Economic Growth through Societal Motivation

Economic engines are fostered through the patterns of human development and the creation of an environment that allows them to realize their fullest potential on the market. The economic system should encourage exploratory entrepreneurial behavior that leads to tangible rewards for societal members to ensure momentum continues to thrust forward. The same mechanics that apply to organizational motivation also apply to national motivation as each member determines whether or not they will engage the market with their skills and abilities. 

The book Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty outlines how wealth is increasingly accumulating into fewer and fewer hands thereby retarding the financial growth of the middle class. Wealth distribution tied directly to performance helps to encourage greater levels of motivation and innovative ideation.  Higher performance should be encouraged throughout the layers of society to have the highest development of the economic system. 

Expectancy-Value Theory:  People will determine how much effort they are going to put forward to obtain goals. If the system doesn’t offer these rewards or if people are effectively blocked due to issues such as racism, religious bigotry, sexism, nepotism, corruption, or improper wealth allocation national motivation will decline. 

Path-Goal Theory: It is not enough to offer the rewards without offering the right rewards for the right kinds of activities. Employees that work hard, develop new products, and create better ways of conducting business have a right to increased income. The rewards must match the path to ensure the highest amount of effort.

Cultural Reward Systems: Each culture has their own embedded reward systems that encourages higher levels of motivation within that particular cultural context (Rosenblatt, 2010). Once the culture is set it will change the vantage points of societal members and influence what actions will lead to effective rewards that adjusts social intelligence and thinking. 

Skill Set Creation: To think, build, and produce requires the motivation to learn and develop. The system must reward employees who successfully complete training, obtain certificates, graduate with degrees, and improve their earning potential in some way. The closer learning is associated to current societal needs the higher the alignment of effort and skill. 

Ideation to Production: When good ideas are ignored only because they didn’t come from the “right” person with the “right” social connections the system suffers as less people learn to open their ideas to unjust criticism. Development of a nation requires the ability to explore various types of ideas from multiple sectors of society. 

Treaties and Agreements: Opportunities are based on the ability to sell products on the global market that obtain rewards for societal members. The types of agreements developed for trade and information sharing will determine the potential opportunities generated. The agreements influence the productive structure of a nation.

Wealth allocation should impact all segments of society to be effective. Developing a stronger society requires all-hands-on-deck through offering appropriate rewards, effective paths that help the greatest amount of people, the skill-set to produce, open-minded enough to accept new ideas, and having the international agreements in place to develop new opportunities.

The way the system operates and develops has a natural impact on the methodologies people use to make decisions. Every person uses judgments to determine whether or not additional effort will lead to increased rewards or other valued benefits. A lifetime of rewards, punishments, successes, and failures will determine the overall way in which a people think and becomes embedded into a nation’s culture. 

It is the entire system and its impact on the population that will determine whether or not a nation will succeed or decline or suffer the fate of history. Each member is surrounded by the factors of their environment and the way in which other people think that creates social perception as encased in culture. It is this cultural perception matched with appropriately pathways to success and tangible rewards that will determine if the system has the capacity to continue to grow in the future. 

Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA. ISBN 9780674430006

Rosenblatt, V. (2010). Social axioms, values and reward allocation across cultures. Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings.