Behaviour and Motivation — Page 180, Lesson 288

Let’s start with the big picture. We’re looking at Behaviour and Motivation — and I want to begin by placing it squarely inside the cockpit. At every stage of the motivational models we’ll discuss, we can associate a direct relevance to flight safety. The fundamental aim of flight safety is to have a pilot who is mentally and physically satisfied, working confidently as a member of a highly skilled team, to achieve a trouble-free and safe flight. That’s the target. Now, two things influence a person’s motivation: the difficulty of the task and the arousal of the individual. Arousal here means your state of alertness or activation — too low and you’re bored, too high and you’re stressed. Both affect how motivated you feel to perform. Let’s move into The Influence of Human Needs on Flight Safety. Most airlines aim to make a profit by carrying cargo and/or passengers safely. To do that, one of the many operational facets they must understand is human needs in the realm of flight safety. Passengers want to arrive safely, on time, with their baggage. To guarantee that, the airline must provide a fully serviceable and correctly equipped aircraft. The only way to deliver that is through a well-organised servicing schedule, crew rostering operation, and good passenger/cargo facilities. All these factors influence meeting human needs and, at the same time, provide greater flight safety. Now, let’s look at the Basic Model Showing Two Independent Sources of Motivation. This model illustrates two independent sources of motivation and shows the relationship between motivational elements in a work situation and performance. The two sources are: 1. The perceived value of a reward — how much you want it. 2. The probability of its attainment — how likely you think you are to get it. People place very different values on rewards. But here’s the key: if a person expects that their efforts for attaining a reward will pass unnoticed, then they may feel the reward has little usefulness — even though it is highly valued. So both the value and the perceived chance of getting it matter. Two other variables must be included here: natural abilities and learned skills. These are what you bring to the task — your innate talent and what you’ve trained to do. From performance, we can see rewards emerging. Rewards can be intrinsic — like a feeling of pride or achievement — or extrinsic — like pay or promotion. If rewards are tied to performance and are seen to be, higher job satisfaction will be achieved, resulting in higher performance. Many people feel more content if they have clear targets to meet, and providing those targets are realistic, they too can contribute to job satisfaction. That diagram on screen shows you the basic model — the two sources of motivation, the variables of ability and skill, and how performance leads to intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, which then feed back into motivation and satisfaction.