money is a motivator essay

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Does More Money Really Make Us More Happy?

• Elizabeth Dunn
• Chris Courtney

A big paycheck won’t necessarily bring you joy

Although some studies show that wealthier people tend to be happier, prioritizing money over time can actually have the opposite effect.

• But even having just a little bit of extra cash in your savings account ($500), can increase your life satisfaction. So how can you keep more cash on hand?
• Ask yourself: What do I buy that isn’t essential for my survival? Is the expense genuinely contributing to my happiness? If the answer to the second question is no, try taking a break from those expenses.
• Other research shows there are specific ways to spend your money to promote happiness, such as spending on experiences, buying time, and investing in others.
• Spending choices that promote happiness are also dependent on individual personalities, and future research may provide more individualized advice to help you get the most happiness from your money.

Where your work meets your life. See more from Ascend here .

How often have you willingly sacrificed your free time to make more money? You’re not alone. But new research suggests that prioritizing money over time may actually undermine our happiness.

• ED Elizabeth Dunn is a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia and Chief Science Officer of Happy Money, a financial technology company with a mission to help borrowers become savers. She is also co-author of “ Happy Money: The Science of Happier Spending ” with Dr. Michael Norton. Her TED2019 talk on money and happiness was selected as one of the top 10 talks of the year by TED.
• CC Chris Courtney is the VP of Science at Happy Money. He utilizes his background in cognitive neuroscience, human-computer interaction, and machine learning to drive personalization and engagement in products designed to empower people to take control of their financial lives. His team is focused on creating innovative ways to provide more inclusionary financial services, while building tools to promote financial and psychological well-being and success.

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Money as a Form of Motivation in the Work Place Essay

Motivation is described as the forces that account for the stimulation, assortment, course and continuance of behavior [1] . This then means that quite a number of things can motivate people as motivation is goal oriented behavior.

People tend to do things for the rewards they will receive at the end of the task or at the end of a period of time. Money, at the work place is one of the things that get people to work harder. This then shows that money can and is used as a motivational factor in the work place so that employees can strive to give their best and their all at the end of the day.

Nowadays, people tend to look at how much they are going to get paid rather than job satisfaction, hence in this light money becomes a motivational force for the workplace and for the employees. In short, money makes people wake up in the morning to go to work, sit behind a desk for eight or more hours and go back home tired at the end of the day ready to repeat the whole process again the following day.

When workers are money motivated, they will carry out their duties effectively, efficiently and thoroughly so that they can make as much money as possible in the shortest time possible.

According to management study guide, Motivation is very important in an organization as it improves the level of efficiency of employees which in turn leads to an increase in productivity, reducing the cost of operations and improving overall efficiency. Motivation in the work place also leads to achievement of organizational goals. Organizational goals are achieved when co-ordination and cooperation take place at the same time which can effectively be achieved through money motivation [2] .

Motivation plays a big role when it comes to survival of organizations. If the way to fully motivate employees is to offer them money then organizations will offer their employees money so as to motivate them fully in their work therefore improving the organization as a whole. Employers need to also appreciate what inspires employees within the environment of their work and the responsibility that they perform. [3]

There are theories of motivation of employees that are linked to money in one way or another. Different researchers came up with different theories explaining the needs of workers:

According to Abraham Maslow’s Needs Hierarchy Theory (1983),

“Employees have five levels of needs: physiological, safety, social, ego and self-actualizing. Physiological needs are important as they sustain human life and one cannot survive without them. They are; food, water, warmth, shelter, sleep, medicine and education. Safety needs are the needs to be free of physical danger, fear of losing a job, property, and protection against emotional harm.

Social needs include the need to belong and acceptance from others not forgetting the need for affection and friendship. Ego/esteem needs include satisfaction of power, prestige status and self confidence while self actualization is the drive to become “what one is capable of becoming, it includes growth, achieving one’s potential and self fulfillment” [4] . (Maslow 1943)

Maslow insisted that for one to move on successfully to the next level, the wishes at the lower level have to be completely achieved and fulfilled so as to be motivated by the higher needs level. In simple terms, for example, one would not be motivated by social status before he has achieved security or one would not be motivated by safety before he can afford the basic needs, food, shelter, clothing, education, medication, water and sleep.

This shows that individuals have to work hard to get enough money so as to satisfy their needs and the needs of their dependants fully. In such a scenario, an employee would be motivated by the money he receives at the end of the work period as then would the employee be able to fulfill his needs therefore proving Maslow’s hierarchy needs theory.

According to Shah, and Professor Shah; and Vroom in reference to Vroom’s Valence x Expectancy theory: employee effort will lead to performance which will lead to rewards. The theory focuses on three things: efforts and performance relationship, performance and reward relationship, rewards and personal goal relationship [5] .

The theory states that the force of inclination to behave in a certain way depends on the strength of anticipation that the act will be followed by a specific result and on the allure of that result to the individual. In simple terms, valence x expectancy theory states that an employee can be motivated to work harder when their belief is that hard work will result in awareness of individual targets in form of some prize; the prize in this case being money.

Rewards can either be positive or negative, the more positive the reward the higher the level of motivation of the employee goes, while the more negative the reward, the less the level of motivation for the employee. In this sense money is seen as the positive reward, encouraging the employee to work harder and more effectively as the results of the employee’s hard work are positive, generating money for the employee, while loss of income is looked as the negative reward.

Frederick Herzberg’s two-factor theory states that certain aspects in the work place result in job satisfaction but when these aspects are abolished they lead to dissatisfaction. [6] In his theory Herzberg states that intrinsic factors are related to job satisfaction, while extrinsic aspects are related to dissatisfaction. He based this theory on the question: “what do people want from their Jobs? he carried out a research and concluded that removing dissatisfying characteristics from a job does not necessarily make the job satisfying.”

He claims that certain aspects when present in the work place make employees more motivated to work but when these aspects are absent, there is less motivation in the work place. In this scenario money bonuses can be seen as the aspect that brings more motivation to the work place and when there is absence of money there is less motivation amongst the employees.

For example, if employees are told they will be paid extra money to come to work during public holidays and weekends, majority of the employees will show up as they are expecting a bonus which is in form of a sum of money at the end of the day. In this way money acts as a motivator to the employees who would give up their weekends and holidays with the aim of receiving a certain amount of money.

Herzberg pointed out that there are two types of peoples needs: hygiene factors create dissatisfaction when they are missing and create satisfaction when they are there , employees often tend to take existence of these factors for granted for example; salary, working conditions, or job security. Motivators; contribute to satisfaction for example recognition in the work place, promotion, responsibility just to mention but a few. To achieve high motivation and employee output, motivation and hygiene factors must be used together [7] .

In reference to Jeremy Bentham’s the carrot and stick approach, individuals are driven by their own self-interest and they are motivated by the desire to avoid pain at all costs and achieve maximum pleasure at the lowest possible cost.

“An employee will work only if the reward is attractive and big enough or if the punishment is sufficiently horrible.”

The carrot in this theory refers to the rewards while the stick refers to the punishment, in simpler terms employers use the system of rewards and punishment to induce certain behavior traits in their employees.

In majority of motivational theories, some kind of ‘carrot’ are recognized and awarded to individuals in this case money, or some form of financial bonuses like a paid vacation, a company car that one does not have to fuel are used as motivational aspects for employees to keep working hard so that they can enjoy the financial rewards at the end of the day. The issue with the carrot approach is that more often than not, individuals get the reward, in spite of their performance levels.

The stick on the other hand refers to the punishments accorded to individuals who do not perform their duties well. In the form of fear; fear of loss of job, loss of income, reduction of a bonus, demotion or some other form of consequence has, is, and will still continue being an effective way of motivation among employees. The thought of loosing ones job and not having a steady income creates fear in the employees who work hard to keep their jobs and secure their income.

The stick approach results in poor quality work, defensive behavior from the employees and it is not the best way to use when it comes to motivation of employees. Through the stick approach employees tend to fear and work because they have no other choice and they want to keep their jobs and get income at the end of the day.

In using the carrot and stick approach to influence motivation among employees one ought to be careful so that the rewards, money and the penalties that is, loss of employment balance out. In this way an employer will have a peaceful working environment for his employees and himself. Money offers and financial bonuses should be attractive enough and sufficient enough for the employee needs so that they can work hard not only for their benefit but for the benefit of the employer and organization at large [8] .

According to B.F. Skinner he uses the term operant conditioning to illustrate the effects of the outcomes of a specific character trait on the future repetition of the particular behavior.

“There are four kinds of operant conditioning: positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, punishment and extinction. Positive and negative reinforcement fortify behavior while on the other hand punishment and extinction deteriorate behavior.” Positive reinforcement encourages behavior in that it offers rewards after certain good behaviors are observed for example; if your work is outstanding one gets an extra bonus and perhaps a promotion. Negative reinforcement on removes a stress factor as a result of good behavior.

For example, economic sanctions being lifted from a country due to an improvement on their corruption levels. Extinction refers to getting no reward for something one has done. For example: if one is not getting paid for overtime, they stop working over time. Punishment is where one has to pay for their behaviors, for example; not getting paid the day one comes into work late [9] . In this case of operant conditioning money can be seen as positive and negative reinforcement.

This means that the rewards an employee gets for working hard are in form of money either a bonus, or an increase in salary the more the money, the higher the level of motivation among employees . Punishment and extinction in this case can be looked at as loss of work, loss of a steady income and this will lower motivation levels among the employees.

People have witnessed workers striking around the world due to payment issues that have arisen from delayed wages, salary arrears, more taxes, or minimum wages. Employee strikes have become a common site mostly due to the financial situations. When employees refuse to work and strike or go on a go-slow, the employer suffers a lot as work becomes stagnant.

Most employees strike due to lack of motivation in the financial aspect. In the United Kingdom, college staff of the University and College Union went on strike over pay changes. The employees were demanding a standardized payment scheme while the college was proposing a new scheme that would pay employees according to the number of people passing a course.

From this example, we see that the financial security of the employees was threatened hence they decided to go on strike to force their employer to reconsider his decision. We see that indeed money was the motivating factor here and since money was to be taken out of the picture, the employees reacted and made their opinions known as well as securing their income [10] .

In England, July 8 th 2010, 200 workers walked out of the Astrum plant in Stanhope that manufactures tank track over lack of a pay rise that was to be given during the year. The employees, complained that overtime had been banned and that talks for a pay rise had not succeeded. This shows that the overtime and pay raise motivated the employees to work hard and gave them an incentive to go to work each morning as they knew that they would have something to look forward to at the end of the day.

This price they were looking forward to was the overtime pay and the pay rise which when both of them were canceled pushed the workers to strike. This shows that money is indeed a motivational factor in the work place and that without money work would not take place as effectively as it should. [11]

In Middle East, the first ever workers strike was witnessed in Turkey, in the IT sector on the 9 th of July 2010. The employees went on strike claiming that their salaries were far much lower than those who worked in other companies in the same positions. This shows that the employees felt cheated and used as their knowledge and hard work was not being rewarded accordingly.

These employees wanted to feel appreciated by their colleagues and their employer and wanted to feel equal to their fellow employees who worked in other companies. They claimed that collective bargaining about the salaries and failed and that they would resume work only if their salaries were raised to the standard of their colleagues in other companies. [12]

In Africa, Egyptian textile workers recommence their demonstrations over owing wages after guarantees of payments went unpaid for four months.

The workers had not received payment from the year 2007; this made the workers vow not to go back to work until they were paid. Abraham Maslow’s notes “after a 21- day sit-in by employees outside parliament buildings, an agreement between the Manpower Ministry and Immigration and Bank Misr agreed that the employees were going to be paid LE 106 million which they were owed.” [13]

This scenario shows and reinforces the idea that money is a huge motivational factor when it comes to employees as without money the employees do not work. When these Egyptian employees were promised to be paid the first time they went back to work hoping that the employer would keep his word and pay them as he had promised.

After four months of no pay, the aggravated employees decided to go on strike and even sit outside parliament buildings to make sure that their voices were heard and their needs taken care off. If money was not a motivational factor for employees they would not have gone on strike they would have kept on working but because money is a big motivational factor for employees they went on strike and demanded to be paid for their hard work [14] .

In Nigeria, health and medical workers suspended their on-going industrial action because the government agreed to pay 50% of their arrears.

