Mixed Motivation: When Genuine Interest and Recognition Combine
Both genuine interest and outside recognition sustain you. It’s a common result: almost nobody runs on a single type of motivation.
There’s no fixed or “correct” proportion between the two. It varies by person, task and moment, and research on work motivation has spent three decades showing why that mix is the norm rather than the exception.
Two scales, not two ends of the same line
The usual intuition pictures motivation as a seesaw: the more interest moves you, the less reward does. The data don’t describe it that way.
In 1994, Teresa Amabile and her team published the Work Preference Inventory, one of the most widely used questionnaires for measuring motivational orientation at work. It measures intrinsic motivation (curiosity, enjoyment, a sense of competence) and extrinsic motivation (recognition, money, competition, evaluation) as two separate scales, so a person can score high on both, low on both or high on just one.
A mixed profile, then, isn’t a midpoint between two poles: it’s the combination of two sources working at the same time.
What Self-Determination Theory adds
Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory adds an important nuance: not all outside motivation is the same. Ryan and Deci (2000) arrange it along a continuum that runs from the most controlled regulation (acting for a reward or to avoid a penalty) to the most internalized, when you work for something external whose value you’ve made your own. The article on extrinsic motivation walks through that continuum in more detail.
For this profile, the consequence is clear: combining interest with pressure from a boss isn’t the same as combining it with the wish for good work to show because you value that result. Both mixes can produce the same result on a short test and work very differently day to day.
What a forty-year meta-analysis found
In 2014, Christopher Cerasoli, Jessica Nicklin and Michael Ford published a meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin covering 183 samples and more than 212,000 participants from school, work and sport. Their conclusions fit what this profile describes:
- Intrinsic motivation predicted performance moderately to strongly, whether or not incentives were involved.
- Each source carried weight in a different area: interest better explained the quality of work, and incentives its quantity.
- The type of incentive mattered. When the reward was tied directly to performance, interest weighed less in the outcome; when the link was more indirect, it weighed more.
The authors conclude that interest and incentives aren’t necessarily at odds and are best studied together. It is, in research language, a description of mixed motivation.
Quantity and quality of motivation
A team led by Maarten Vansteenkiste (2009) compared profiles of secondary school and university students by combining two variables: autonomous motivation (interest and personal value) and controlled motivation (pressure, guilt, reward). Four groups emerged, one of them scoring high on both.
The group with the best learning pattern wasn’t the one with the most motivation overall, but the one with high autonomous and low controlled motivation. The authors’ reading is that the quality of motivation matters, not just its quantity. For a mixed profile, the interesting question isn’t how much outside factors move you, but whether that outside push feels like your own or like pressure.
An example
A translator enjoys solving the hard passages in a literary text: there, interest is enough. The final terminology check, long and repetitive, moves forward instead thanks to the deadline and to knowing that the publisher values a clean delivery. Neither source carries the whole job alone, and there’s no contradiction in that.
How this combination shows up
- Effort holds up whether there’s a visible goal or not, though a clear objective still helps.
- Part of the work is genuinely enjoyed, and at the same time, having that effort recognized matters.
- The balance between “for the interest” and “for the result” shifts depending on the task, without that feeling contradictory.
- Less appealing tasks hold up better with a concrete goal, and appealing ones with room to do them your own way.
Which source fails when performance drops
In this profile, when performance falls, it’s rarely motivation as a whole that’s missing: usually one of the two sources fails. A question like “am I just not that interested in this, or do I not see doing it well being reflected anywhere?” helps tell them apart, instead of putting everything down to willpower.
Noticing your own progress feeds both at once. The article on personal motivation explains Amabile and Kramer’s diary study on the weight of small wins in meaningful work.
If you notice that interest in the task clearly outweighs any outside incentive, check out the intrinsic motivation profile; if it’s the other way around, check out extrinsic motivation.
You can go back to your full result in the What Motivates Me at Work? test.
Sources
- Amabile, T. M., Hill, K. G., Hennessey, B. A., & Tighe, E. M. (1994). The Work Preference Inventory: Assessing intrinsic and extrinsic motivational orientations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66(5), 950-967. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.66.5.950
- Cerasoli, C. P., Nicklin, J. M., & Ford, M. T. (2014). Intrinsic motivation and extrinsic incentives jointly predict performance: A 40-year meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 140(4), 980-1008. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035661
- Deci, E. L. & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior. Plenum.
- Ryan, R. M. & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68-78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68
- Vansteenkiste, M., Sierens, E., Soenens, B., Luyckx, K., & Lens, W. (2009). Motivational profiles from a self-determination perspective: The quality of motivation matters. Journal of Educational Psychology, 101(3), 671-688. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015083
Want to know more about yourself?
Discover your result with one of our related tests.
Frequently asked questions
Is mixed motivation an indecisive or unclear result?
No, it's a real profile: almost nobody runs on a single type of motivation at one hundred percent, most people combine genuine interest and outside recognition in different proportions.
Is it better to have mixed motivation than a single type?
There's no better type in the abstract. Cerasoli, Nicklin and Ford's (2014) meta-analysis found that intrinsic motivation and incentives predict performance jointly and aren't necessarily at odds: interest is more closely tied to the quality of work, and incentives to its quantity. What seems to matter is the kind of outside motivation: the kind that comes from valuing the result works better than the kind that comes from pressure.
Can the balance between both types shift depending on the task?
Yes, that's common: the same person can be moved almost entirely by interest in one project and need clear goals in another, depending on how much meaning they find in each.
Does this profile need anything special done about it?
No. It's a common result and doesn't point to any problem. What does help, in light of the research, is telling which of the two sources sustains each task, because when performance drops it's rarely motivation as a whole that fails, but one of the two.
How does the test decide that my motivation is mixed?
The test has 15 statements, five for each profile. The mixed-motivation ones ask directly whether you need both interest and recognition at once, or whether your motivation changes depending on the task or the stage. The result shows the profile you identified with most: it describes how you perceive your motivation, and doesn't separately measure each type of regulation that Self-Determination Theory distinguishes.
