Victor Vroom lives!

At the IITT National Trainers Conference yesterday in Oxford, I received an unexpected stimulus to some long dormant synapses when one of the speakers, Bernadette Ude, related how she had used the motivational theories of Victor Vroom to help plan her change programme. Could this be true? Is Victor Vroom alive and flourishing after all these years?

In the late 1970s, I read Vroom's book Leadership and Decision Making and later attended one of his workshops on leadership. I was taken by his theory of motivation and used it quite a bit in my work. It's so simple, that you sort of feel anyone could have come up with it. To quote Wikipedia:

"Vroom's theory assumes that behaviour results from conscious choices among alternatives whose purpose it is to maximise pleasure and minimise pain."

It goes on:

"The expectancy theory says that individuals have different sets of goals and can be motivated if they believe that (1) there is a positive correlation between efforts and performance; (2) that favourable performance will result in a desired reward; (3) that the reward will satisfy an important need; and (4) the desire to satisfy the need is strong enough to make the effort  worthwhile."

In other words. you'll do something if you believe there's a strong  chance that this will lead to something you want. This means you feel capable of doing it, and you have confidence that the reward will be forthcoming. If someone offered you $1m for a sponsored swim, you may be pretty keen, but not if this depended on you swimming the English Channel or if you were doubtful this person really had $1m.

So Victor Vroom. Good theory. Great name.