Motivation. (Literature review) - Essay Example

Motivation in different areas of life and work is an important requisite and is perhaps the pathway for success in any field. Consequently, motivation is a widely recognized problem area and hence is an area of research for many years (Stauber, 31-47). As a result, there is a considerable body of literature in this area. This work would undertake a literature review on motivation applied to academic area (Rawsthorne and Elliot, 326-344). Thus, a simple strategy of literature search based on the key words, "academic", "motivation", and "academic motivation" was undertaken on the available literatures in both electronic and print media.

Many journals have articles published on this topic, and the most recent were chosen to critically review them. Interesting to note is that a vast amount of literature is on management education. Mele, in his book, Motivation and Agency, has reviewed many studies to characterize motivation. Motivation is an animal instinct but is not universal across animal kingdom. Motivation is a goal-governed phenomenon. Motivated individuals have a capacity to represent goals. Therefore an attitude encompassed by motivation would have either a goal or a means to achieve it.

Different individuals have different intensities of motivations, and an intentional agency to do something is always involved in a motivated attitude (Spera, 456-490). While applied to learning or motivation in academic education, it can happen in one of the two main forms, self-directed learning, where the learner has sufficient control over the process and hence over the purpose, form, content, and pace of the learning, and intrinsic motivation can only generate this. The other form of learning is expressive that need to be elucidated by the external environment, hence may need extrinsic stimulation, and goal always do not elucidate that (Mele, 4-58).

Elliot and Dweck in their seminal work, competence and motivation, have correlated motivation to presence of competence, and in this book, in the section of motivation, they have conducted a literature review to define the elusive motivation. They have also commented that there are several different kinds of motivation, and as supported in the literature, the first kind of motivation is the motivation to achieve (Elliott and Dweck, 5-12). It has been demonstrated that people who are high in achievement motivation, take moderate risks and challenges to achieve.

These people are attracted to tasks that are neither very hard nor very easy. These people often are motivated to strive constantly to better themselves and their accomplishments. The second kind of motivation is competence or self-efficacy motivation that refers to the persons' beliefs in their own ability to solve the problem at hand (Kinlaw and Kurtz-Costes, 295-311). Achievement motivations theorists tend to explain the energization and direction of competence-based behaviour. The traditional motive theory has been replaced by finding casual attributions that are directed by the development of cognitive psychology (Boggiano, Barrett, Weiher, McClelland, and Lusk, 866-879).

Debnath and coworkers deal with the problem of student motivation within the classroom, and the authors examine the influence of appropriate classroom