He described four main levels of motivation, from highest to lowest:
Duty
Personal Conviction
Personal Gain
Money
Duty
The highest motivation level is duty. On this level, people consider a company they work for to be part of their lives. They are loyal to the company and its interests. They are reliable and give support to managers. There may be many people working for a company, but rarely are the majority those with a duty level of motivation.
Personal Conviction
People who are not company patriots but consider themselves professionals and try to do their jobs well according to their personal standards of professionalism are people on the personal conviction level of motivation. For example, this could be an accountant who does not care what the company does or how well it succeeds, but by virtue of personal conviction, thinks it is important to ensure that the accounting department is run properly.
Personal Gain
The next level of motivation is personal gain. People on this level do their jobs just to get some benefits from the company. These benefits range from the intangible, such as experience, knowledge, and networking, to the tangible, such as the company’s convenient location, compensation, and other benefits. These people often tell you that they are ready to deliver fantastic results if you provide higher pay and better benefits. Sometimes they sound very convincing. If you have ever gone along with this kind of person’s plea, then you know it does not work. Their level of production does not increase in proportion to their appetite.
Money
The last level of motivation is money, and it is actually pretty rare to find a person at this level, as this is a level of motivation in which, strictly speaking, a person does not even care what he does as long as he makes more money doing it. Although many people say they are interested only in money, this is not actually true. Just try offering an engineer who constantly complains about being underpaid a better-paying job as sales manager. Typically, he would tell you that he wants to work in his specialty. This means that his level of motivation is not money, but personal conviction. People who are on the money level of motivation usually have some serious money troubles and are ready to do anything possible to solve them.