They however gave the government an ultimatum that if their arrears were not going to be paid in the course of a week’s time they would resume their industrial action. This shows that money is the underlying factor for employees in all job sectors. If the health workers go on strike it means sick people are suffering more than they should be as they are not being attended they way they should be attended to.

The Nigerian government then shifted the payment issue to the bank claiming that the banks were holding the money for their own selfish interests. This however does not matter to the employees as all they want is their money paid so that they could fulfill the needs and wants. This situation again shows distinctively that money is an underlying factor that motivates employees to work and work hard for that matter [15]

In conclusion, this paper has proved that indeed money is a motivational factor in relation to employees at the work place. Nobody wants to get tired working for nothing so the incentives at the end of the day, that is salary and bonuses give individuals the strength and zeal to work everyday without complaining that they have to go thorough the same routine every single day.

Money has become a motivational factor at the workplace because every single thing in the world is becoming expensive due to the inflation rates that seem to be escalating every single day.

Without money, it is extremely difficult for one to survive so one has to work hard at their jobs so as to earn enough money to sustain themselves and their dependants. Money is the driving force behind all jobs that an individual takes up. Majority of employees all want to become millionaires or billionaires at one point in their lives so that they could stop working and sit back and enjoy the fruits of their labor

Money motivates and provides incentives to employees to give their all when at work as once they have the money in their hands there is a level of satisfaction that they have achieved and this satisfaction encourages then to work more harder so as keep getting the money.

Money is a motivational factor for employees as it allows them to purchase luxury items and enjoy their money in any way they feel like. Without money many people who are employees in one place or another, would not be able to purchase items like cars, houses, entertainment systems for their houses just to mention but a few.

Money also brings about status quo among employees and respect. In the world today, the more money you have the more respect you get from other people. Individuals tend to compare themselves in terms of how much money they have in their bank accounts. Musicians are producing songs about how much money they have so as to get respect not only from their peers but also from other people.

The kind of car one drives and the kind of house one lives in will earn one respect and this is all possible because of the amount of money one has that comes from ones hard work.

In short money makes the world go round, if one has enough money, ones world will spin smoothly and efficiently according to his needs, on the other hand if one does not have money, yes, ones world will spin but it will have difficulties and major ones for that matter as one will be unable to take care of his needs let alone the needs of the people who depend on him.

Money is a form of motivation for employees in that the more they work, the more money they get to contribute to their monthly pensions and the more the monthly pensions gain interest therefore at the end of the working term, one will be looking forward to a huge amount of money that resulted from his hard work. For Example, retirements benefits corporate offer this attractive package to employees increasing their motivation in their work.

Bibliography

An, ‘ Theories of motivation ’, Analytictech , 2003. Web.

An, ‘Importance of motivation’, Management study guide , 2001. Web.

Bentham, J., Jeremy Bentham: Life, Influence and Perspectives on his thought , Routledge, New York, 1993.

Biehler, R. & Snowman, J., Psychology Applied to Teaching, 12th ed, Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1997.

Knights, D. & Willmott, H., Organizational behavior and management, London, Thomson Learning, 2007.

Maslow, A. H., ‘A theory of human motivation,’ Psychological Review , vol. 25, 1943, pp. 370-396.

Shah. K. & Shah, J. P., Vroom,V. H. work and motivation, Laynetworks , 2000. Web.

Ukwuoma, B., Muanya, C. & Olayinka C., ‘ Health workers suspend strike, govt to pay 50% arrears’ , 2000. Web.

Vroom, V. H. Work and Motivation , Krieger Publishing Company, Manhattan,1982, pp. 48.

‘Workers Struggles: Europe, Middle East & Africa’, World Socialist 2010. Web.

• R. Biehler & J. Snowman, Psychology Applied to Teaching, 12 th ed. Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1997, 399.
• Management study guide: importance of motivation
• V. H. Vroom, Work and Motivation , Krieger Publishing Company, Manhattan, 1982, pp. 48.
• A. Maslow, ‘A theory of human motivation,’ Psychological Review , vol. 25, 1943, pp. 370-396.
• K. Shah & J. Shah, Vroom,V. H. work and motivation, Laynetworks , 2000.
• D. Knights & H. Willmott, Organizational behavior and management , London, Thomson Learning, 2007, 83.
• D. Knights & H. Willmott, Organizational behavior and management , London, Thomson Learning, 2007, 104.
• J. Bentham, Jeremy Bentham: Life, Influence and Perspectives on his thought, Routledge, New York, 1993, 65.
• An, ‘Theories of motivation’, Analytictech.com , 2003.
• ‘Workers Struggles: Europe, Middle East & Africa’, World Socialist .
• ‘Workers Struggles: Europe, Middle East & Africa’, World Socialist , 2010.
• A. H. Maslow, ‘A theory of human motivation,’ Psychological Review , vol. 25, 1943, pp. 370-396.
• B. Ukwuoma, C. Muanya & C. Olayinka, ‘Health workers suspend strike, govt to pay 50% arrears’, 2000.
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IvyPanda. (2024, February 28). Money as a Form of Motivation in the Work Place. https://ivypanda.com/essays/money-as-a-form-of-motivation-in-the-work-place/

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IvyPanda . 2024. "Money as a Form of Motivation in the Work Place." February 28, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/money-as-a-form-of-motivation-in-the-work-place/.

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IvyPanda . "Money as a Form of Motivation in the Work Place." February 28, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/money-as-a-form-of-motivation-in-the-work-place/.

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Essays About Money: Top 5 Examples and 6 Prompts

With money comes great power; however, power must always come with responsibility. Discover thought-provoking essays about money in our guide.

Money is everywhere. We use it to eat, drink, clothe ourselves, and get shelter, among many other uses. Nowadays, it is an undisputed fact that “money makes the world go round.” The earliest known form of money dates back to around 5,000 years ago ; trade was previously carried out using a barter system. However, over the centuries, more and more nations began implementing a currency system, and money has become more critical. 

In the contemporary world, it seems to be “all about money.” However, it is important not to lose sight of what is important; we must maintain good physical and mental health and healthy relationships with the people around us. Money is necessary; it is just not the only thing necessary. To start your essay, read these examples to write insightful essays about money. 

5 Top Examples On Essay About Money

1. essay on money by prasanna, 2. how money changed human history by jacob wilkins, 3. capitalism: money that make money by ernestine montgomery, 4.  is money the most important thing by seth higgins.

• 5. ​​An Introduction to Saving Money by Jeremy Vohwinkle

Writing Prompts For Essays About Money

1. good uses for money, 2. the “dark side” of money, 3. money’s role in history, 4. morality vs. money, 5. can money buy happiness, 6. how to save money.

“Imagine the world without money. We will eventually come to a point where we will be asking questions like “what’s the point of life”. Hope and goals are some of the important things that will keep a man going in life. Without any sense of achievement or motivation, there wouldn’t be any inventions or progress in the world. People work to get money and then people work harder to get more money. This cycle of life that keeps a man motivated and hopeful is one of the biggest advantages of the system of money”

This essay gives readers a general outlook on money and its advantages and disadvantages. It gives people equal opportunity to work for their dreams and motivates them to be productive members of society, while it also raises the question of greed. Money, without a doubt, has its positive and negative aspects, but it exists and is only becoming more critical.

“But the barter economy was flawed. There was no universal measure for determining the value of an item. It was all based on the subjective opinion of the individuals involved. And to make matters worse, the barter economy relied on both sides wanting something the other had to offer. Trade, therefore, could be sluggish and frustrating. Human beings needed something different, and money was the answer.”

Wilkins writes about how money revolutionized the way trade was conducted. The barter system involved trading any objects if both parties agreed to a deal, such as trading animal skins for fish or medicine for timber. However, the only measure of an item’s value was how much one party wanted it- both sides needed to have something the other wanted. The introduction of money allowed people to put a solid value on commodities, making trade easier.  

“So, if you were to closely observe the dirty, disordered canvas of economic progress during the 20th and 21 st century, you should conclude that, for all its warts, capitalism has been the winner. It has sometimes caused pain; suffered from serious cycles; and often needed the clout of the state- such as we have seen from September 2008. It has also been quite resistant to sensible regulation. Even so, the basic institutions of capitalism have worked, not just in the US and the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and development) nations, but also many developing countries, of which India is one.”

Albeit lengthy, Montgomery’s essay discusses the debate between socialism and capitalism, a topic of which money is at the core. Montgomery describes Karl Marx’s criticism of capitalism: all the money goes to a few people, not the workers. She believes these are valid to an extent and criticizes certain forms of capitalism and socialism. Neither capitalism nor socialism is perfect, but according to Montgomery, capitalism creates a better economy. 

“Being the richest man in the world does not mean you are the happiest man in the world, although money can buy you happiness sometimes, but not always. If we could all appreciate the way life is, the fun, and the beauty I think the world would be better. If people weren’t power hungry maybe we’d have a lesser demand for money. Those people who is money hungry and power hungry need to relax. Money can’t buy you happiness. These individuals need to understand that.”

Higgins implores readers to remember that money is not the only thing people need in the world. He stresses the necessity of money, as it is used to pay for various necessary goods and services; however, he believes it is not a prerequisite for happiness. Material things are temporary, and there are other things we should focus on, like family and friends. 

5. ​​ An Introduction to Saving Money by Jeremy Vohwinkle

“A financial emergency may take the form of a job loss, significant medical or dental expense, unexpected home or auto repairs, a hurricane or major storm, or something unthinkable, such as a global pandemic. The last thing you want to do is to rely on credit cards with their hefty interest fees or to be forced to take out a loan. That’s where your emergency fund can come in handy. Historically, the formula for an emergency account is to have enough readily available cash to cover three to six months of living expenses.“

Vohwinkle’s essay gives readers some suggestions on how to save more money. Most importantly, he suggests setting up an emergency fund, as all other saving techniques stem from there. He also suggests creating an automatic savings plan and cutting down on “spending leaks,” like buying coffee. You might also be interested in these essays about celebration .

In this essay, write about why money is necessary and the ways to use it for the greater good, and include ways in which it can be used (investing, donating, etc.). For each point, you make, be sure to explain why. Of course, this is entirely subjective; feel free to write about what you consider “good uses” for money. 

On the other hand, money also has a negative side —research on money-related issues, such as taxpayer-funded corruption and trading of illegal goods. In your essay, explore this side of money and perhaps give solutions on how to stop these problems. 

Money has played a progressively more important role throughout human history. Discuss the development of currency and the economy, from the barter system to the digital world we live in today. You need not go too in-depth, as there is a lot of ground to cover and many eras to research. Be sure to cite reputable sources when discussing history. 

Many people warn of “selling your soul” for financial gain. In your essay, you can write about the importance of having solid values in this day and age, where money reigns supreme. What principles do you need to keep in mind? Explain how you can still value money while staying grounded; mention the balance between material needs and others. 

As stated in Higgins’ essay, more people have begun to prioritize money over all else. Do you believe that money is truly the most important thing? Can it alone make you happy? Discuss both sides of this question and choose your position accordingly. Be sure to provide precise supporting details for a stronger argument. 

Enumerate tips on how you can save money. Anything works, from saving certain things for special occasions to buying more food in the grocery rather than eating out. This is your opinion; however, feel free to consult online sources and the people around you for extra advice. 

For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the best essay checkers .If you’re still stuck, check out our general resource of essay writing topics .

Martin is an avid writer specializing in editing and proofreading. He also enjoys literary analysis and writing about food and travel.

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44 How Important Is Money to Motivate People to Work?

Marylène Gagné, Future of Work Institute, Curtin University

Alexander Nordgren Selar, Department of Psychology, Stockholm University

Magnus Sverke, Department of Psychology, Stockholm University

• Published: 23 February 2023
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This chapter explores research on the importance of money to motivate people to work. Research on the role of money in people’s lives and as a motivator of working shows that even though people need a decent basic income, money is not the best motivator of work performance. A review of research on the effects of performance-based compensation on motivation, performance, and well-being concludes that financial incentives do not seem to be as powerful to drive performance as portrayed in many motivation theories, and that there is still a need to better understand how such incentives relate to need satisfaction and work motivation. Moreover, incentives seem to have undesirable side effects on moral engagement, stress, and well-being. The chapter also explores other aspects of compensation, including how fairness and the relative distribution of money within organizations influence need satisfaction, motivation, and work outcomes, as well as how motivational assumptions and payment norms and preferences might modify how money influences motivation. It ends with an identification of remaining knowledge gaps and suggestions for future research on the effects of compensation on work motivation that would benefit from using self-determination theory, as well as the practical implications of what is known thus far for the design of compensation systems.

