Motivational Interviewing: The big 5 questions test and learning style

1.0 INTRODUCTION

Motivational Interviewing (MI), is a person-cantered encouragement approach used to enhance internal motivation of an individual to change by exploring uncertainty and draft measures to correct them (Miller and Rollnick, in press). It is uncommon in the field of therapeutic intervention to prioritize resolution of uncertainty as a means of enhancing changes in adaptive behaviour. This is opposing to the numerous approaches in therapy used to aid clients in implementing change. Looking into the stages-of-change mode (Prochaska & DiClemente, 1986), MI is yields the most effective influence on individuals that are contemplating changes but has numerous hindrances (Theresa and Stephen, 2002). In essence, the uncertainties, irrespective of where they occur in the change process are a signal for the therapist to adopt motivational interviewing and not the action-oriented strategy. MI has its roots from the works of Rogers (1957) as it emphasis on egalitarian relationship and stresses on the importance of understanding in the therapeutic process. Although it is kind of different from the client-centred therapy, it still incorporates the same therapeutic goals in relation to the right direction for change by providing the necessary approaches for moving the client toward behavioural change. Motivational interviewing also borrows the principles of learning theory and behavioural therapy as it adopts them to accomplish the reinforcement in client (Theresa and Stephen, 2002).

On that note, the purpose of this paper is to analyse the concept of motivation and apply it to my learning style as well as adopt it in understanding the type of organization and job description that I will be able to do better in.

2.0 PART A

2.1 MOTIVATION: AN OVERVIEW

Motivation is a major psychological process. A study showed that competitive issues in the organization are the main motivators among employees. Along with the factors like, view, personality, and learning, motivation is an important element in behavioural determining. Although motivation is not a predictor of the behaviour by itself, it is considered along with other factors. Motivation and motivating are located on both sides of one continuum of conscious behaviour of the human from a simple reaction like sneezing to learning routine habits of brushing teeth. Luthans (1998) states motivation as an energetic, driving factor in behaviour. It induces the employees to do their jobs and achieve identified goals. A way of stimulating people is using a driving force in them, which leads to satisfaction and commitment in their jobs. The views of the employee about job satisfaction and commitment also depend on organizational behaviour and performance of human resource management. On the other hand, job commitment depends on the views of employee about the whole organization. Although there was a significant relation between job satisfaction and commitment in organizations, some studies also showed that job satisfaction leads to higher commitment. In general, it can’t be neglected that motivated employees feel more satisfied and consistent and don’t incline to leave or change their workplace.

There is growing evidence that the manifestation of leadership has changed in the light of the new social and economic circumstances that organizations are facing today. Besides the factors like view, personality, and learning, motivation is an important predictor of the behaviours.

Smith, (1994) sated that the organizations success depends on the level of motivation given to the employees. Notes (2010) said, motivation is an intermediate factor for predicting behaviour where it is not an observable factor. According to Bauer and Bender (2004) motivation is divided into three sections. The first part refers to the power of stimulation or the latent energy inside a person.  The second part refers to the type of decision making and direction in shaping their behaviour. The third part refers to the degree of behavioural consistency for meeting their goals. Luthans (1998) explains motivation as a psychic tool leading to a stimulated goal by behaviour. So, the clue to understanding motivation lies in the concepts and relations among the needs and drives.

 Miner, Ebrahimi, and Wachtel (2011) stated that, motivation consists needs, drives, and incentives and their interactions. On the other hand, management researchers and managers believe that an organizational goal depends on the employees’ commitment. Motivation is supposed to be a good factor, leading to a better performance and forming behaviours and it can be in the hands of every manager. It should be noted that motivation can be in internal or external forms. Internal motivation is the drive for just doing an action. For example, job attraction, growth, recognition, and achievement.

In external form, employee’s actions and concerns are impressed by external incentives like reward, feedback, and punishment (Linz S.J., 2003). (Cornelbin T., 2006) states that independence and social relations in the work place stimulates motivation.

Carter et al (2011) stated the three factors affecting motivation include information, reward, and personal elements. He also states that employees should motivated and encouraged by providing some special allowance, fringe benefits  referring to their good performance and specific skills, this will increase the job commitment of the employees. Other payments in the organization can be counted as the monetary structure of an organization. Brown, J. And Sheppard (2012) believes that money is the most stimulating strategy for employees in achieving higher productivity. It leads to expressing feelings like safety, power, prestige, social status, reaching goals and achievements.

