Essay About Need Theoriesnow And Right Thing

Motivation and Lewin’s Theory
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Motivation and Lewin’s TheoryIntroduction and HistoryMotivation is a very popular concept in management. We would like to often talk about you know if we want to motivate people to do the right thing, we want them to do. If we can only motivate them to do the right thing. That way consultant could make good money telling them how to motivate people. Even we motivate them to be more ethical, more decent, more _____, only good stuff. If we can only motivate to do the right things, problem solved. History: Line of thinking that has been around: The idea that somehow, as human beings we have these instincts in us, that is perhaps natural, instinct to be a mother, a father, to play music, instinct to want to climb mountain, for everything you could put an instinct that somehow the reason that this person is engaged in activity has an instinct in him. This stuff went to point that, at some point, British psychologists went over 140 instincts documented, that there are all these different instincts that people have. Opposite of instincts is the simple mechanism of hedonism (fundamental motivation is to seek pleasure and avoid pain). All of our behavior can be explained as all the time we want to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Need TheoriesNow a day’s psychologists talk about needs. They don’t talk as much about instinct or hedonism. They make classification as Physiological needs (Thirst, hunger sex) versus Psychological needs (being successful, being social, receive recognition). With respect to psychological needs question comes up to us that what they are and how many? It is important to recognize that physiological needs although they are categorized separately, they operate within the menu of the culture we are in. for example, somebody might have a drink because they are having a coffee with a friend and not that they are thirsty so am having a coffee. Its social that we are in coffee shop and having chat. The physiological needs get integrated in our psychic and our culture. So, there is a culture if you go to somebody’s house they will offer you a cup of tea and it would be rude of you to say no after 10 minutes, am not thirsty. Same with our eating behavior. You eat because its lunch time and after that you will get busy and not because you are hungry. And with sex too. People are more likely to have sex on weekends than of weekdays. Point is physiological needs are not completely separate and driven by their physiological condition. Occasionally you feel that yes, I feel so thirsty that I have been doing exercise and all. Maslow Theory: The most famous need theory. He talks about the idea that there is an order in our needs. We satisfy lower needs first then move to needs higher in the order. So, the lower needs are physiological needs (you make sure you got food and are not dying of hunger), then safety needs (you make sure you got shelter, protect yourself, survive the winter time), then social needs (having relationship and family), then ego and esteem (you are successful, have recognition, you are somebody), then self-actualization (meaning you somehow reach your potential. You grow more, you learn more, you reach wherever you wanted to reach). This theory is popular because it is simple enough and people like to say we understand psychology, hierarchy of needs.Problem with this theory: 1. How do you know you satisfy the need? Because in order to go to next stage you need to satisfy the previous one. For example, social, relationship, family. Does it matter what those relationship and family situations are? Yes, it does. For example, somebody caught in a bad marriage. After satisfying that condition can they move to the next one? What if somebody is not caught in a bad marriage at all, or someone is in a good marriage. Do they have a better chance to move to the next one? What has to happen in order to satisfy these conditions, in order to move to the next one. That is not clear. 2. Is it possible to satisfy some needs before the other one? You have to keep this order and match the conditions, he was getting so much criticism for this so he changed and said it is okay to move from one to the other. For example, you have self-actualization happening with lot of difficulties of previous stages. For example, the hungry artist, writer, musician, example the German musician, France shooper, guy was very bored during his life to the point that he would keep warm in his place by staying under his blanket because he did not have money for heat. He wrote his music very very small because he did not have money to buy paper. But he wrote awesome music. But during his time, he did not have the recognition. His potential was to wrote some awesome music, he certainly did it. All of a sudden without going through any of those categories, someone just blooms.3. Problem with categorization. You make these categories high level categories ego, esteem, social needs. It includes a lot of stuff as it is a high-level category. If you will go to actual behavior of somebody, the question is how will I map this behavior in these categories. So, example, somebody buys an expensive house which need is being satisfied. All of these needs. Actual behavior can fall in all of these categories. Safety shelter should. Social because family and friends come and