It has been argued that work is compensated because “the overwhelming majority of workers would not otherwise perform the tasks” ( Lazear, 2018 , p. 195). Lazear, an influential behavioral economist, says that without compensation, only enjoyable tasks would get done and those most needed by society would be neglected. Besides the fact that statistics on volunteer work attest to the impressive contributions volunteers make to essential services that are far from always enjoyable (e.g., ABS, 2019 ; Ironmonger, 2012 ), and that 76% of people admit they would continue to work even if they did not need money ( Paulsen, 2008 ), views like those of Lazear on the importance of money to motivate work have dominated the field of compensation management ( Lawler, 2000 ; Pfeffer, 2007 ; Shaw & Mitra, 2017 ). These perspectives illustrate the classical debate on whether money (compensation) or other factors are the main driver of individual behavior. On the one side, there are those who emphasize instrumentality and advocate that individuals engage in behavior only if they personally gain from these behaviors (e.g., Lazear, 2018 ; Olson, 1971 ). On the other, there are proponents of the view that individual behavior is a function of more intrinsic factors, such as joy, meaningfulness, altruism, values, or the perceived importance of a certain cause (e.g., Sen, 1982 ; Weber, 1968 ). Self-determination theory (SDT; Ryan & Deci, 2017 ) is perfectly suited to explain this range of different motivational drivers of individual behavior.

In this chapter, we explore research on the importance of money, compensation, and compensation systems to motivate people to work so that we can better understand: (1) the importance of money in people’s lives and as a motivator of working; (2) how performance-based incentives influence motivation, performance, and well-being; (3) how fairness and the relative distribution of money within organizations influence work outcomes, and; (4) how motivational assumptions and payment norms and preferences might modify how money influences motivation. We end with an identification of remaining knowledge gaps and suggestions for future research on the effects of compensation on work motivation, as well as the practical implications of what is known thus far for the design of compensation systems.

The Importance of Money

There is no doubt that receiving an income is important in people’s lives as it is necessary in most of our currently structured societies to have money to at least meet basic physiological and security needs, as evidenced through how income influences life expectancy ( Chetty et al., 2016 ; Statistics Sweden, 2016 ). Income influences many of the life decisions people make, including occupational and job choices, as well as other choices such as where to live and whether to get married and have children ( Leana & Meuris, 2015 ). However, once a minimum income threshold is reached, money does not necessarily translate into additional happiness ( Jebb et al., 2018 ; Kahneman & Deaton, 2010 ), and people often overestimate the extent to which additional money would make them happier ( Aknin et al., 2009 ).

Another important aspect of money is its availability. Insecure employment breeds insecure earnings that create stress ( Odle-Dusseau, Mathews, & Wayne, 2018 ; Sverke, Hellgren, & Näswall, 2002 ). Thus, not earning an income that meets basic survival needs leads to financial insecurity, which has been associated with numerous negative outcomes, including disrupted cognitive functioning (and consequently learning, decision-making, and work performance), moral disengagement ( John, Loewenstein, & Rick, 2014 ; Pitesa & Thau, 2014 ; Sharma et al., 2014 ), and lower health and well-being ( Haushofer & Fehr, 2014 ; Howell, Kurai, & Tam, 2013 ; Leana & Meuris, 2015 ). Research on unemployment (e.g., Jahoda, 1982 ; Warr, 1987 ) indicates that individuals who lose their jobs lose not only the manifest benefits of work (i.e., their salary) but also various latent benefits associated with having a job (opportunity to make a meaningful contribution, social contact, status and identity, time structure, and the possibility of engaging in structured activities). This indicates that work/employment offers many benefits beyond money and, contradicting Lazear (2018) , many reasons for wanting to work besides money. Research on job insecurity indicates that the perceived risk of losing one’s job can have detrimental consequences for employees’ attitudes, work-related behavior, and health (for meta-analytic results, see, e.g., Jiang & Lavaysse, 2018 ; Sverke et al., 2002 , 2019 ).

This might seem at first glance to contradict research showing that having strong materialistic goals is bad for one’s well-being ( Dittmar et al., 2014 ; Kasser & Ryan, 1993 ). However, research actually shows that if the goal underlying the desire for money is to reach income security, it does not negatively impact autonomous work motivation (i.e., meaning and enjoyment-based motivation; Chen & Hsieh, 2015 ). In line with this, satisfying levels of pay have been found to positively impact autonomous work motivation ( Kuvaas et al., 2016 ), but research shows that this positive impact could shift and even turn negative if the way money is administered and distributed is perceived as controlling the employee ( Cerasoli, Nicklin, & Nassrelgrgawi, 2016 ; Kuvaas, Buch, & Dysvik, 2020 ).

In addition, the relative distribution of money can influence employee pay satisfaction, job satisfaction, willingness to remain, and autonomous work motivation ( Card et al., 2012 ). Of particular interest, previous research has shown that monetarily disadvantaged employees in work units experienced decreases in their pay satisfaction and job satisfaction and increases in their job search intentions when they got access to information about the actual pay differences between them and their peers (i.e., when they understood that they were disadvantaged). However, these variables remained intact among advantaged employees even when they were made aware about the fact that they were better paid than their peers ( Card et al., 2012 ). Taken together, these results indicate that pay inequalities are more likely to decrease disadvantaged employees’ job satisfaction, and willingness to remain than they are to increase advantaged employees’ relations with these outcomes. Thus, above income insecurity, both the management of compensation (i.e., whether it is controlling and decreases the experience of autonomy) and employee perceptions of being disadvantaged are likely to influence these outcomes—perhaps with the unintended consequence of lowering employee autonomous motivation.

Going back to Lazear’s (2018) argument that money is the most powerful motivator of work performance, it can be compared to other means to motivate workers. This can be done by examining its motivational power relative to other key organizational practices likely to affect need satisfaction, such as the provision of feedback, managerial styles, and redesigning work to make it more autonomously motivating.

One meta-analysis of 98 interventions to change one of 11 work practices (e.g., work redesign, training, performance appraisals, goal setting, financial incentives) showed that financial incentives yielded the greatest changes in performance ( Guzzo, Jette, & Katzell, 1985 ). Another review of 61 field experiments on incentives, participation, goal setting, and job enrichment similarly revealed that financial incentives led to slightly greater performance improvements than the other changes ( Locke et al., 1980 ). Most of the jobs or tasks in these meta-analyses were simple and repetitive physical or algorithmic tasks for which performance is easy to measure and quantify (e.g., tree planting, animal trapping, welding, punch card processing). In contrast, today’s work involves more complex tasks that require more cognitive processing and problem-solving in often increasingly uncertain and interdependent contexts ( Griffin, Neal, & Parker, 2007 ). Today’s work challenges may thus require more autonomous motivational styles that are more strongly associated with flexibility, proactivity, and creativity than controlling styles ( Gagné, Griffin, & Parker, 2021 ; Van den Broeck et al., 2021 ). In addition, costs associated with employee turnover and ill-being are increasingly within the scope of organizational concerns, given that they too affect the bottom line. Again, meta-analytic findings show the strong advantage of promoting autonomous motivation over controlled motivation to promote well-being and retention ( Van den Broeck et al., 2021 ). Therefore, it is doubtful that the conclusion drawn from these older meta-analyses, that money is the most powerful motivator of performance, would hold for contemporary work.

Our own recent research (together with Falkenberg and Hellgren) examined the importance of compensation relative to the importance of other sources of psychological need satisfaction in a contemporary sample of workers. In a study of 582 highly skilled white-collar workers in the Swedish energy sector, we found that factors related to a performance-based pay system (i.e., instrumentality, procedural fairness) had negligible and mixed relations to performance relative to other practices that were more strongly related to need satisfaction, particularly job autonomy and, to a lesser extent, receiving constructive feedback ( Nordgren Selar et al., 2020 ). These results concur with a slightly older study of Swedish nurses in which it was found that feedback, job autonomy, and workload were more predictive of work attitudes and performance than justice perceptions related to the pay system ( Andersson-Stråberg, Sverke, & Hellgren, 2007 ). Though more studies are needed, this research supports the idea that performance-based incentives may not have the predicted strong and uniform positive effects for many of today’s jobs.

In the contemporary world of work, people need money to fulfill many of their needs, and having secure employment and income therefore matters. To the extent that people can improve their life circumstances through money, it can help fulfill both survival and psychological needs ( Di Domenico & Fournier, 2014 ). However, we should not place too much weight on compensation to motivate performance relative to other means to motivate workers, such as providing them autonomy through good work design and giving adequate feedback to enhance their feelings of competence, as demonstrated in our ongoing research. People do not consider their income in only absolute terms but also in relative social comparison terms. Equity theory ( Adams, 1965 ) has often been used to examine the importance of justice perceptions in pay administration, and there has also been quite a bit of research on pay dispersion ( Shaw, 2014 ), but none so far has considered how pay dispersion may influence autonomous work motivation. Future research could continue to elaborate on these findings to fully discern how income, both absolute and relative, influences need satisfaction and work motivation. Later in this chapter, we elaborate on equity perceptions, but before that, we consider another aspect of income security caused by using pay-for-performance compensation schemes that deserves attention.

Performance-Based Compensation

In contrast to skill-based and seniority-based compensation, where pay levels and pay raises depend on factors such as credentials and tenure in an organization, performance-based compensation refers to cases where compensation depends (partly or completely) on how well an individual employee performs their work or produces results (e.g., Gerhart & Fang, 2014 ; Lawler, 1990 ). Different types of performance-based pay schemes are used, including merit increases based on (typically) yearly performance appraisals, commissions or “piece-rates” delivered for producing results (e.g., selling a product, manufacturing a widget), and bonuses for reaching a performance target (typical targets include sales quota, customer satisfaction ratings, safety record, attendance, and getting an “exceeds expectations” rating from manager in yearly appraisal). Apart from merit increases, the other forms of performance-based pay imply that one’s total compensation can vary upward and downward across time, making the portion of one’s income based on performance less secure.

There have been heated debates about the effects of performance-based incentives on work motivation and performance. One of SDT’s subtheories, cognitive evaluation theory ( Deci & Ryan, 1980 ), is devoted to understanding the effects of contingent rewards on intrinsic motivation. It proposes that tangible contingent rewards can influence intrinsic motivation through their effects on autonomy and competence satisfaction. A second subtheory, organismic integration theory, similarly argues that autonomy and competence experiences affect autonomous extrinsic motivation (i.e., identified regulation; Ryan & Deci, 2017 ). Given that it has been shown to be important for workers to have higher autonomous relative to controlled forms of motivation in order to perform well, be engaged, and avoid burnout at work ( Howard et al., 2016 ), it is important to consider how performance-based pay influences workers’ basic need satisfaction and motivation.

Numerous meta-analyses and reviews of research on the effects of contingent pay on motivation and performance have been conducted (e.g., Cerasoli, Nicklin, & Ford, 2014 ; Cerasoli et al., 2016 ; Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 1999 ; Gerhart & Rynes, 2003 ; Jenkins et al., 1998 ; Kim, Gerhart, & Fang, 2021 ; Lazear, 2018 ; Locke et al., 1980 ; Weibel, Rost, & Osterloh, 2010 ). Though incentives have been shown to lead to higher performance across many of these reviews, the effects seem to be limited to performance quantity rather than quality (Cerasoli et al., 2014 , 2016 ; Jenkins et al., 1998 ) and to simple boring tasks rather than complex interesting ones ( Weibel et al., 2010 ). Although previous research has emphasized the importance of employees seeing a clear connection between their pay and how they perform (i.e., “clear line of sight”; Lawler, 2000 ) and perceiving pay decisions as fair ( Andersson-Stråberg et al., 2007 ), employees actually rarely see a clear connection between their pay and performance ( Gerhart, Rynes, & Fulmer, 2009 ; Kuvaas et al., 2016 ). Many would argue that this lack of perceived instrumentality would make incentives less powerful in driving performance ( Jensen & Meckling, 1976 ; Lawler, 1990 ; Vroom, 1964 ). However, meta-analytic results indicate that indirectly contingent incentives (i.e., pay that is loosely related to performance, or lower in instrumentality) are more strongly related to need satisfaction and intrinsic motivation than are directly contingent incentives (i.e., pay that is tightly related to performance, or higher in instrumentality; Cerasoli et al., 2014 , 2016 ). In other words, through their evidenced positive associations with intrinsic motivation and need satisfaction, indirect instrumental incentives are more likely to increase employee performance than are directly instrumental incentives, because intrinsic motivation is much more strongly associated with work performance than is external regulation ( Van den Broeck et al., 2021 ).

