Juan Antonio Pérez López - Foundations of management

These three types of motives (the three components of an action's value) indicate the satisfaction of different types of needs: material, cognitive and affective needs. The following is a brief description of these needs:

Material needs: these are all those needs that are satisfied from outside of the person, by means of the interaction of the senses with the physical world surrounding him. In the final analysis, they mean the possession of things or the possibility of establishing perceptional relationships with things. The satisfaction of these needs is linked to what we normally call a sensation of pleasure (and their non-satisfaction to the sensation of pain). In fact, pleasure is the measure of the value of reality with respect to its ability to satisfy this type of need.

Cognitive needs: These are needs related to our ability to do things, to achieve what we want. They are satisfied when people find themselves able to control the reality surrounding them, able to do more things. This satisfaction therefore depends on the extent to which a person, by means of appropriate learning processes, develops what we will call his operational knowledge, that is, the body of skills for managing his environment. A feeling of power and, to a certain extent, a feeling of security, represent the psychological states that depend on the satisfaction of these needs.

Affective needs: These are the needs linked to the achievement of suitable relationships with other people, with the certainty that others care for us, that they like us as people, that we are accepted for what we are (and not because we have a particular skill or because we are useful to others). The satisfaction of this need is attained through the certainty that the other person is affected by what affects us simply because it affects us. All of us have

the ability to internalize what happens to other people. This internalization is what is, strictly speaking, called love. People are thus able to love and be loved, and this relationship is what satisfies affective needs. In order to achieve this satisfaction, one must develop what we would call an evaluative knowledge. We will see further on how the learning takes place in this knowledge and how it is this which enables a person to discover other people's internal states, and, consequently, to experience the corresponding affective satisfactions.

These types of needs are not ordered in a hierarchy; rather, they are all simultaneously present in human beings. In fact, for these needs to be satisfied, a person must have an adequate relationship with reality on three different levels: the world of perceptional realities, the world of personal realities, and his own inner world. He may alter these relationships through his actions, and by seeking to improve one of them he may impair the others. For example, if he seeks to improve his satisfaction on the level of material needs by stealing something, he will impair his ability to maintain satisfactory relationships on the level of affective needs. It may be useful at this point to discuss in somewhat greater detail why this is so.

When making a decision, people are often faced with what is called a motivational conflict: some actions are more appealing from one point of view, others from another. Of these, the most important are the so called intermotivational conflicts. In this type of conflict, one action is very appealing, for example, because of extrinsic motives while another is appealing because of another type, and the person must choose one of the two actions. Innumerable examples could be provided for this type of conflict, from the little boy trying to decide whether to go and play, thus displeasing his mother who hopes he will stay home and study, to the salesman who hesitates to close a profitable sale knowing deep down that he is deceiving his customer (provided that the reasons for the hesitation is “not to displease mother” or “not to deceive”; if the hesitation is due to fear of “punishment” should his bad deed be found out, the conflict will not be inter-motivational but rather intra-motivational on the level of extrinsic motives).

It is the resolution of inter-motivational conflicts that shapes a person's motivational quality. That is, if a person ignores the transcendent motives in his decisions, he will find it increasingly more difficult to take them into account. To put it another way: his spontaneous drive or impulse will become increasingly less sensitive to this type of motive.

There is one type of learning that requires that a person be driven by transcendent motives, namely, the growth of evaluative knowledge. This knowledge is what enables him to discover personal realities, that is, the internal states of other persons. The degree to which a person is able to know personal realities is precisely the degree to which he will be able to feel affective satisfactions.

We tend to think that the satisfaction of a person's needs depends solely on what happens outside of that person. This is true in the case of material needs. However, the satisfaction of affective needs depends above all on something within the person: the state of his evaluative knowledge. Even in the case of a person surrounded by other people who really love him, if he has not developed this capacity, his affective needs will remain unsatisfied because he will be unable to discover, and consequently to feel, the affection other people have for him. For this reason it can be said that motivation caused by transcendent motives is the motivation that seeks to guide human action towards personal self-improvement at the very deepest level: the ability to feel other people as such people, the ability to develop deep affective relationships with other human beings.

A person's difficulty in making his decisions consistent with the achievement of his affective self-improvement is to be found in the cost that type of behavior involves. It often happens with inter-motivational conflicts that the spontaneous impulse to achieve extrinsic or intrinsic motives is much stronger than the impulse to achieve transcendent ones. The choice of alternatives aimed at the latter achievement will normally imply a cost of opportunity, that is, a sacrifice with respect to the achievement of extrinsic and/or intrinsic motives that could be achieved by choosing different alternatives.

We will leave these questions aside for the moment, to return to them in the Second Part since, as we have said, for a static analysis of organizations all we need is to have present the three types of motives that can motivate a person’s action when he participates in an organization. When we arrive at the analysis of dynamism, that is, of the learning that takes place within organizations, we will need to start from an analysis of the level of individual learning that happens as a consequence of what people are doing within the organization 1.

1Author's note: The concepts of effectiveness, efficiency and consistency which have been introduced in this chapter play a decisive role in the anthropological theory of organizations. Readers who are familiar with the work of Chester Barnard will no doubt be reminded of the concepts of effectiveness and efficiency that Barnard discovered and applied both to personal action and to organizational action in general (in Chapters 2 and 5, respectively, of The Functions of the Executive). The distinction of Barnard’s is, in my opinion, one of the most significant milestones in the development of the theory of human organizations. The purpose of this note is to acknowledge my intellectual debt to him. This is not the place to develop the theoretical analyses that have led me from the concepts of effectiveness and efficiency in Barnard's theory to those of effectiveness, efficiency and consistency in my own. Readers interested in these issues are invited to read Organizational Theory: A Cybernetical Approach (Barcelona: IESE, Research Paper no. 5, 1974). This paper tries to demonstrate the need for, and the possibility of, a theory that generalizes Barnard's theory by taking into account the dynamism brought about by the decision-maker's learning processes.