Motivation to the act in the space of human-centricity

Abstract

The rising interest of science, education and business in human being in all their complexity is considered as a manifestation of a single trend that can be described in terms of human-centricity, anthropological turn or humanization. In business, within the framework of this trend, the usual ideas about human motivation are rapidly changing and the practices of working with it are undergoing transformation. The purpose of this article is to identify possible directions of such transformations. It is shown that the basis of human-centricity is an unfinished and fundamentally incomplete image of a human being. This leads to the fact that even the most advanced motivation theories, which integrate the achievements of various psychological schools, such as Self-determination Theory of R. Ryan and E. Deci, are not able to fully describe all possible qualitative types of motivation and all possible regulators of human activity. It is also shown that motivation practices in humancentered corporate cultures are aimed primarily at facilitating and strengthening autonomous types of motivation, which can be generically called motivation to the act. Modern companies operate in many ways as self-regulating and self-governing systems. And managers not only facilitate such motivation among employees, but also expect that employees will systematically commit acts. Managers of the world’s leading companies, as a rule, are convinced that only a free human being capable of acting autonomously and self-deterministically can create something truly outstanding. Controlled types of motivation play a secondary role. Moreover, in modern companies, corporate culture is organized in such a way that controlled types of motivation are the result of mediation of more autonomous types — the employee is given the opportunity to construct an individual system of incentives, objects of needs, introjects and identifications.