It has also been shown that incentives may lead to “collateral damage” such as stress and anxiety ( Dahl & Pierce, 2020 ; Parker et al., 2019 ). Due to the uncertainty associated with it, performance-based pay can create income insecurity (especially when a significant ratio of one’s income is from this source). Insecurity might explain the relation between the introduction of performance-based pay schemes and increases in psychotropic prescriptions for anxiety and depression in a sample of thousands of Danish workers ( Dahl & Pierce, 2020 ). Not surprisingly, stress consequences are more pronounced for high-stakes rewards (i.e., having to meet a quota to obtain the reward) relative to low-stakes rewards (e.g., a piece-rate system; Parker et al., 2019 ).

Income insecurity can also be caused by using performance-based compensation, which could explain the “collateral damage” associated with the use of performance-based incentives. Research on the effects of performance-based incentives on motivation and performance also suggests that support for classic theories advocating for their use (i.e., agency and expectancy theories; Jensen & Meckling, 1976 ; Vroom, 1964 ) is not as solid as portrayed in the general compensation literature. SDT provides alternative views on how performance-based incentives may influence motivation and performance through the satisfaction or frustration of psychological needs, and some recent work, including recent meta-analyses ( Cerasoli et al., 2016 ), provides support for SDT-based predictions. Most intriguing are the results concerning the (lack of) impact of perceived instrumentality on performance. However, much more research is needed to fully understand the impact of incentives on motivation, performance, and well-being.

Other Important Compensation Characteristics

Until recently, SDT research on compensation had not considered other aspects of compensation that have been examined extensively in compensation research: fairness and pay dispersion.

Many compensation researchers argue that performance-based pay is perceived to be more equitable because it rewards employees based on their contributions (e.g., Lawler, 2000 ). We think SDT could be used to further understand how and why. First, research indicates there are important relations between need satisfaction and general work-related perceptions of justice (Gillet et al., 2013 , 2015 ), but the causal direction is unclear as studies have mainly used cross-sectional designs.

Justice is generally conceived of as a four-dimensional construct ( Colquitt, 2001 ). Distributive justice refers to the fairness of how resources, such as pay, are distributed in organizations, while procedural justice reflects employees’ fairness perceptions regarding the rules or procedures used to make decisions about how to distribute resources (i.e., consistent use of rules, appeals process). Informational justice reflects perceptions of having received sufficient information in time, while interpersonal justice concerns aspects such as being treated with respect and dignity and the absence of discrimination.

Little research to date has examined how each of these forms of justice specifically relates to the satisfaction of competence, autonomy and relatedness, and it would be useful to know this as it would help us understand the psychological function of justice in promoting motivation and performance so we know how to influence need satisfaction through pay. One study has found that both employee perceptions of pay-related justice and congruence between employee and manager reports of their enacted pay-related justice result in more positive work attitudes, a stronger willingness to remain in the organization, and better performance ( Malmrud et al., 2020 ); however, types of justice were collapsed for analyses. Another recent study suggests that some types of pay-related justice may be more important than others in influencing need satisfaction. Olafsen and colleagues (2015) found that it was not the equitable distribution of income that mattered most to satisfying psychological needs and promoting autonomous motivation, but whether procedures to determine the income (i.e., performance evaluation and feedback) were perceived to be just. Still not known is whether different forms of pay (i.e., fixed vs. performance-based) will yield different perceptions of justice, and whether justice perceptions derived from different forms of pay might influence need satisfaction differently.

Another characteristic of compensation systems created by the use of performance-based pay is the dispersion of pay it creates among groups of workers doing the same job. So far, research suggests variable effects of high pay dispersion on performance ranging from positive to negative ( Shaw, 2014 ). Pay dispersion is also directly related to increased turnover, and perceptions of justice are an important moderator of the effect of dispersion on outcomes ( Shaw, 2014 ). Dispersion also leads to lower collaboration and knowledge sharing, consequently lowering firm performance ( Siegel & Hambrick, 2005 ; Kleinbaum, Stuart, & Tushman, 2013 ).

A recent study of 1,146 Swedish private-sector workers examined the relative importance of different characteristics of compensation systems, including income levels, the perceived dispersion of pay among their work group, the extent to which managers emphasized the connection between performance and rewards and the perceived procedural justice of their pay system ( Nordgren Selar et al., 2022 ). Interestingly, the best paid group (but with high pay dispersion) had lower task performance and higher turnover intention than employees who had average pay levels but lower pay dispersion. These groups had similar perceived justice levels, indicating that pay dispersion was the variable that impacted outcomes most. In addition, employees with incomes slightly below the national average in Sweden—characterized by pay compression and procedural fairness—were more willing to remain with their organization and experienced lower levels of work-related exhaustion than a moderately dispersed group and one highly dispersed group that were both characterized by relatively similar levels of pay as this compressed profile. What we do not know is why pay dispersion was negatively related to outcomes; therefore, conducting research to look at how it might influence need satisfaction and work motivation would help.

The Influence of Motivational Assumptions and Payment Norms

Unless explicitly volunteering their time, people expect to be compensated in exchange for their labor. Executives and human resources managers assume that to attract high talent in an organization, compensation must be competitive ( Gerhart & Milkovitch, 1990 ). It is typically assumed that performance-based pay is an effective means to attract talent and drive performance ( Kessler & Purcell, 1992 ; Shaw & Gupta, 2015 ). Yet, if job candidates say that they are attracted to a job for the monetary compensation it offers, they are seen as less desirable candidates because it is assumed that their desire for money means they have less intrinsic motivation for the job. This is known as the “motivation purity bias” ( Derfler-Rozin & Pitesa, 2020 ), and it is the reason for advising job candidates not to ask questions about compensation during job interviews. Once hired, however, the same decision-makers assume that workers will perform better if they receive performance-based pay! This might be happening simply because people are typically seen as having a preference for extrinsic rather than intrinsic “incentives” (an extrinsic incentives bias; Heath, 1999 ) when they are in an employment context, because the motivational power of self-interest is often overestimated ( Miller & Ratner, 1998 ) and because it is generally assumed that people work for money and are therefore extrinsically motivated ( Deci, Benware, & Landy, 1974 ). This leads organizations to adopt “Theory X” approaches to managing workers, including monitoring, micro-managing, and paying contingently on performance ( McGregor, 1960 ), which may lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Given that decision-makers tend to overemphasize compensation as a motivational factor ( Magee, Kilduff, & Heath, 2011 ) and that, as discussed in the previous section, other work factors seem to actually be more important to motivation than compensation, it seems important to change how business leaders are educated on these matters.

Is there a basis for employers’ reluctance to hire people who are motivated by money? Research suggests that a focus on money can have some unintended consequences. The mere salience of money (which performance-based pay heightens) or wealth can cause lower prosociality and moral disengagement ( Gino & Mogilner, 2014 ; Gino & Pierce, 2009 ; Kouchaki et al., 2013 ; Vohs, Mead, & Goode, 2006 , 2008 ). Other research shows that exchange rules might also affect effort and decisions, such that a “market” or economic exchange framing (i.e., short-term transactional) leads people to reduce efforts and act more out of self-interest relative to a social exchange frame (i.e., long-term trust-based; Heyman & Ariely, 2004 ; Kouchaki et al., 2013 ). A case in point is recent evidence that people who receive performance-based pay prioritize spending time with colleagues over spending time with family and friends, and they do so in order to reach their performance targets ( Hur, Lee-Yong, & Whillans, 2018 ). Performance-based pay has also been associated with “moral disengagement” that has been deemed responsible for ethical breaches, risky decision-making, and interpersonal deviance ( Burns & Kedia, 2006 ; Donoher, Reed, & Storrud-Barnes, 2007 ; Gläser, van Gils, & Van Quaquebeke, 2017 ; Gläser & Van Quaquebeke, 2019 ; Harris & Bromiley, 2007 ; Roman & Munuera, 2005 ; Schweitzer, Ordóñez, & Douma, 2004 ). Even “charging” for time worked has been associated with increased stress, reduced happiness, and less willingness to volunteer ( DeVoe & House, 2012 ; DeVoe & Pfeffer, 2007a , 2007b , 2010 , 2011 ; Pfeffer & Carney, 2018 ) because people come to view time as money.

Another interesting question is whether a job candidate’s primary motivation influences their attraction to organizations that offer performance-based pay. There is quite limited research on this question. One study found that intrinsically motivated candidates had a preference for merit-pay schemes (which are essentially base salary increases based on performance evaluations) because they offer more performance challenge, while extrinsically motivated candidates were attracted to jobs with higher starting salaries and safer seniority-based pay increases ( Clugston, Howell, & Dorfman, 2000 ). It is possible that intrinsically motivated candidates feel more competent than extrinsically motivated candidates ( Vallerand & Reid, 1984 ), and it has been shown that people who feel competent tend to prefer riskier performance-based compensation programs because they are confident in their chances of getting good compensation this way ( Fahr, Griffeth, & Balkin, 1991 ). What it does to their motivation once in the job has not been examined, meaning that initial motivation has not been evaluated as a boundary condition on the effects of incentives on subsequent work motivation.

Payment norms (i.e., beliefs about whether people should be paid or not for their efforts and whether people expect to be paid) can also influence people’s motivation toward tasks. When people are told the norm is to pay for a certain task, their intrinsic motivation toward that task is less likely to be negatively affected by a monetary reward, quite possibly because getting paid is not experienced as controlling one’s behavior when the norm and expectation is to be paid ( Staw et al., 1980 ). In other words, pay norms may modify the functional significance of the pay. What has not been considered in research done on the role of payment norms is whether equity considerations could be added to analyses of functional significance: if the norm is to pay, employees may feel cheated out of something if they do not get paid, but if the norm is not to pay, they might not feel cheated when not rewarded but controlled when rewarded.

Related to the issue of norms is whether people perceive a task as work or play. When a task is rewarded, people are more likely to consider the task as work (i.e., unpleasant) rather than play (i.e., pleasant). For example, research has demonstrated that when children must do one task before being permitted to do another one (where both are equally interesting), children as young as four years assume the first task will be uninteresting before even trying it ( Lepper et al., 1982 ) and show less interest for it when they do engage in it ( Lepper & Greene, 1975 ). Labeling a task as work versus play may also change how people approach the task. For example, labeling a word-puzzle task as work supervised by a “production manager” made MBA students focus more on quantitative performance aspects and use a more goal-directed approach (an ends-oriented approach), whereas labeling a task as play supervised by a “starship captain” made students use a means-oriented approach, focus more on qualitative performance, and provide more elaborate creative responses (they also enjoyed it more; Glynn, 1994 ). Some researchers argue that relationship rules may account for the finding that rewards lead to framing tasks as work ( Heyman & Ariely, 2004 ). For example, when a prisoner’s dilemma game is labeled “the Wall Street Game,” people tend to compete more and cooperate less than when it is labeled “the Community Game” ( Liberman, Samuels, & Ross, 2004 ). Economic exchange relationship rules might be triggered by rewards and by other means to labeling a task as “work,” whereas communal relationship rules might be triggered by the absence of rewards and through interest and meaning (i.e., autonomous motivation). This was demonstrated in an experiment by Heyman and Ariely (2004) where compensating people with candy did not influence helping (a communal frame), but if the monetary value of the candy was mentioned, it led people to adjust their helping effort to the amount of reward received (an economic frame).

Another interesting set of findings is that when people receive money in exchange for labor, they subsequently place more importance on money than when they receive money from investments or a coin toss ( DeVoe, Pfeffer, & Lee, 2013 ). This apparently happens because money received for labor indicates one’s competence, thus imbuing the money with more symbolic value. It is also the case that performance-based pay increases one’s desire for money relative to fixed pay, resulting in putting more effort to earn more and less willingness to give it to a charity ( Hur & Nordgren, 2016 ). This is apparently due to such pay schemes creating an attentional fixation on money.

