It’s Not All About the Money, Approaches to Motivation at Work - Post Meeting Reflections

Date:  Wednesday, 16 September 2026, 16:00 – 18.00 BST 

Speakers:  Rob Briner - Professor of Organisational Psychology, Queen Mary University of London

Martha Newsom – Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Greenwich and Research Affiliate at University of Oxford School of Anthropology

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How do you motivate people? It’s a question that leaders have asked probably since the beginning of collective human activity. We know that it exercised the minds of ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans and, no doubt, many others too. Since then, dozens of academic theories and thousands of studies have attempted to explain it. So why did PARC decide to wade into this debate?

Reviewing some of our earlier work a clear picture emerged. Organisations are facing a bewildering confluence of new challenges and Reward leaders are being asked to raise their game in response. Part of doing that means looking beyond the frames of reference we're used to working in. Different ways of looking at what makes people do what they do seemed like a good place to start, which is what led to this event and the associated report.  We were not trying to cover the whole of motivation, which would be a life’s work. Rather, this was an invitation to pause and look again at the foundations underneath our legacy systems and thinking. If a single idea makes someone stop before reaching for the safe, familiar answer, then we have done our job.

One of the curious discoveries from our investigations on the subject we did was that, while motivation has been the subject of countless studies, there has been relatively little research on the practice of reward. As one academic remarked in 2023, “Employee compensation continues to be an under-studied topic despite its clear importance to employees’ lives.” The relationship between motivation and reward is therefore ripe for further discussion. 

In the report, we encouraged reward professionals to think beyond the economic and individual frames of reference by looking at motivation through the lenses of psychology, sociology and anthropology, which provide a more social and cultural context. 

Our first speaker at the event was Professor Rob Briner, who looked at motivation from an occupational psychology perspective. He started by separating job performance from job outcomes. A team can miss a deadline for reasons entirely outside its control, so what we reward has to be behaviour, not just results. He also pushed back on the idea that performance is one thing: it includes task performance, but also "contextual" performance (discretionary effort, helping colleagues, or, negatively, sabotage and withdrawal), how performance fluctuates over time, and how well people adapt when goals or environments shift. 

Motivation is not the same as job performance, as he explained:

“An individual may be highly motivated towards achieving a particular goal but for a whole range of reasons (e.g., ability or lack of resources) they may not be able to do so. Even if a goal is completed it can only be considered to be relevant to work performance if it contributes to organisational objectives.”

Motivation, he pointed out is a process, not a fixed trait or state. It has stages (initiation, direction, intensity, persistence) and many interacting influences, of which reward is only one. He touched on self-determination theory, which holds that people have three basic psychological needs: competence, relatedness, and autonomy. When work supports rather than thwarts these needs, people are more likely to be intrinsically motivated. 

Asking how reward affects performance, across all the different behaviours, contexts and people involved, Rob’s conclusion was "it depends." Getting reward right, he argued, requires understanding exactly what behaviour you're trying to elicit and how it interacts with everything else driving motivation.  Understanding basic work psychology theory and evidence is therefore essential for effective reward practice.

Dr Martha Newson, looking at motivation from an anthropological perspective, started with the subject of evolution. Humans are a hyper-social species. We survive and have always survived through group membership, not individual accumulation. Once basic physical needs are met, status and belonging become the currency that actually matters, and they're relative rather than absolute. Most of us in the developed world today have a better standard of living than medieval kings yet we may still feel poor next to our neighbours.

Martha traced this through classic anthropology, discussing Marcel Mauss's work on "the gift," where even the most generous-looking exchange carries an obligation, and Bronislaw Malinowski's kula ring, a system of ceremonial exchange in Melanesian societies that persists precisely because it isn't reciprocated for profit. Real gifts, she argued, are a communication between generations, and without ceremony they lose their power. The same question applies inside a company: how much of a "reward" is really about status, not value?

From there she moved to belonging itself as the reward. Citing research on identity fusion she noted that people aren't just motivated by their organisations, they can become motivated as members of them, to the point of self-sacrifice. To underline the point, a 2016 study found that retirees who lost both of their two main social groups had a six-year mortality risk six times higher than those who kept both. Group belonging, in other words, may be a bigger factor in early death than smoking or drinking.

In this social context, offering people money can do more harm than good. Drawing on research into "sacred values", Martha showed that when something is experienced as sacred, such as a cause, an identity, a relationship, offering material incentives can intensify opposition rather than soften it. Her closing reframe was the most useful part of the talk: instead of asking "how much is it worth?", ask "what does it mean?" Instead of "what has this person achieved?", ask "who could this reward allow them to become?"

From this and from our research, some strands emerge. Pay can indicate what someone is worth in the market, though it is only ever partially a market phenomenon. But pay may also ‘crowd out’ other forms of worth. More powerful questions, like where a person stands in the organisation, whether they feel they belong, how much recognition they have, will not always be answered by paying them more.

The ‘four lenses’ we identify in the report, the Economic, the Psychological, the Sociological and the Anthropological, give a more rounded view of the organisation and how it relates to the people within it. The findings of PARC’s recent reports suggest that the next five to ten years will be more challenging for companies than in recent decades. In PARC’s Future Reward Leader report (2023) we identified a number of areas in which Reward leaders need to up their game. Developing a knowledge and understanding of behavioural science outside the traditional Reward frame of reference will be an essential part of this transition.

You can download and read the full report below for further insight into the themes and findings discussed during the session.