Leadership and People Management: Foundations to Practice · Motivation and Engagement
Diagnosing and Addressing a Motivation Problem
When a team member's motivation genuinely declines, the specific underlying cause matters enormously for choosing an effective response, and applying a generic fix without first diagnosing the actual gap wastes effort and can even make the situation worse.
A leader noticing declining motivation in a team member often reaches immediately for a generic response, more praise, a bonus, a new project, without first diagnosing which specific underlying need, autonomy, competence, or relatedness, is actually unmet. A generic fix aimed at the wrong need can fail entirely or even backfire, such as offering more praise to someone whose actual underlying issue is a lack of genuine autonomy in how they do their work.
- A generic motivational fix applied without first diagnosing the specific unmet need (autonomy, competence, relatedness) can fail entirely or even backfire.
- Diagnostic questions differ by need: autonomy asks about genuine ownership, competence asks about challenge and feedback, relatedness asks about feeling seen and valued.
- A worked example shows that offering more autonomy to someone with an actual competence gap would worsen the situation, since they need more support, not less.
- Some motivation problems reflect a genuine values or interest mismatch rather than a fixable organizational gap, and an honest conversation about role fit is sometimes the right outcome.