The black-box model to distinguish between motivator and amotivator

Motivated employees are essential for today's business to adapt to the fast-paced environment. However, motivating employees is arguably the most complex in practice. In this paper, our aim is to discuss the distinction between motivator and amotivator. The literature was undertaken to review on the differences between motivator and amotivator solely from the perspective of job satisfaction or objective performance. Psychologists pay primarily attention on individual's subjective feeling in heart, such as job satisfaction and need. However job satisfaction is based on self-reported scores from the Motivation and Job Satisfaction Survey. On the other hand, some researchers focus on the evaluation of those variables, such as organizational effectiveness and individual performance. However they neglected largely the side of psychology. Motivation cannot be seen nor can it be measured directly, but motivation can be inferred in terms of behavioral or outcome changes brought in by internal or external stimulus. Therefore, this paper introduced a unifying black-box model by which through comparing the measured outcome to previous one, we can infer whether the outside stimulus is a motivator or not. Based on the above model, we proposed that the distinguishing principles between motivator and amotivator should incorporate both job satisfaction and individual performance. If any one of the variables is missing or negative, then motivation will not occur or will diminish in the long run. By applying the proposed distinguishing principle, the continuum pattern between motivator and demotivator was presented, respectively positive motivator, negative motivator, hygiene factor and demotivator. The result of this paper offered practitioners a valid and useful framework for making best of limiting resources to reach the maximum utility of motivation, so as to maintain a long-term, high level of employee motivation.