Banjoko (1996) found that many managers use money to encourage or punish their employee’s either to increase their efficiency or to threaten on losing their jobs. Thus, the tendency to receive higher salary motivate employees. Training Employees: Training employees is an important strategy to improve their abilities and skills at the expense of removing challenges and matching with new advances in technologies. The identity of information and interaction: when the interaction between different sections of an organization improves, the employees are easily connected and share information, which creates a healthy competition between the employees. Therefore each person’s performance doesn't only depend on his skills, but also on the degree of motivation. (Locke and Lathan, 1990) refers that Job satisfaction is the perception of the employee from the pleasure of the job which meets his needs.

Carr (2005) differentiates that motivation arise out of expectations of future while satisfaction arise out of the past events. In 2003, Herzberg analysed motivation-hygiene profile of the organization. In the frequency analyses he found that the most common dissatisfied is company’s policy and administration, and the least frequent is security. Herzberg explains that: “An employee must have positive interpersonal relations with his co-workers” (Herzberg, 1974). Thus, the researcher implies that it is hard to define the level of the “pain” or which factor is the most important as a dissatisfied.

Theories of worker motivation address a model connecting job satisfaction, motivation and performance. Considerable importance is attached to these concepts, and there is a need for clarification on how distinct satisfaction and motivation are from each other. On one end, job satisfaction is an emotional response accompanying actions or thoughts relating to work, whereas motivation is the process that activates behaviour. As satisfaction is an attitude, it is possible for a worker to be satisfied with his job but not be motivated.

Broad (2007) says that tangible incentives like rewards and recognition encourages employees to “think smart” and to support both quality and quantity in achieving goals. This paper is an attempt that focuses on how incentives, rewards and recognitions impact employee motivation. According to Andrew (2004), rewards and recognition makes the employees to stay committed to the organization.  Lawler (2003) argued that the prosperity and survival of the organizations relies on how the human resources are treated. Most of the organizations have gained the immense progress by fully complying with their business strategy through a well-balanced reward and recognition programs for employers.

Rollnick and Miller (1995) have also stressed on the need for therapist to be attentive to the hidden assumptions while using motivational interviewing. These assumptions implore numerous emotional connotations in exploring the approach instead of relying basically on techniques. These assumptions are:

1.      Intrinsic motivation can be enhanced but not imposed;

2.      Clients must be willing to lay down their uncertainties at certain points in order for motivational interviewing to occur;

3.      With the presence of uncertainties, direct persuasion becomes ineffective;

4.      The optimal relationship is egalitarian therapeutic relations; and

5.      A quiet and emphatic style is very important in initiating discussions about change

Since the conception of motivational interviewing by Miller & Rollnick (1991), the approach have been implemented in numerous cases such as diet and exercise changes (Berg-Smith et al., 1999; Rollnick, Mason, & Butler, 1999), HIV risk reduction (Carey et al., 2000; Carey & Lewis, 1999), and gambling (Hodgins, Currie, & el-Guebaly, 2001). This paper however, takes a different approach to the areas of implementation by studying the influence of motivational interviewing in convincing 4-5 years old pupils to gain interest in mathematics education, as well as illustrating the roles their teachers have to play in ensuring full adoption of the process and enhancing the desired change in the pupils.

The need for an approach that enhances mathematics learning in young children is important and this has been demonstrated by Sara (2009), who found that most of the pupils  in pre-nursery and nursery level experience difficulties in process mathematical questions especially when it comes to processing them in word format as most of these pupils  don’t have a clear pedagogical background. As such, teachers can be of great help by motivating them to increase their commitment towards process of mathematical question and that is the where Motivation interviewing comes into place. From a lay man’s view, MI is an approach to therapeutic study which involves the therapist coming close to the client in order to understand the obstacles that wage war against change process. In the case of the children, the need is to understand how their cognitive processing ability can be improved in order to help them understand mathematics easily.

3.0 PART 2

3.1 BIG 5 QUESTIONS TEST

	Disagree				Agree
I am the life of the party.
I feel little concern for others.
I am always prepared.
I tend to manipulate others to get my way.
I get stressed out easily.
I have a rich vocabulary.
I tend to lack remorse.
I don't talk a lot.
I am interested in people.
I leave my belongings around.
I tend to want others to admire me.
I am relaxed most of the time.
I have difficulty understanding abstract ideas.

http://personality-testing.info/tests/BIG5.php

Below is an analysis of the result I got from conducting the test online with the website provided above. 