go. Ego and esteem: person is the recognition of success. Self-actualization too as they have been working hard to kind of make sure that they can have good quality of life and they have been successful. It’s hard to know if I will take a simple behavior itself, how do I map it into these categories. Need for Achievement Theory: Made by Harvard professor. The idea is if you see people they have something that he calls need for achievement. Different people have different degrees of need for achievement. Then he proposed you can actually learn to increase your need for achievement and it is linked to success. If you are a high achiever then you will try to good in whatever you are pursuing whether it is marking in school or starting your own business or working in a company. He went international. He would even have branches setup in different parts of the world where people will come and test their need for achievement and then they receive training to increase need for achievement and increase their probability of success.How does he measure it? Psychologists call it Projective Technique. He shows ambiguous pictures (not very clear what the picture shows) and then asks you to describe what you see. Depending upon the description you provide, you receive the score on your need for achievement. For example, picture is of a person with briefcase on the street. You are asked to describe. You say person is tired and going home to take a break. This is what a person with low need for achievement will say. Person with higher need for achievement will say person is going home to do some additional work taking the briefcase with him to make sure the work is done. Or interpretation could be given there is nothing in the picture. The idea being that you are projecting something from yourself and I am going to give you these whole bunch of pictures, take all these descriptions you give, I score these descriptions and will tell your score for need for achievement. He did his bunch of studies claiming that characteristic of a person who has high need for achievement, have these properties. They would like to take responsibility, volunteer to do so. They will take risk but based on calculation as opposed to luck. They like to be calculative. They like to get feedback on whatever they do so they know where they stand. That is the whole idea for need for achievement. Need for Affiliation: The idea being that somehow there is a need and people try to interact with other people. That is the basic idea of need for affiliation. We like to socialize and hangout with people.Need for Power: Need for power can be personal or social. When it is personal, means that individual sees strictly from their own point of view of wanting to attain more power such as seeking higher positions in the organization. When the power is social, it is more in respect to the group. So, individual might receive power from other members of the group, because the person is caring always tries to accommodate everybody in the group and make sure that group reaches the goal or create a good social environment. The person would be appreciated by the group and will acquire power. Problems with Need Theories: 1.  A bit of circularity in the explanation. So, the idea being that if the person did well, you will attach it to the category of self-actualization. So, the categories are broad, and you kind of circularly go, if the good thing happens you come back and say it must have been the need for it. 2. They try to keep the needs in category so that the number does not expand but you can easily think of other needs coming into the picture here. Example, what if somebody is a jogger? Is there need for jogging? You see that more than any other needs. 3. Process of attribution that we go through for these categories is messy.  Example, somebody goes to a company party. What kind of need is being satisfied? Need for affiliation? Need for power? Or he just wants to make sure that the boss knows I am there. Herzberg’s Theory and Equity TheoryHe actually went to places of work and collected data. His idea was (two-factor theory. Two independent things happening in the environment) One of them he calls is satisfiers or motivators. By this he means, these are the things that motivates people to work harder and get energized to do things. He related it to the content of the job. Example, you are working on a project which is interesting and challenging. You get satisfaction from it, it motivates you to work on it. The other factor is dissatisfier (hygiene factor). Here the idea is things will be related to the context of the job. By dissatisfier means that, they can only make you unhappy. They will never motivate you. Example salary level. If your salary is below, what the market pays, then that might be the source of dissatisfaction. If your office is uncomfortable or noisy, that might be source of dissatisfaction. But his point is that, if you remove those, it will not motivate the person. So, paying you the right amount, what the market pays will not act as a motivator. The only way the motivator will change is when the content of your job changes and not the context. Methodology of Data Collection: So, how does he collect data? What he uses is called critical incidence. He asks people these questions: Last time that really good happened to you, tell me what it was. And he recorded it. Also, last time that really bad happened to you, and he