bigger picture, and they might become motivated enough to put in the extra effort that’s needed to push the team towards collective success.
Gamified Team Training – A New Way to Improve Group Motivation
There are multiple ways that are used and have been tried and tested (especially in the corporate world) to motivate groups and teams. That includes team-building exercises, seminars, meetings, and several other activities. While many of these exercises and activities are very effective for motivating individual teams or even the whole of the workforce, they can easily get boring and repetitive.
A very engaging and fun way to induce group motivation is by gamifying your team training. This allows colleagues in an office, students in a class, or other teams to do something together. By focusing on the gamified training’s collaborative aspects, you can motivate groups to work together towards a combined goal. If created properly, a gamified training can help break down and convey quite complex ideas in fun ways. And groups can collaborate in a much more interactive environment and see quantifiable results of their collaboration and team spirit.
This can improve group motivation immensely, and not only for the time being. Gamified team training can feel like a fun, miniature version of the group assignments and team projects. And when members of the team are able to achieve success through group motivation and collaboration in these gamified training sessions, they might try to mimic the same positive behaviour in the workplace as well.
We at Pixelhunters, have designed a whole platform that allows gamification of group training to save time with increased efficiency https://multiplayerteamtraining.com. Collaboration, social communication, competition, and different gameplay dynamics have been designed to serve different learning goals. We have 4 games for offline /real classroom usage and 10 games for 100% online play.
Different metrics and assessments are running on the backend to measure users’ performance and provide training managers with valuable data.
We can fast plug different training content into one or multiple games and rent the solution for a month or more. We have a catalogue with ready training content or we can plug any custom client content.
If you are interested to try a group training that is more fun, interactive and motivational, please contact us at info@pixelhunters.com
Final Words
Group motivation can transform workplaces for the better. But that doesn’t mean it only has benefits for groups. The assurance and euphoria of collective success are very similar to winning personal battles, better even, since you share the experience with your colleagues and friends. It also makes people feel more amicable towards each other and motivates each individual to realize their place in the organization. People perform better, act better, and grow individually and collectively.
That is the power of group motivation & the Multiplayer Team Training Platform!