Motivational assumptions influence how money is used to motivate workers, and workers also have expectations and preference for certain pay systems that can be influenced by norms and by their motivations. Money itself appears to influence how people view tasks, and it influences their behavior and well-being. There might very well be a vicious cycle whereby expecting income to be based on performance (which is taught in most business schools to be the best way to compensate workers) increases attraction into jobs that offer performance-based pay. Once received, the perceived value of monetary incentives might increase, thereby increasing more controlled types of motivation, which are not strongly positively related to performance and well-being ( Van den Broeck et al., 2021 ).

Future Research Directions

Besides the identified gaps mentioned in previous sections, we suggest other research avenues. Gerhart and Fang (2015) pointed out the lack of research linking the effects of rewards on intrinsic motivation to the effects of rewards on performance. Howard et al. (2016) have also pointed out the lack of research examining possible interactive effects between different types of motivation and demonstrated, using latent profile analyses, that motivational combinations matter for performance and well-being outcomes: profiles that have relatively higher autonomous versus controlled types of motivation yield better outcomes. In other words, adding controlled motivation (particularly external regulation) to high autonomous motivation leads to decrements in performance and well-being. What remains to be discovered is how performance-based compensation (and its instrumentality and controllingness) and pay inequality influence belongingness to these different work motivation profiles, and how need satisfaction explains these effects.

Both Gagné and Deci (2005) and Gerhart and Fang (2015) have emphasized that the effects of pay-for-performance schemes could change for different types of tasks (interesting vs. boring, algorithmic vs. heuristic) and for different performance measures (behavior vs. results, individual vs. aggregate, and quantitative vs. qualitative, creative and innovative performance). Recently Gagné et al. (2021) also proposed that autonomous motivation may be particularly important for adaptive and proactive performance rather than just for measures of job proficiency. Given that the future of work is likely to be more interdependent and uncertain (requiring cooperation, adaptivity, and proactivity) and where technology is likely to replace humans for simple and algorithmic work ( Gagné et al., 2021 ), autonomous motivation is what we will need to promote foremost. With the evidence we have thus far on the effects of performance-based pay on work motivation, we cannot advocate for its use to promote autonomous motivation. However, research using complex heuristic tasks is lacking. Indeed, most of the research conducted on the effects of incentives on motivation and performance has used rather simple and short-term tasks, even in studies purportedly looking at the interest level of the task or creative ones (e.g., puzzles, coming up with slogans) that do not reflect what people do in most of today’s jobs. We need to find ways to study the effects of incentives in realistic contemporary jobs.

It is also difficult to treat the effects of performance-based compensation on motivation and work outcomes without considering what employees plan to do with their money. As shown by the body of research considering money motives, more intrinsic reasons for wanting money lead to more positive outcomes compared to extrinsic reasons ( Thibault Landry et al., 2016 ). Thus, there might be interactive effects between the characteristics of performance-based pay programs (e.g., how controlling or salient they are experienced to be) and money motives.

It is still unclear whether performance-based pay is perceived as being a fairer way of compensating good performance relative to fixed-pay programs. There are many angles from which to consider fairness, including the view that pay should be based on needs ( Dornstein, 1989 ), that there should be equal pay for all or at least for those doing similar work (e.g., Rawls, 1971 ), and that pay should be based on performance and contribution to attaining organizational goals ( Lawler, 2000 ). Yet procedural justice has been shown to be more important to autonomous motivation than distributive justice ( Olafsen et al., 2015 ). Meta-analytic evidence also shows that procedural justice is more strongly related to performance than distributive justice ( Cohen-Charash & Spector, 2001 ). Would it therefore be the case that fixed-pay setting decisions, if they are perceived as procedurally fair (i.e., based on accurate information, transparent, with an appeals process), would work as well as, if not better than, performance-based pay decisions? Only more research will help answer this question.

Implications for the Design of Compensation Systems

Given that compensation accounts for 20% to 50% of total operating expenses in organizations ( Gerhart & Milkovitch, 1990 ), it is surprising that compensation does not seem to have that much effect on employee need satisfaction, motivation, and performance, relative to less costly strategic actions such as creating job autonomy and providing feedback ( Nordgren Selar et al., 2020 ). This does not mean that people do not place any importance on compensation in their lives. People need money to live, so an income that provides for basic physiological and security needs at a minimum is important, and it needs to follow cost-of-living inflation. Income should also be secure enough (i.e., not too heavily based on performance), which means jobs must be secure enough (avoid short-term contractual arrangements when possible).

It is also better to emphasize, when managing employees, common goals rather than using a “This is what you are paid for” mentality. Use other means of motivating people, including enriched job designs, procedurally just performance appraisals with constructive feedback, and the development of relationships based on trust rather than a mere exchange. People are more likely to derive satisfaction for their competence, autonomy, and relatedness needs this way, therefore making such strategies more likely to promote autonomous rather than controlled motivation.

When they design compensation and incentive systems, employers need to think about how they will influence the satisfaction of needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness if they want to promote autonomous motivation and optimal functioning (i.e., performance and well-being). If performance-based pay is used, they should avoid making it too salient on a day-to-day basis and avoid creating large pay dispersion from it.

Conclusions

The distinction between money and other factors as drivers of motivation has a long history. For instance, Max Weber (1968) noted that value rationality (doing things based on ethical, ideological, or religious values) is just as rational a motive as instrumental rationality (doing things based on self-interest or personal gain) for engaging in social action. From an organizational theory perspective, Etzioni (1975) noted that utilitarian management principles make employees prone to commit to their organization based on instrumentality (as long as they gain from it). While this was recognized as a better strategy than leading through coercion, Etzioni argued that normative management (through visions, culture, and values) is more effective and will result in moral attachment to the organization. The same lines of reasoning can be found with respect to leadership, where transformational leadership (i.e., charismatic, inspirational, and empowering) is generally argued (and found) to bring about more autonomous motivation than transactional leadership (i.e., a directive approach, contingently rewarding, close monitoring, and sanctions for deviations; Bass, 1985 ; Gagné et al., 2020 ; Montano et al., 2017 ).

All of these theoretical frameworks point to major differences in beliefs about whether motivation stems from internal or external sources. McGregor (1960) made this explicit in his theory of managerial styles, where Theory X describes a management style based on the belief that people are not inherently motivated and must be coerced or seduced (e.g., with rewards) in order to perform, and where Theory Y describes a management style based on the belief that people are inherently motivated and that this motivation can be nurtured by giving people autonomy. We also can see this dichotomy of assumptions about human nature among the theories used to advocate for rewards (e.g., agency and expectancy theories) and theories used to caution against their use (e.g., SDT). Interestingly, these divergent assumptions about what motivates people to work influences how employers use money at different points of an employee’s journey, from attracting them, to selecting them based on their motivations, to managing them to perform. Organizations might need to explore their own assumptions and be more aware of how they drive their human resource management decisions.

We began this chapter by questioning how important money is to motivate workers. Money is an important factor to attract and retain workers ( Rynes, Gerhart, & Parks, 2005 ), and there have been repeated calls for more research into its effectiveness as a motivator of performance ( Gerhart & Fang, 2015 ; Gupta & Shaw, 2014 ). However, we have also highlighted that there is strong debate about the outcomes of the relative distribution of money, as exemplified by contrasting results in previous research about performance-based compensation and pay inequality among colleagues. We particularly need to better understand how and why monetary incentives, and their relative distribution, work by focusing on psychological mechanisms ( Rynes et al., 2005 ). For example, we need to know more about how different compensation systems (e.g., compressed vs. performance-based; see, e.g., Bloom, 1999 ) and pay inequality influences the motivational profile of workers once they are hired, and how this influences their performance and well-being, both of which have consequences for organizations. Moreover, we must consider the burden these systems place on managers and organizational resources and whether they are worth it if the impact of performance-based rewards is not as important as once thought. Performance-based pay requires more precise performance measures that are considered “objective” and accurate, and adequate monitoring systems to capture these measures (which can also be experienced as controlling; Enzle & Anderson, 1993 ; Lepper & Greene, 1975 ). In addition, performance appraisals based on such measures demand more work from managers.

As noted by Aguinis, Joo, and Gottfredson (2013) , money on its own does not improve knowledge or abilities, nor does it improve job quality. However, how money is given and distributed can influence need satisfaction and have consequences for performance and well-being. SDT suggests a focus on the satisfaction of needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness, with propositions already put forward by Gagné and Forest (2008) , some of which were recently tested ( Kuvaas et al., 2020 ). We should continue to develop our knowledge in this area through more research to create better compensation systems that will promote good motivation and optimal functioning in work environments.

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Motivated by Money: Understanding the Money Motivation Theory

Money makes the world go round, or so the saying goes. It’s no secret that financial gain is a powerful driving force for many individuals, especially in the United States financial landscape. This phenomenon is known as money motivation, a concept studied extensively in psychology.

The money motivation theory states that money motivates people to work harder for financial gain. This theory posits that financial incentives, such as bonuses and commissions, can drive individuals to achieve their goals and improve their performance.

Key Takeaways:

• Money motivation is the concept of being driven by financial gain.
• Money motivation theory is that financial incentives can drive individuals to achieve their goals and improve their performance.
• Motivation by money is a powerful driving force in the United States financial landscape.
• Understanding the role of money motivation in various aspects of life can help you achieve financial success.
• Balancing financial aspirations and personal values is essential to lead a fulfilling and prosperous life.

Understanding Money Motivation

Money is often considered the best motivator because it is tied to many basic needs and desires. As a result, financial incentives can be a powerful driving force behind our decisions and actions. Understanding what drives money motivation is essential , as it can play a significant role in achieving your personal and professional goals.

One of the main reasons why money is considered the best motivator is because it provides a tangible and measurable concept of success. When a financial goal is achieved, such as obtaining a raise or reaching a savings milestone, it can be easily quantified and celebrated. This can provide a strong sense of accomplishment and motivation to pursue financial success.

Additionally, money can satisfy various psychological needs such as security, power, and status. The ability to provide for oneself and loved ones can create a sense of safety and stability. Money can also be used to establish a higher social standing, which can increase one’s sense of self-worth and power.

However, it is essential to note that money motivation has its drawbacks. When individuals are solely driven by financial gain, they may prioritize their financial gain over the well-being of others, leading to unethical behavior. If other forms of recognition and fulfillment do not accompany financial rewards, it can also lead to burnout and job dissatisfaction.

“Money is a great servant but a bad master.” – Francis Bacon

In conclusion, understanding the reasons behind money motivation is essential for achieving personal and professional success. While financial gain can be a powerful motivator , it should not be the only factor driving your decisions and actions. Strive for a balance between financial aspirations and personal values to lead a fulfilling and prosperous life.

The Role of Money Motivation in Career Success

Money can be a powerful motivator if you want to advance your career. According to the money motivation theory , financial incentives significantly impact job satisfaction, productivity, and overall professional growth.

When you’re motivated by money , you’re more likely to pursue opportunities that offer higher salaries or bonuses. You may also be more willing to take risks to achieve financial gains, which can lead to higher rewards in the long run.

However, balancing pursuing financial gain and maintaining a fulfilling work-life balance is crucial. If you’re solely focused on money, you may miss out on other vital aspects of your career, such as personal growth and job satisfaction.

To use money motivation effectively in your career, consider setting realistic financial goals and developing a plan to achieve them. This can help you focus on your objectives while allowing room for personal fulfillment.

The Impact of Money Motivation on Financial Decision-Making

When you’re motivated by money, it can significantly impact your financial decision-making. The money motivation theory suggests that individuals are willing to take more significant financial risks when the potential rewards are higher. This can result in riskier investments, potentially leading to higher returns or substantial losses.

Money motivation can also affect long-term financial planning. When driven by financial gain, you may be more likely to focus on short-term gains rather than long-term stability. This can lead to a lack of diversification in your investment portfolio, leaving you more vulnerable to market volatility.

On the other hand, being motivated by money can also lead to more informed financial decision-making. When focused on achieving your financial goals, you may be more likely to research and analyze investment opportunities thoroughly. Additionally, the desire for financial gain can drive you to seek financial education and guidance, allowing you to make more informed decisions.

The Impact of Money Motivation on Risk-Taking Behavior

One of the most significant impacts of being motivated by money is the potential for increased risk-taking behavior. Individuals driven by financial gain may be more willing to take on higher-risk investments, believing in the potential for higher rewards.