John Holland’s Typology theory, first published in 1959, describes how individuals interact with their environments and how individual and environmental characteristics result in vocational choices and adjustment. Holland maintains that by late adolescence most people come to resemble a combination of six vocational/personality/interest types: Realistic (R), investigative (I), Artistic (A), Social (S), Enterprising (E), or Conventional (C) in six parallel work environments. Most people resemble more than one, and in many cases, all of the types to some degree. Hence, an individual’s personality is a composite of several of the typeseach individual having a unique combination. These types reveal patterns of likes and dislikes, specific values, self-descriptions, and characteristic behaviors. The pattern of an individual’s personality scores and resemblances is called a subtype, which is indicated by the first letter of each type in order of importance for that individual. People with similar codes typically show similar patterns of vocational preference and generally do well in similar occupational environments (Brown & Lent, 2004).

These six types, most commonly referred to as the RIASEC model, are represented figurally by a hexagon showing the relationships within and between personality types. Each personality type is a point on a hexagon. This model positions each personality type to show accurate distances between the types in addition to how closely they correspond to each other Holland 3 (also known as calculus in Holland’s theory). Those types that are adjacent to each other on the hexagon (R and I) share the most common characteristics; those that are furthest apart share the least in common (A and C) (Patrick, Eliason & Thompson, 2005).

In addition to the to the RIASEC model of key person and environment characteristics, four diagnostic indicators are central to Holland’s theory: congruence, consistency, differentiation, and identity. Congruence refers to the degree of fit between an individual’s personality and actual work environment (Irah, 2000). This is perhaps the most important of Holland’s constructs because as Niles and HarrisBowlsbey stated in Patrick, et al. (2005) a primary goal of using Holland’s theory in career counseling is “helping clients identify and connect with congruent work environments” (p. 46).

Consistency refers to how similar two types are, and is determined by the position of those types on the RIASEC hexagon. Letters adjacent to each other have a high consistency, as compared to those that are opposite on the hexagon, which would have a low consistency (Patrick, et al., 2005). Differentiation is the degree to which a person or a work environment is well defined. Some people, for example, appear to strongly resemble one personality type while others appear undifferentiated and have interests and abilities that fit several personality types. People who are undifferentiated may have difficulty making career decisions and may need career interventions that help them achieve greater differentiation among Holland types (Patrick, et al., 2005). Holland defines his last construct, identity, as the “possession of a clear and stable picture of one’s goals.

4.0 MY LEARNING STYLE

From the above analysis, I can easily see that I am a theorist. This is because, I exhibit the qualities and characteristics of a theorist as discussed above. In that sense, my implication is that I tend to be a perfectionist and while some of my friends admire me for that, other doesn’t seem to be comfortable with it because I tend to put them into high pressure. I see problems as a theoretical implication that must be solved by developing a countering theoretical background. This implies that I like to review all elements of a situation, scrutinize the pros and cons before defining the plan for solving such problems.

The benefit of this form of attitude towards learning in my own references is that it allows me to have a broader view and understanding of the situation in hand in order to present a more reliable and feasible solution. The fact that I don’t make decisions quickly allows me to review the situation by understanding both the positive and negative aspects of the situation. A thorough review of a given situation is very important and significant in the sense that it allows the problem solver to understand the real situation, the causes of the situation and the outcomes the situation has yielded. Such an understanding will help me to develop a more reliable and feasible solution as I already know the causes of the problems and the impact it has on my general understanding and development.

I have also compared my learning style to that of my friends and I think I have the better learning style. This is because, I see that my friends can sometimes be too quick in decision making, and the end product is a poor decision that they will eventually start to regret. I don’t really like to be influenced by my past in terms of regrets, and the best approach to avoid this issue is to make sure that the right decisions are made and this is my way to life and learning.

5.0 CONCLUSION

The purpose of this paper was basically to illustrate the importance of motivation in employees and conduct a self-evaluation of my learning style as it relates to the organizational context. The findings in this case are very important because it has been able to demonstrate that motivation is very important for increase performance in reference to the workforce. This is because when an employee is highly motivated, the person is pushed to increase his or her performance for the goodwill of the organization and such an increase in individual performance will then influence the performance of the organization positively.

My learning style indicates that I am a theorist and I try to put all factors around me into consideration when making decision. This is because I don’t tend to harbour mistakes around me and I seek for perfection in whatever I do. As such, this will influence my level of motivation positively because I will always ensure that whatever I produce in the organizational setting is very perfect and meets the set standards for which I have been given. In conclusion, it can be stated that organizational motivation is very important for increased productivity in the organization setting and theorist are better positioned to be motivated irrespective of the issues that surround their daily lives in the organization.

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