There are many motives that encourage people to perform actions that do not directly benefit them or their organization. This applies to the field of work and ordinary life, when we are influenced by various circumstances, often harmful to us. The first reason is directly related to our need to feel comfortable and do everything possible to achieve this state.
When making such decisions, employees can be guided by the fact that this allows them to maintain their usual conditions. That is, the desire to preserve the usual order of things, in which there is no need to strive for something more, can lead to a lack of motivation to commit deliberate actions.
Every action that a person performs has its own purpose, even if we are not aware of it. One of the most common hidden goals is comfort. This explains why it is so difficult for us to stop ourselves: the feeling of comfort makes people forget about the negative consequences of their actions.
In other words, we are attracted by a kind of “reward”, despite the fact that we all know perfectly well that this will negatively affect us in the future.
On the other hand, the motivation to agree to requests that do not directly benefit employees or organizations is manifested in the fact that people often think only about a momentary problem. That is, an important aspect is the inability to correctly assess the consequences of a decision that may affect various indicators in the future.
This is also due to the fact that the constancy of such decisions is associated with the inability to assess their correctness immediately. Thus, the result of accepting such a request appears only over time, when the correlation between the action and its consequence is no longer so noticeable.
The motivational sphere is quite dynamic: the meaning and influence of individual motives change accordingly, and their hierarchy changes. Various factors can change this hierarchy; however, despite the dynamism of the motivational sphere, each person has relative stability. It can be argued that the motives that motivate us to activity are relatively stable, unchanged for a certain period of time.
Consequently, the adoption of such decisions is also influenced by external circumstances related to the company’s threat or loss of respect. Each person has a hierarchy of needs, so if not accepting a request can provoke a violation in the built-up family of values, then this is the motive for making a decision.