However, it’s essential to strike a balance between risk and reward. While higher-risk investments may lead to higher returns, they also have a more significant potential for loss. Evaluating your risk tolerance and making investment decisions that align with your financial goals and values is crucial.

Money Motivation and Investment Choices

Your money motivation can also impact your investment choices. When you’re motivated by money, you may be more likely to invest in industries that offer the potential for higher returns, such as technology or healthcare.

On the other hand, if you’re motivated by other factors, such as environmental sustainability or social impact, you may be more likely to invest in socially responsible funds or companies.

It’s essential to consider your motivations when making investment decisions. While pursuing financial gain is a powerful motivator, it’s necessary to prioritize investments that align with your values and long-term financial goals.

Balancing Money Motivation with Personal Values

While money motivation can be a powerful driving force for success, balancing it with your values is vital. Remembering your core beliefs is crucial to achieving long-term satisfaction and fulfillment. Here are some strategies to balance money motivation with personal values:

• Identify your values: Reflect on what’s truly important to you. It could be helping others, making a difference, or simply leading a peaceful life. Knowing your values will help you align your financial goals with your life purpose.
• Set realistic financial goals: While chasing big financial rewards is tempting, setting realistic goals that align with your values is essential. This will help you find purpose and direction in your financial pursuits.
• Practice gratitude: Being grateful for what you have can help you appreciate the present moment and find contentment amidst financial pursuits. Recognize that money alone cannot bring happiness and fulfillment, and focus on the positive aspects of your life.

Remember that money motivation should not come at the expense of your well-being or relationships. Maintaining a healthy balance between financial aspirations and personal growth is important. You can lead a fulfilling and prosperous life by finding a harmonious approach to achieving financial success.

Overcoming Challenges of Being Motivated by Money

While being motivated by money can be a powerful driving force for success , it can also come with challenges. Here are some reasons why money is considered the best motivator and ways to overcome the potential obstacles:

• Burnout: When your sole focus is on financial gain, it can lead to burnout and exhaustion. To avoid this, try setting non-financial goals, such as personal development or helping others, to give yourself a purpose beyond money.
• Shallow relationships: Money can attract people only interested in what you can provide for them. To build meaningful relationships, focus on shared values and common interests rather than just financial gain.
• Decreased job satisfaction: When financial incentives take precedence over job satisfaction, it can lead to a lack of fulfillment in your career. To combat this, focus on finding a job that aligns with your financial and personal goals.
• Narrow perspective: Being solely motivated by money can limit your perspective on what true success means. To broaden your outlook, seek experiences that challenge your beliefs and expose you to different ways of thinking.

By acknowledging and addressing these potential challenges, you can maintain a healthy perspective on financial motivation and achieve tremendous success in all aspects of life.

“Wealth is not about having a lot of money; it’s about having a lot of options.” – Chris Rock.

In conclusion, being motivated by money can be a powerful driver of success in the U.S. financial landscape. Understanding the money motivation theory and why money is often considered the best motivator can help you achieve your goals and succeed in your career. However, balancing your financial aspirations with your values is essential to lead a fulfilling and prosperous life.

Align Your Financial Goals with Your Values

One way to balance money motivation with personal values is to align your financial goals with your core beliefs. Take time to reflect on what is truly important to you, whether it be family, friends, or community involvement. Consider how your financial decisions can support these values and bring you closer to your ideal lifestyle.

Overcoming Challenges

There can be potential challenges and drawbacks to being solely motivated by money, such as burnout or a lack of fulfillment. To overcome these obstacles, focus on long-term financial planning and set realistic goals for yourself. Additionally, finding a hobby or passion outside of work can help you maintain a healthy perspective on financial motivation .

Harnessing the Potential

By harnessing the potential of being motivated by money, you can drive your success in various aspects of life, from career growth to financial decision-making. By understanding the role of money motivation in your life and balancing financial aspirations and personal values, you can achieve both financial prosperity and personal fulfillment.

What is money motivation?

Money motivation drives an individual’s actions and behaviors, primarily focused on financial gain. It is the desire to achieve financial success and the belief that money is a powerful motivator.

Why is money often considered the best motivator?

Money is often considered the best motivator because it provides tangible rewards and satisfies basic needs and desires. It can incentivize individuals to work harder, take on challenges, and strive for success to earn financial rewards.

How does money motivation impact career success?

Money motivation is crucial to career success. It influences job satisfaction, productivity, and professional growth and can drive individuals to pursue promotions, take on additional responsibilities, and achieve financial stability in their chosen careers.

What impact does money motivation have on financial decision-making?

Being motivated by money can influence financial decision-making by shaping investment choices, risk-taking behavior, and long-term financial planning. It can lead individuals to prioritize monetary gains and consider financial factors when making financial decisions.

How can I balance money motivation with personal values?

Balancing money motivation with personal values involves aligning financial goals with core beliefs and finding a harmonious approach to achieving financial success. It is essential to consider the impact of financial decisions on personal well-being, relationships, and overall happiness.

What are the potential challenges of being motivated by money?

Being solely motivated by money can present challenges such as prioritizing financial gains over personal fulfillment, straining relationships, and experiencing dissatisfaction despite material wealth. Recognizing these challenges and developing strategies to maintain a healthy perspective on financial motivation is essential.

What have we learned about money motivation and the money motivation theory?

Throughout this exploration, we have learned that money motivation can be a powerful driving force for success in various aspects of life. The money motivation theory suggests that financial gain can incentivize individuals to achieve their goals and lead prosperous life.

However, balancing financial aspirations and personal values is crucial to finding true fulfillment.

Writer, Managing Editor and Motivator-in-Chief of Motivation Pay. Menzi has extensive writing, publishing and team management experience. She is a reader of hundreds of books, mother to two wonderful college-age kids and caretaker of two feline brats named Lucas and Mauie.

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Money as a motivator

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Where do you stand on the issue of money as a motivator at work?

For: Money is an effective, powerful and simple motivator. Self-evidently, money motivates and extra money motivates people to work extra hard. It’s natural to compete, and when rewarded with money for better work then productivity and standards are raised for all. Further, because it is not always wise or indeed possible to promote individu-als, money can be used as an equitable and very acceptable way to reward all workers. More important, because money is a “generalized reinforcer” it is always acceptable to all people everywhere and at all times. Money talks, and it talks loudly and clearly.

Equivocal: Money sometimes, but not always, motivates. For those who are very well paid, even quite large amounts have a minimal motivational effect. Worse, money rewards can and do set employees against one another, leading to conflict, disharmony and reduced teamwork. It leads as much to a win-lose as a win-win philosophy. Also, it is very difficult in many jobs to determine or measure an individual’s work performance accurately and equitably to decide how much money to award.

Against: Money is not effective and only has the power to demotivate. Money actually trivializes work: it turns those who are intrinsically motivated at work into extrinsically motivated workers. Money rewards (bonuses, performance-related pay) may bear little relation to what the worker does, or feels. If money works and is so motivating, perhaps the base salaries are too low. There are better ways to motivate people, other than cold cash. It is a naive nonsense to believe that if a person’s salary is increased by, say, 20 percent this will generate a 20 percent increase in his/her productivity (or even morale).

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Furnham, A. (2012). Money as a motivator. In: The Talented Manager. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230369764_41

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Money as a Motivator Essay

Money inspires me to do lots of things, since it does you, and a lot of cash would motivate me to perform things that I wouldn’t perform for less.

Remember: This is just a sample from a fellow student. Your time is important. Let us write you an essay from scratch

Famous sayings like “money the actual world get around”, “money makes the infinit? go” and “show me personally the money” successfully act as testaments to our argument yet reflecting for the previous examples, money as defined it, is clearly the sole motivator in work and many more environments. In the unfortunate instances, money since the sole motivator in the workplace varies from exploitation of people for less labor in some countries, to more publicly-known crimes such as murder and embezzlement. Precisely what is actually is cash?

This is a very commonly asked question, especially in today’s society. Money is usually nothing but whatever you see- published coins and paper, but looking at culture today it truly is plain to see money plays a critical part. (Elliott, 2007) There is absolutely no problem that we live in a very materialistic world today that we are selves include actually produced. In this kind of society, it can be strongly believed that the simply true inspiration is that of “making the most money. ” All of us, the approving team believe this being true, especially in the workplace in which it seems enjoy the biggest component. The powerful force that ultimately guides work-related behavior is money, cash and only cash.

That is “only money inspires people, to get the job done. ” Based on the Oxford Book the term inspire is defined as “to give incentive to”, or “the reason why a person(s) is behaving or performing in a selected way. ” It is thought to be the “internal drive” which could enforce someone to portray distinct patterns (Kreitner, 1995). In defining the word cash on the other hand, functioning beyond of what is generally accepted funds only becoming paper, records and money, seeing that we believe money in conditions of the place of work can exist in various forms. Examples of such as; the showing of revenue, commissions, and tips, talk about issues as well as objects that could be or are an excellent source of monetary value.

This paragraphs will explain to readers that show the affirmation “only money motivates” by clarifying numerous examples which have perceived to confirm this declaration as indefinitely true. You simply have to take 1 look at culture today to essentially acknowledge that just money motivates. The lottery as an example, you will find no various other logical reason behind a person’s motive in buying a lottery ticket, or any other sort of a gambling ticket apart from that person being motivated by idea that they could succeed a very large lump-sum involving.

Things like truth television and radio today will attract people with some money to exploit themselves in every single way possible or perhaps thinkable approach. Let’s can this declaration for example , might you hunt down normally the one person that retains hundreds and hundreds of dollars for the fun of it? Would you consume a year old decaying cow’s is going to out of your personal free is going to? There are also many significant past events also have given individuals who drive to become, motivated by money.

In the years between1896-1900 the wedding known infamously as the Klondike Gold Rush produced absolute chaos in the Yukon, Canada. The Yukon’s inhabitants exploded within the next 3 years since people hurried from all around the world to try their very own luck in increasing all their wealth and fortune, this is certainly a prime case in point motivated strictly by their hopes and in some cases desires for discovering of gold, in “the superb north of Canada. ” (Yukon, 2013) In the workplace today, we are as well finding a very similar trend occurring. Money ‘s the reason behind the selection made by quite a few men and women today to bid farewell their love ones, good friends and acquaintances to seek better paid task opportunities international, or throughout Canada around the world.

Engineers, technicians, mechanics, and countless other folks are becoming lured offshore or cross-country by income that enable those people to enjoy the greater conveniences in life, and jobs which provide them enough opportunities to grow or move up the ‘totem pole’ within their fields. This opportunity is very great it also allows for a possible task change. A fantastic man once said “Money has never built man content, nor does it, there is nothing in its nature that to create happiness.

The more of it speculate if this trade the more one particular wants. ” That was said simply by Benjamin Franklin, former guru of America. (Franklin, 2013) There is no doubt that this case is just one of many. An article with the heading ‘Growing crisis for the hospitals since 5, 500 a year become a member of the brain drain in search of better pay’ (Browne, 2001) says it all. Not only are technical engineers making the move offshore, but they are changing their focus beyond all their national house borders to get better salary.

These individuals happen to be motivated strictly by the idea and desire of higher salaries, and a seemingly better life. The motivating capabilities of money are drawing the attentions of numerous star sportsmen. Soccer and Hockey are a good example, in which they take every possible opportunity to enjoy for the ‘highest bidder’, or make the most amount of money, which inturn sees a whole lot of great talent leaving the. Have they forgone the opportunity to take great pride in fully play for their very own country only for the benefit of a larger salary?

It does appear and so. In addition , it has also been noted that professional tennis players have declined to play at some of the greatest tennis courts in the world, because the monetary prizes were not to the player’s pleasure. Workers and professional sports athletes are not the only ones packaging up to seek better economical opportunities and rewards.

Corporations have also did start to focus their particular efforts towards a more globalized-context simply by becoming appealing multinational corporations. There is just one motive behind big multinational companies; they make billions after billions of us dollars. What inspires a international company to use labors via poor countries? They have the cabability to make higher profits, as a result of lower pay-out.

Seeing as persons in poorer countries is wonderful for less, international companies have realized the way to save big in wages and further increase their income is to employ this ‘cheap labor’. In this case, it truly is obvious to find out that what motivates a firm to move toward globalization, according to the facts that it is money and only money. This might not always be a bad point, because these businesses do take work to countries that might not normally have any kind of work. (Dollar, 2012) There are a numerous job in society generally there today, a few which holiday providers less than willing to perform. However there are so many those people who are willing to perform these careers every single day.

