How to Motivate a Difficult Employee

Motivation
How would you use intrinsic or extrinsic motivation in the workplace to motivate your most difficult employee or coworker?
Intrinsic motivation refers to the internal rewards that a worker receives upon doing a job well done. Extrinsic motivation refers to the external rewards—such as when an employee receives a bonus for bringing a project in on time and under budget. There are benefits and limits to using one or the other type of motivation to motivate workers (Gerhart & Fang, 2015). Intrinsic motivation has been shown to be linked to “self?determination, control, and satisfaction” (Hennessy, Moran, Altringer & Amabile, 2015, p. 1), but it also can fail to adequately motivate workers who have an eye on valuing performance via raises, job security, and promotion—especially if they feel hampered or constrained by environmental or economic factors either at work or in their own lives.
I would try to use both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in the workplace to motivate my most difficult employee by first finding out what his needs were and then finding a way to motivate him by satisfying those needs. According to Maslow (1943), whose theory of human motivation was based on the needs hierarchy, people cannot acquire the quality of self-determination or self-actualization until they have had their more basic needs met first. These basic needs range from food and shelter to love, friendship, and esteem. The latter tend to human needs that many people require, though certainly in today’s economy an extra bonus would go a long way to meet certain needs as well—so to motivate workers, I would employ both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to get the job done.
Intrinsic motivation methods that I would use to help meet the emotional needs of my most difficult worker would be to give praise routinely whenever he achieved a minor success: no good deed should go unobserved. I would try to maintain a positive and supportive air whenever I could with him. I would also try to find out what sort of needs he had that were not being met. If they were economical, I would focus on extrinsic motivation, offering small bonuses for meeting output targets. If they were personal, such as having a lack of friendship, I would offer intrinsic motivational incentives—like a half day off so that we could go to a local restaurant and enjoy our success.
It would also depend on what kind of objective I was trying achieve because I would want to tie the incentive to the objective. However, one of the goals of intrinsic motivation is that it helps to move the person towards self-determination—i.e., the worker gets used to the idea of doing a job because doing jobs well is its own reward. It is like the idea of virtue being the path to the most happiness. This type of idea is best promoted by creating a workplace culture that fosters such a spirit.
I would also thus try to foster a spirit in the workplace where individuals are intrinsically motivated by the vision of the organization and the leadership. Leaders set the example, communicate the vision, and instill workers with a desire to follow in their footsteps. If, however, the workplace is not offering workers enough of what they need in terms of security, monetary rewards, and other perks, it is necessary to incorporate these into the workplace, with bonuses being used—as in a Christmas bonus or an end of the year bonus based on performance. These ideas would go a long way to facilitate motivation in my most difficult worker—and combing intrinsic with extrinsic motivation would be the best method.
References
Gerhart, B., & Fang, M. (2015). Pay, intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation,
performance, and creativity in the workplace: Revisiting long-held beliefs. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 2, 489-521
Hennessey, B., Moran, S., Altringer, B., & Amabile, T. M. (2015). Extrinsic and intrinsic
motivation. Wiley Encyclopedia of Management, 1-4.
Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370.