recorded it. He collected this kind of data. Something that good happened at work and something that not so good happened at work. The way this data makes sense is that things that people thought positive were related to the content of the job. Things that people thought not so good (negative) were related to the context of the job.Problems with Herzberg’s Theory:1. Emphasis on the fact that two factors are independent of each other. Independence of the two factors is questionable. They may not always be. Example, If you work on the project with the person you don’t like or you do like, is that purely context or content too because it is a project. If you like the person, the working relationship is good and you are making progress on the project. The other side is that the working relationship is not good but still you are enjoying the project. So, do I call one context and the other content?Attribution Bias as the explanation of the results. The next thing that has been brought is the idea of attribution bias. The idea being that, when you ask people when was the last time that something good happened, they are more likely to attribute to the things they were more involved in or had control off. So, they attribute it to themselves. And when something bad happens, they like to attribute it to the environment (something external).my boss was not good, my office is noisy, colleagues are not good. Maybe you are measuring attribution bias as a true reflection of what is happening at work. Methodology only samples the peaks. When you ask people something good or something bad that happened, in a sense what you are sampling here, you are sampling peaks, really good and really bad. Those really good and really bad may not be representative of what actually happens at work. For example, how many times the really good stuff happened last year? Twice, thrice. It may not reflect the normal work day or really bad stuff often did that happen. EQUITY THEORY:Based on the Gestalt’s idea of trying to keep balance and feel something is fair or just. So, for example, they study like they create a low experimental situation in which they assemble something so that they connect some pieces of paper to make some shape and are supposed to do this over and over again for some time and while they are doing that they tell the person that they are being paid more than some other person doing the similar task. How does the person respond to this equity created? If they feel they get more, they will produce more, so they start working faster to bring some kind of balance here, some kind of equity. On the other hand, if you tell them that are being paid less than others, they slow it down. They don’t produce much. So again, they bring the balance to the equation of how much effort is being put in versus the output. So, it is a measure of what is happening socially versus what my share is here. For example, there was an investor who made a lot of money in some ways applying equity theory. This guy would look for companies who were in bad shape and going out of business and then buy them. The only thing he did as a strategy was he randomly fired half of people and doubled the salary of the remaining and said I don’t know anything about this business, I’ll come back in 6 months and see how you guys are doing and more often or not things picked up. (Getting double salary than what they deserve made them enthusiastic to work for)Management by Objective (MBO): Given by a consultant making observations, that if you look at organizations and meetings in organizations, one of things that is notable is that the goal is not clear. He came up with the idea that management instead of creating these confusing situations, should put some efforts in clarifying the goals that what should be achieved here and get people to participate in this process and accept these goals. Then there would be understanding of what this group should be doing. This idea of goal setting and trying to clarifying goals, has been studied by Lock, who did a lot of study in showing that if you specify a goal, people will work harder for it. For example, ask somebody to draw and picture as many as one can versus telling them to do 60. On telling as many as you can, they may stop at 25-30 and on telling 60, they may stop at 55-59. So, by specifying it people will work hard. Also, he did a lot of study on that If the goal is more difficult and challenging to people, again they will tend to work harder to achieve it. Problems with MBO: 1. It is difficult to know exactly we have to set this goal because what are the things that happen if the workers are involved and that is what the guy wanted to do. He likes to make the goal such that it is easily achievable. On the other hand, the management wants the goal to be harder to achieve. So, there is a conflict in establishing an acceptable goal. If the management pushed harder, then you may lose acceptance from others. If you make it too easy, you push it in the direction that is easy for them. 2. Measurement changes the behavior. Often with these goal setting, (example of fund raising), you would like to have some form of a numeric measure of the performance. So, it is easy to say how well we are doing here, in fund raising, we wanted this much, how much has been raised so far. Other things could be production, improving the quality, reducing the number of defective parts. Somehow you would like to have quantitative