A garbage enthusiast who collects foul smelling trash daily stands by their work since they find out they are having paid enough for their work. This is the simply reason why they will choose to do them. You could state, to these people “only funds motivates” in cases like this.

These careers have not offer when it comes to working circumstances and other job benefits, every they have to offer is funds. These people tend not to care about situations, because the money alone is sufficient to satisfy. This really is one of the reasons all of us disagree with theorists just like Fredrick Herzberg that came plan reasoning or maybe the idea that money does not stimulate, “…So intended for Herzberg money was not a motivator” (Chapman A., 2001). Thomas A Stewart an author for Business installment payments on your 0 journals claims “Money is not really a motivator, and this statement is usually complete non-sense. Money motivates me to do lots of things, since it does you, and a lot of cash would inspire me to do things that we wouldn’t do for less.

Money motivates. ” (Chapman Capital t. ) The reoccurring situations of income disputes and industrial strikes that have loomed society present a demonstrating point as to why only cash motivates. Qantas baggage handlers and shipment workers were recently involved in a protracted dispute with the company regarding wages. (News, 2011) More significant recently had been the hits of nearly 4000 Sydney bus individuals, which influenced most of us in some way. This big fuss was caused simply by one main issue- shell out. Bus individuals of Sydney had called for a 27% increase in their very own base wage over 36 months. Claiming that, their shell out had gone down far behind other public sector opportunities in recent years.

Everywhere in the media all of us hear about miserable workers asking for pay goes up. Yet you never will you hear workers striking above other office related problems. It almost seems unbelievable to get a group of staff if they were receiving excessive pay plans, to hit over their belief that they feel unrewarded or undervalued in the workplace also because they feel their success have gone unnoticed by managers at work. This kind of subject matter after that makes want to ask exactly where nonmonetary gestures fit in this?

Our belief is that non-monetary factors just like working circumstances, interpersonal associations and company policies and procedures are generally not motivators yet merely health factors that just serve to continue to keep people by being disappointed, so here we all indeed accept Herzberg’s theory of determination. We believe the factors that provide job fulfillment only cause and reinforce organizational determination, but not inspiration or operate performance. Many people today would rather operate overtime, weekends and times than call it a day if they knew they were in return getting a bonus from their supervisor. As i have said before monetary rewards such as share and stocks can even be regarded as cash.

Many companies provide these choices to their personnel to encourage them toward achieving the organizational goals better work production and performance. Recently, Vodafone granted share options to a lot more than 42000 staff around the world. Every employee receiving an option to buy Vodafone stocks with a encounter value equal to 50% of their annual salary (Vodafone, 2001).

Proposed programs like these have been completely a success as a survey done in 97 discovered that broad-based stock choice companies had 31% more production than all public companies (NCEO). Reveal schemes happen to be improving efficiency because staff are realizing that the more earnings the business makes the greater the dividend they receive. This will likely thereby securely aligning the employee’s individual goals of producing money together with the organization’s total objective of profitability and success.

Funds is also the only reason behind workers staying with a firm. Offering bonuses and having an above-average salary. Entrepreneurship maintains if you wish to keep and retain staff you must: 1 . Pay employees higher than market rates; ‘employees stay more content and job harder if they happen to be paid above the normal market rates. ‘ 2 . Set up a signing or perhaps continuation bonus. One regional entrepreneur offered a key receptionist a $5, 000 benefit if your woman stayed 3 more years.

If the girl left before the three years, in that case she was legally accountable for the prorated share from the bonus not really earned. We feel that bonuses that connect employees to the company over a three to four yr time period are excellent investments. three or more. Have an incentive system in place. It is plain to see more money is going to motivate a worker to stay with their firm and therefore insure the long-term viability of the business. Would having flexible hours and difficult work lure an employee to stay, if they are not receiving an attractive pay package?

It is very unlikely. 4. Create a tradition of education, for employees; the single most important motivational factor was the ability to master. To keep workers motivated, organizations need to build a culture of learning, where employees keep more enriched at the end of each and every day. your five. Provide standard, consistent feedback.

Employee responses is a important part of the education process, and shouldn’t you should be relegated towards the annual review. To be effective, reviews needs to be specific and actionable. But that’s not always just how it works.

In a study simply by Leadership IQ, 53 percent of employees said that once their boss praises superb performance, the feedback does not provide enough useful data to help them do it again. And sixty five percent responded that when their boss criticizes poor functionality, it doesn’t provide enough useful data to help them right the issue. (Daniel Debow, 2011) On a several note yet still on the circumstance of the work environment, money has additionally motivated a minority number of individuals to the extreme point of corruption. Sneza Suteski, a great accounts clerk, was found guilty of homicide for planning the death of her boss. That which was her objective?

Money, Suteski devised an “elaborate and complex” plan by changing bank figures in the programmed payments system for accounts she acquired approval for that would have viewed $500, 500 flow in to the bank accounts of herself, her brother and her ex-boyfriend (Crichton, 2002). This case acts to prove the extreme motivational power of money in the workplace, whether or not it involved carrying out a thing horrendous like murder. Focusing the point yet again, that people will be purely driven by cash. Embezzlement is another workplace related crime strictly motivated by money. It involves the act associated with an employee thieving company cash from their organisations.

This month, there are many “famous” embezzlement cases around the world, this case is merely one of many. In 1997, Yasuyoshi Kato embezzled $90 mil from Day-Lee Food’s Inc. (Marguet, 2011). This case can be considered the most severe embezzlement circumstance in the great the United States.

This is just one of many of embezzlement that is going on in places of work today. Personnel that perform these dishonest and deceitful acts happen to be driven by the thought of obtaining their practical one thing only- money. Popular sayings like “money makes the world go around”, “money makes the infinit? go” and “show me the money” successfully function as testaments to the argument yet reflecting on the previous examples, money as we have defined this, is obviously the sole motivator in work and many other environments.

In fact , it is this kind of a powerful motivator that it enables people to regularly work below conditions that the majority wouldn’t want to encounter for a day. Alternatively, if people don’t have sufficient, workers and unions want to disturb the lives of the community to get more money and in which this is not feasible, many sports and other folks are happy to leave the country searching for it. In the unfortunate circumstances, money as the sole motivator in the workplace amounts from fermage of people for less labor in some countries, to more publicly-known crimes including murder and embezzlement.

 Ultimately, there is no doubt inside our minds and everyone else’s heads that ‘only money motivates’. The lotto as an example, you will discover no different logical cause of a person’s motive in buying a lottery ticket, or any type of other kind of a wagering ticket other than that person being motivated by idea they could earn a very large lump-sum pounds. There are also various significant earlier events also have given people that drive being, motivated by simply money. Cash is the reason in back of the choice manufactured by numerous women and men today to bid goodbye their sweetheart, friends and colleagues to seek better paid out job options overseas, or perhaps here in Canada across the country.

In this instance, it is obvious to see that what motivates a company to advance towards globalization, according to the facts that it is cash and only cash. It is plain to see that more money will certainly motivate a staff to stay using their firm and therefore insure the long-term stability of the business. On a several note yet still on the circumstance of the place of work; money in addition has motivated a minority number of individuals to the ultimate point of corruption.

The case serves to prove the ultimate motivational power of money in the workplace, even if this involved carrying out something horrendous like killing. Embezzlement is yet another workplace related crime purely motivated simply by money. Famous sayings just like “money makes the world go around”, “money makes the mare go” and “show me the money” successfully serve as testaments to the argument but reflecting on the previous illustrations, money as we have defined that, is plainly the sole driving force in work and many other environments.

In the unfortunate situations, money while the sole motivator in the workplace ranges from exploitation of people for less labor in a few countries, to more publicly-known crimes such as murder and embezzlement.

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Sat / act prep online guides and tips, best analysis: money and materialism in the great gatsby.

Book Guides

In The Great Gatsby , money is a huge motivator in the characters' relationships, motivations, and outcomes. Most of the characters reveal themselves to be highly materialistic, their motivations driven by their desire for money and things: Daisy marries and stays with Tom because of the lifestyle he can provide her, Myrtle has her affair with Tom due to the privileged world it grants her access to, and Gatsby even lusts after Daisy as if she is a prize to be won. After all, her voice is "full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it. . . . High in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl. . . ." (7.106).

So how exactly does materialism reveal itself as a theme, how can it help us analyze the characters, and what are some common assignments surrounding this theme? We will dig into all things money here in this guide.

Money and materialism in the plot Key quotes about money/materialism Analyzing characters via money/materialism Common assignments and analysis of money/materialism in Gatsby

Quick Note on Our Citations

Our citation format in this guide is (chapter.paragraph). We're using this system since there are many editions of Gatsby , so using page numbers would only work for students with our copy of the book.

To find a quotation we cite via chapter and paragraph in your book, you can either eyeball it (Paragraph 1-50: beginning of chapter; 50-100: middle of chapter; 100-on: end of chapter), or use the search function if you're using an online or eReader version of the text.

Money and Materialism in The Great Gatsby

In the opening pages, Nick establishes himself as someone who has had many advantages in life —a wealthy family and an Ivy League education to name just two. Despite not being as wealthy as Tom and Daisy, his second cousin, they see him as enough of a peer to invite him to their home in Chapter 1 . Nick's connection to Daisy in turn makes him attractive to Gatsby. If Nick were just a middle-class everyman, the story could not play out in the same way.

Tom and Daisy 's movements are also supported by their money. At the beginning of the novel they move to fashionable East Egg, after moving around between "wherever people played polo and were rich together," and are able to very quickly pick up and leave at the end of the book after the murders, thanks to the protection their money provides (1.17). Daisy, for her part, only begins her affair with Gatsby after a very detailed display of his wealth (via the mansion tour). She even breaks down in tears after Gatsby shows off his ridiculously expensive set of colored shirts, crying that she's "never seen such beautiful shirts" before (5.118).

Gatsby 's notoriety comes from, first and foremost, his enormous wealth , wealth he has gathered to win over Daisy. Gatsby was born to poor farmer parents in North Dakota, but at 17, determined to become rich, struck out with the wealthy Dan Cody and never looked back (6.5-15). Even though he wasn't able to inherit any part of Cody's fortune, he used what he learned of wealthy society to first charm Daisy before shipping out to WWI. (In a uniform she had no idea he was poor, especially given his sophisticated manners). Then, after returning home and realizing Daisy was married and gone, he set out to earn enough money to win Daisy over, turning to crime via a partnership with Meyer Wolfshiem to quickly amass wealth (9.83-7).

Meanwhile, Tom's mistress Myrtle , a car mechanic's wife, puts on airs and tries to pass as rich through her affair with Tom, but her involvement with the Buchanans gets her killed. George Wilson , in contrast, is constrained by his lack of wealth. He tells Tom Buchanan after finding out about Myrtle's affair that he plans to move her West, but he "[needs] money pretty bad" in order to make the move (7.146). Tragically, Myrtle is hit and killed that evening by Daisy. If George Wilson had had the means, he likely would have already left New York with Myrtle in tow, saving both of their lives.

Hardly anyone shows up to Gatsby's funeral since they were only attracted by his wealth and the parties, not the man himself. This is encapsulated in a phone call Nick describes, to a man who used to come to Gatsby's parties: "one gentleman to whom I telephoned implied that he had got what he deserved. However, that was my fault, for he was one of those who used to sneer most bitterly at Gatsby on the courage of Gatsby's liquor and I should have known better than to call him" (9.69).

In short, money both drives the plot and explains many of the characters' motivations and limitations.

Key Quotes About Money

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her; If you can bounce high, bounce for her too, Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, I must have you!"

—THOMAS PARKE D'INVILLIERS

The epigraph of the novel immediately marks money and materialism as a key theme of the book—the listener is implored to "wear the gold hat" as a way to impress his lover. In other words, wealth is presented as the key to love—such an important key that the word "gold" is repeated twice. It's not enough to "bounce high" for someone, to win them over with your charm. You need wealth, the more the better, to win over the object of your desire.

"They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together." (1.17)

Our introduction to Tom and Daisy immediately describes them as rich, bored, and privileged. Tom's restlessness is likely one motivator for his affairs, while Daisy is weighed down by the knowledge of those affairs. This combination of restlessness and resentment puts them on the path to the tragedy at the end of the book.

