From cop...

Message: 6

Date: Sat, 11 May 2002 06:44:11 +0200

From: Michael Franz <michael_franz@gmx.de>

Subject: Motivational Factors

Hi John and Charmine,

I like the idea of providing a knowledge gift! Since both articles are

written in German I had to translate the main ideas. So, please pardon my

english!

Wish you a nice weekend, Michael

First Reference: Heiss, S. (2002) Analyse motivationspsychologischer

Faktoren in Communities of Practice - Überwindung persönlicher Grenzen,

Presentation held on the WMK Conference, 11. April 2002, page 6

Heiss proposes 12 motivational factors in CoPs:

1. closed Interaction

2. sameness

3. connectness

4. autonomy

5. meaningful environment

6. recognition

7. norm realisation

8. orientation

9. social comparision

10. economics of interaction

11. getting knowledge

12. learning

Second Reference: Frost, B. & Holzwarth, C. (2001) Motivation in Communities

of Practice ? Problematik von Incentives und mögliche Interventionsänsatze ?

Erfahrungen bei der Siemens AG, in: new management, Nr. 10, 2001, p. 53-59.

Benjamin Frost and Costance Holzwarth wrote a Paper about motivation in

CoPs for the context of large international groups. The start with the

question of how a large group can support the motivation of community

members. A company can support either the extrensic or the inrinsic

Motivation of CoP members.

Extrinsic motivaion is usually created through material incentives. A

certain task can lead to a reward or to an punishment. These kind of

incentives can be created rather easily, but they do not create a high

performing CoP.

Intrensic Motivation is created through the issue of the CoP itself. To

analyse and support Intrensic motivation is rather difficult, but still they

regard this kind of motivation as a key success factor for communities.

The Problem of extrinsic Motivation is a kind of crowding out effect,

meaning that the intrensic motivation gets replaced by an extrinsic one. In

other words, employees engage themselves in CoPs because they want to get an

reward, not because they are interested in the issue. Unfortunatly

incentives must be raised over time. But there are more problems to

extrensic incentives, e.g. It is difficult to judge the quality of

contributions, incentive systems can be missused, the impact of an incentive

system is not always clear. Therefore the authors come to the conclusion

that it is not a good idea to combine incentive systems and CoPs

They observe that a member is motivated if the Community helps in dealing

with daily problems and provides the member with a personal network.

Therefore it is better if the company takes measures to support the

individual member reaching these goals. They propose vier fields of action:

providing support, rules of collaboration, building trust and achieving a

collective identity.