Motivation

The interesting question about work is not why people do it. People do it because they need money, and any theory that has to be elaborate about this is a theory that has lost sight of the rent.

The interesting question is why so many of them do more of it than they are paid for. The Trades Union Congress publishes an estimate each year of unpaid overtime in Britain, and for as long as I have been paying attention the number has run to several million people doing several hours a week, worth tens of billions of pounds annually to their employers. That is not a fringe phenomenon or a story about a few driven executives. It is a teacher marking on Sunday evening, a nurse staying forty minutes past handover because the relatives have arrived, a solicitor reading a bundle on the train, a warehouse team leader coming in on their day off because the agency staff are new.

None of these people is confused about the transaction. Ask them and they will tell you that they are not being paid for it, that they resent it about half the time, and that they will do it again next week. Whatever accounts for that is what the psychology of motivation is actually about, and no theory that reduces to incentives will reach it.

The equal and opposite phenomenon is the one organisations complain about. Somewhere in the same country, someone who was that person four years ago now leaves at five past five, declines the extra shift, does exactly the specified task and no more, and is described by their manager as having disengaged. Nothing about their contract has changed. Their pay may well have gone up. What has changed is a relationship, and the vocabulary available to their manager for describing it — engagement, attitude, negativity — locates the change inside the employee, where it did not happen.

from A Guide to Occupational Psychology: People, Work and Organisations in the Modern UK (2026)