"There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city, between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants including an extra gardener toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before…." (3.1-3.6)

The description of Gatsby's parties at the beginning of Chapter 3 is long and incredibly detailed, and thus it highlights the extraordinary extent of Gatsby's wealth and materialism. In contrast to Tom and Daisy's expensive but not overly gaudy mansion , and the small dinner party Nick attends there in Chapter 1 , everything about Gatsby's new wealth is over-the-top and showy, from the crates of oranges brought in and juiced one-by-one by a butler to the full orchestra.

Everyone who comes to the parties is attracted by Gatsby's money and wealth, making the culture of money-worship a society-wide trend in the novel, not just something our main characters fall victim to. After all, "People were not invited—they went there" (3.7). No one comes due to close personal friendship with Jay. Everyone is there for the spectacle alone.

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher—shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange with monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

"They're such beautiful shirts," she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. "It makes me sad because I've never seen such—such beautiful shirts before." (5.117-118)

Gatsby, like a peacock showing off its many-colored tail, flaunts his wealth to Daisy by showing off his many-colored shirts. And, fascinatingly, this is the first moment of the day Daisy fully breaks down emotionally—not when she first sees Gatsby, not after their first long conversation, not even at the initial sight of the mansion—but at this extremely conspicuous display of wealth. This speaks to her materialism and how, in her world, a certain amount of wealth is a barrier to entry for a relationship (friendship or more).

"She's got an indiscreet voice," I remarked. "It's full of——"

I hesitated.

"Her voice is full of money," he said suddenly.

That was it. I'd never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it. . . . High in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl. . . . (7.103-106)

Daisy herself is explicitly connected with money here, which allows the reader to see Gatsby's desire for her as desire for wealth, money, and status more generally. So while Daisy is materialistic and is drawn to Gatsby again due to his newly-acquired wealth, we see Gatsby is drawn to her as well due to the money and status she represents.

I couldn't forgive him or like him but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. . . . (9.146)

Here, in the aftermath of the novel's carnage, Nick observes that while Myrtle, George, and Gatsby have all died, Tom and Daisy are not punished at all for their recklessness, they can simply retreat "back into their money or their vast carelessness… and let other people clean up the mess." So money here is more than just status—it's a shield against responsibility, which allows Tom and Daisy to behave recklessly while other characters suffer and die in pursuit of their dreams.

Analyzing Characters Through Materialism

We touched on this a bit with the quotes, but all of the characters can be analyzed from the point of view of their wealth and/or how materialistic they are. This analysis can enrich an essay about old money versus new money, the American dream , or even a more straightforward character analysis , or a comparison of two different characters . Mining the text for a character's attitude toward money can be a very helpful way to understand their motivations in the world of 1920s New York.

If you analyze a character through this theme, make sure to explain:

#1 : Their attitude towards money.

#2 : How money/materialism drives their choices in the novel.

#3 : How their final outcome is shaped by their wealth status and what that says about their place in the world.

Character Analysis Example

As an example, let's look briefly at Myrtle . We get our best look at Myrtle in Chapter 2 , when Tom takes Nick to see her in Queens and they end up going to the New York City apartment Tom keeps for Myrtle and hosting a small gathering (after Tom and Myrtle hook up, with Nick in the next room!).

Myrtle is obsessed with shows of wealth , from her outfits, to insisting on a specific cab, to her apartment's decoration, complete with scenes of Versailles on the overly-large furniture: "The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles" (2.51). She even adopts a different persona among her guests : "The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her gestures, her assertions became more violently affected moment by moment and as she expanded the room grew smaller around her until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air" (2.56).

In Myrtle's eyes, money is an escape from life with her husband in the valley of ashes , something that brings status, and something that buys class. After all, Tom's money secures her fancy apartment and allows her to lord it over her guests and play at sophistication, even while Nick looks down his nose at her.

Obviously there is physical chemistry driving her affair with Tom, but she seems to get as much (if not more) pleasure from the materials that come with the affair—the apartment, the clothes, the dog, the parties. So she keeps up this affair, despite how morally questionable it is and the risk it opens up for her—her materialism, in other words, is her primary motivator.

However, despite her airs, she matters very little to the "old money" crowd, as cruelly evidenced first when Tom breaks her nose with a "short deft movement" (2.126), and later, when Daisy chooses to run her over rather than get into a car accident. Myrtle's character reveals how precarious social climbing is, how materialism is not actually a path to happiness/virtue.

Common Assignments and Discussion Topics About Money and Materialism in The Great Gatsby

Here are ways to think about frequently assigned topics on this the theme of money and materialism.

Discuss Tom & Daisy as people who "smash things and retreat into their money"

As discussed above, money—and specifically having inherited money—not only guarantees a certain social class, it guarantees safety and privilege : Tom and Daisy can literally live by different rules than other, less-wealthy people. While Gatsby, Myrtle, and George all end up dead, Tom and Daisy get to skip town and avoid any consequences, despite their direct involvement.

For this prompt, you can explore earlier examples of Tom's carelessness (breaking Myrtle's nose, his behavior in the hotel scene, letting Daisy and Gatsby drive back to Long Island after the fight in the hotel) as well as Daisy's (throwing a fit just before her wedding but going through with it, kissing Gatsby with her husband in the next room). Show how each instance reveals Tom or Daisy's carelessness, and how those instances thus foreshadow the bigger tragedy—Myrtle's death at Daisy's hands, followed by Tom's manipulation of George to kill Gatsby.

You can also compare Tom and Daisy's actions and outcomes to other characters to help make your point—Myrtle and Gatsby both contribute to the conflict by participating in affairs with Tom and Daisy, but obviously, Myrtle and Gatsby don't get to "retreat into their money," they both end up dead. Clearly, having old money sets you far apart from everyone else in the world of the novel.

What do Nick's comments about money reveal about his attitude towards wealth?

This is an interesting prompt, since you have to comb through passages of Nick's narration to find his comments about money, and then consider what they could mean, given that he comes from money himself.

To get you started, here is a sample of some of Nick's comments on money and the wealthy, though there are certainly more to be found:

"Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn." (1.4)

"My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor's lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month. (1.14)

Nick's comments about money, especially in the first chapter, are mostly critical and cynical. First of all, he makes it clear that he has "an unaffected scorn" for the ultra-rich, and eyes both new money and old money critically. He sarcastically describes the "consoling proximity of millionaires" on West Egg and wryly observes Tom and Daisy's restless entitlement on East Egg.

These comments might seem a bit odd, given that Nick admits to coming from money himself: "My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations" (1.5). However, while Nick is wealthy, he is nowhere near as wealthy as the Buchanans or Gatsby—he expresses surprise both that Tom is able to afford bringing ponies from Lake Forest ("It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that" (1.16), and that Gatsby was able to buy his own mansion ("But young men didn't—at least in my provincial inexperience I believed they didn't—drift coolly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island Sound" (3.88)), despite the fact they are all about 30 years old.

In other words, while he opens the book with his father's advice to remember "all the advantages [he's] had," Nick seems to have a chip on his shoulder about still not being in the highest tier of the wealthy class . While he can observe the social movements of the wealthy with razor precision, he always comes off as wry, detached, and perhaps even bitter. Perhaps this attitude was tempered at Yale, where he would have been surrounded by other ultra-wealthy peers, but in any case, Nick's cynical, sarcastic attitude seems to be a cover for jealousy and resentment for those even more wealthy than him.

Why does Gatsby say Daisy's voice is "full of money"? What does it reveal about the characters' values?

Gatsby's comment about Daisy's voice explicitly connects Daisy the character to the promise of wealth, old money, and even the American Dream . Furthermore, the rest of that quote explicitly describes Daisy as "High in a white palace, the King's daughter, the golden girl…" (7.106). This makes Daisy sound like the princess that the hero gets to marry at the end of a fairy tale—in other words, she's a high-value prize .

Daisy representing money also suggests money is as alluring and desirable—or even more so—than Daisy herself. In fact, during Chapter 8 when we finally get a fuller recap of Daisy and Gatsby's early relationship, Nick notes that "It excited [Gatsby] too that many men had already loved Daisy—it increased her value in his eyes" (8.10). In other words, Gatsby loves Daisy's "value" as an in-demand product .

But since Daisy is flighty and inconsistent, Gatsby's comment also suggests that wealth is similarly unstable. But that knowledge doesn't dampen his pursuit of wealth—if anything, it makes it even more desirable. And since Gatsby doesn't give up his dream, even into death, we can see how fervently he desires money and status.

Connecting new/old money and materialism to the American dream

In the world of The Great Gatsby , the American Dream is synonymous with money and status —not so much success, career (does anyone but Nick and George even have a real job?), happiness, or family. But even Gatsby, who makes an incredible amount of money in a short time, is not allowed access into the upper echelon of society, and loses everything in trying to climb that final, precarious rung of the ladder, as represented by Daisy.

So the American Dream, which in the first half of the book seems attainable based on Gatsby's wealth and success, reveals itself to be a hollow goal. After all, if even wealth on the scale of Gatsby's can't buy you entry into America's highest social class, what can? What's the point of striving so hard if only heartbreak and death are waiting at the end of the road?

This pessimism is also reflected in the fates of Myrtle and George, who are both trying to increase their wealth and status in America, but end up dead by the end of the novel. You can read more about the American Dream for details on The Great Gatsby 's ultimately skeptical, cynical attitude towards this classic American ideal.

Connecting money to the status of women

Daisy and Jordan are both old money socialites, while Myrtle is a working class woman married to a mechanic. You can thus compare three very different women's experiences to explore how money—or a lack thereof—seems to change the possibilities in a woman's life in early 1920s America.

Daisy maintains her "old money" status by marrying a very rich man, Tom Buchanan, and ultimately sticks with him despite her feelings for Gatsby. Daisy's decision illustrates how few choices many women had during that time—specifically, that marrying and having children was seen as the main role any woman, but especially a wealthy woman, should fulfill. And furthermore, Daisy's willingness to stay with Tom despite his affairs underscores another aspect of women's roles during the 1920s: that divorce was still very uncommon and controversial.

Jordan temporarily flouts expectations by ""[running] around the country," (1.134) playing golf, and not being in a hurry to marry—a freedom that she is allowed because of her money, not in spite of it. Furthermore, she banks on her place as a wealthy woman to avoid any major scrutiny, despite her "incurable dishonesty": "Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever shrewd men and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage, and given this unwillingness I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young" (3.160). Furthermore, by the end of the novel she claims to be engaged, meaning that like Daisy, she's ultimately chosen to live within the lines society has given her. (Even if she's not actually engaged, the fact she chooses to tell Nick that suggests she does see engagement as her end goal in life.)

Myrtle feels trapped in her marriage, which pushes her into her affair with Tom Buchanan, an affair which grants her access to a world—New York City, wealth, parties—she might not otherwise have access to. However, jumping up beyond her roots, using Tom's money, is ultimately unsustainable—her husband finds out and threatens to move out west, and then of course she is killed by Daisy before they can make that move. Myrtle—both working class and a woman—is thus trapped between a rock (her gender) and a hard place (her lack of money), and perhaps for this reason receives the cruelest treatment of all.

So all three women push the boundaries of their expected societal roles—Daisy's affair with Gatsby, Jordan's independent lifestyle, and Myrtle's affair with Tom—but ultimately either fall in line (Daisy, Jordan) or are killed for reaching too far (Myrtle). So Gatsby ultimately provides a pretty harsh, pessimistic view of women's roles in 1920s America.

What's Next?

In The Great Gatsby, money is central to the idea of the American Dream. Read more about how the American Dream is treated in The Great Gatsby and whether the novel is ultimately optimistic or pessimistic about the dream.

Money (or the lack of it!) is also why the novel's symbols of the green light and the valley of ashes are so memorable and charged. Read more about those symbols for a fuller understanding of how money affects The Great Gatsby.

Want the complete lowdown on Jay Gatsby's rags-to-riches story? Check out our guide to Jay Gatsby for the complete story.

Thinking about indulging in a little materialism yourself alà Gatsby? We've compiled a list of 15 must-have items for fans of The Great Gatbsy book and movie adaptations .

Looking for other literary guides? Learn more about The Crucible , The Cask of Amontillado , and " Do not go gentle into that good night " with our expert analyses.

Anna scored in the 99th percentile on her SATs in high school, and went on to major in English at Princeton and to get her doctorate in English Literature at Columbia. She is passionate about improving student access to higher education.

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The Connection Between Money And Motivation

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