Читать книгу Foundations of management - Juan Antonio Pérez López - Страница 25

There are three types of results that are inseparably linked with an action: extrinsic, internal and external. In so far these results are relevant for the achievement of the decisionmaker's present or future satisfactions we call them motives (extrinsic, intrinsic and transcendent, respectively). Motivation—the impulse that moves him to act—reflects, to a greater or lesser extent, each one of these motives, depending on that person's motivational quality. However, a particular action's real value obviously depends on the value of all of them; it is therefore incorrect to analyze an action's value by looking only at one or two types of motives, since all three are normally present. Thus, a worker may perhaps focus only on what he expects to earn by doing his work (extrinsic motive) and not take into account what he is going to learn from it (intrinsic motive) and how it may affect other people whether he does his work well or not (transcendent motive). In that case, he will only be incorrectly evaluating his action. However, this mistake will not prevent the results from appearing, and he will suffer their consequences a posteriori although he failed to take them into account a priori.

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.