Why Motivation Doesn’t Last

No matter how long your tenure as a team leader has been, you’ve probably seen it.

Motivation can fade.

Individual employees who seemed so full of life and so engaged in the job eventually settle into rhythms and patterns and might even burn out. Teams that were formed with an inspiring mission eventually fall into those regular old habits of teamwork and can become demotivated and disengaged.

It happens.

It happens in organizations of all sizes. It happens in teams from a variety of different ranges of work. But as a leader, there are a few things you can do to diagnose why motivation doesn’t last, and help turn it around and reengage and reinspire your people.

In this article, we’re going examine four specific reasons why motivation doesn’t last, and what you can do to turn it around, and it’s all based on decades of social science and organizational psychology research, some of which has gotten some attention in the professional world, and a lot of which is overlooked.

Don’t Believe They Can

The first reason people get demotivated is the belief that they just can’t do it. They were excited about the job, they stayed engaged through the primary training and as they started to put in the effort, they just started failing. And…