What is Motivation?
Motivation has been described as the desire to fulfil a need. Achievement motivation is a persons individual motivation to strike for success which enables the person to persist even when they meet obstacles or even failure.
This is such a valuable quality in a customer service sales person. Imagine it’s the last 10 minutes before the retail store closes and the team needs one more sale to hit their daily target. The sales person sees the customer giving off an approach signal (they look like they need help) and then considers that they have a 50/50 chance of failure so they say to themselves “no thanks” and start to tidy the stock in the store.
Two Aspects of Personality
The sales persons behaviour is driven by the motive to avoid failure. However the next sales person who sees the same situation thanks that this is a way where they have a chance to succeed. The think “I have chance to help the team reach its target, so they then approach the customer. They are driven by the motive to achieve success. This we call Achievement Motivation, it comes down to two aspects of personality.
- The motivation to succeed
- High level of performance
- Values feedback
- Attributes success to effort
- The motivation to avoid failure
- Preoccupied about failure
- Perform worse when evaluated by others
- Attribute performance to outside factors, luck etc
The Key to Success
The key to the success of any retail store is the manager and team members who engage with the customers on the shop floor. There is no doubt that the manager and the sales team who are driven by the motive to achieve success will find away to achieve success.