motivation

motivate, motivation

Motivation has a special meaning in psychology which the OED defines as ‘the conscious or unconscious stimulus for action towards a desired goal especially as resulting from psychological or social factors; the factors giving purpose or direction to human or animal behaviour’. Both it and the corresponding verb motivate have entered the language of business and industrial personnel management to denote the factors that induce employees to work well:

• The really crucial skills, to the headteacher charged with the responsibility of taking a school into this new territory, will be those of motivation, leadership and team-building —T. Brighouse et al., 1991

• Get to know the people you work with —by taking the time to do this you know exactly what motivates them —Irish News, 2007.

From here it is a short step to over-generalized uses in which both words are little more than synonyms for cause (verb and noun) or reason:

• The farming achievements of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were also motivated by the need for more food —J. Purseglove, 1989

• There was no racial motivation for the attack —Leicester Mercury, 2007.