MOTIVATIONAL THEORIES AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS IN HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

Motivation, as experts appreciate, refers to a set of internal (personality or intrinsic) or external (environmental or extrinsic) forces that provoke or mobilize the individual to engage in a given behavior. In the specialized literature, we find a series of well-known motivational theories, credible and consistent from the point of view of theoretical support or empirical evidence, and they all converge towards the analysis of motivational involvement, respectively what is called motivational orientation or the direction of motivational commitment. In organizational activity, the study of motivation started from the need to understand and use the subjective factors that explain performance fluctuations. In recent years, numerous studies related to motivation have been developed, but from a theoretical point of view, no remarkable progress has been made. Most of these studies insist either on identifying the relationships between cognitive aspects and motivation, or on the applications in which the determinants of motivation or its consequences for individual or organizational activity are explored.