measures. The interesting thing about human behavior is as follows: Anytime you measure the behavior it changes. So, you start with the assumption that when I measure it is telling me what’s going on but by measuring it, it changes. It works in the following way: 1. Typically, when you measure you would like to have a quantitative measure. So, that means not all aspects of the behavior could be measured. So, you pick the parts that are easier to measure, that you can assign a number to it. When you do that, then those components that you are measuring, in a sense becomes the item that person pays more attention to and they will try to perform in a manner that will reflect high on those numbers that you are measuring. By doing that, they may not be doing the task as good as they could have been doing. For example, this example was with claim processors that Manulife insurance company in town, their manager was really happy and proud that we have got our claim processing system not on the computer. So, the advantage is we know exactly who is working on what claims. The computer does the usual measure. How long it takes to get processed, average time of claim to get processed, who processes the most number of claims. Every week they will have the picture of the person who processed the most claims on the wall as the best claim processor of the week. So, the management got the report, of all the claims that have been processed, who are fast processors, slow processors etc. The push was to increase the number of claims being processed. So, we talked to the people who did the claim processing and interesting thing happening there was, in order to keep their number as high as possible, certain aspects of claim processing were being dropped. And this has to do with quality that was not being measured. So, for example, they developed this saying that when in doubt pay, meaning that whenever somebody puts a claim and you are not sure whether to pay it, just pay it. Because it did not seem there was a coming back for making a mistake to the claim. It is just the claim I process. So, the company is measuring the number of claims processed and not the number of claims that were paid out and the person who got the money will not come back and complain. Other thing was, if people called, wanting an explanation on how their claim got process, it was no measure for that. So, you basically try to dodge that. He will not get anything in explaining the customer for 10 minutes how it was done, what happened, why they did not get as much as they hoped to. He will try to get out of it saying I have not processed your claim, hang up the phone etc. to dodge those calls. So, the customer service had dropped because there was no measure for that. The idea being here that the measurement has adjusted the attention of the person to just making sure they process as many claims as possible in order to meet the objective. What to do if the goals are not met? As a manager, you were trying to do something, but you cannot achieve. Some people have very strong opinions that you should take strong actions, but it does not always work because if goals were not met, maybe there was something else wrong here. Question is how much understanding you show? If you show more understanding they would think you to be an easy person or the next target set of the goal is not taken seriously and so on. Job Design (also seen as a source of motivation)To make the job such that it will be more debating to people, it should have the property of being seen by person as meaningful. And also, should be such that the person could assume some degree of responsibility and can have some degree of autonomy with respect to the decisions and also receive feedback with respect to the performance. This is the formula to make the job such that it would be a motivating job and they have done a whole bunch of studies trying to support this notion. Classic Problems that led to issues related to Job DesignIt came as result of industrialization. With industrialization, what happened in the sense, having certain technologies available, it also became necessary to have certain people that will match the properties of the technology coming to work as well as possible.  So, a lot of jobs also got divided and fragmented. This was also because of scientific management and bureaucracy. All of them wanted things that could be easier to define, if you make the jobs smaller, it would be easier to define exactly what is expected and you could measure its performance and so on. So, it reaches the point that people in factory are doing the same things over and over again. So, the jobs reach the point that it doesn’t mean anything to the person anymore. It becomes repetitive, deadly kind of boring jobs. They spent most of their times day dreaming and being in a different world. It’s very difficult to exist in that world. So, in an attempt to do something, they tried different things. One thing they tried is:Job Rotation: Meaning that if you are doing task A, you can be rotated once in a while to do task B. So, may be on the first day of the week you get to do task A and on other day task B. So, it is repetitive, but you get to switch. Does it make a difference? No, it does not. It is like you were making me do some dumb thing before, now I am doing some other dumb thing. Job Enlargement: Meaning that if before you were doing only task A, now you can do both task A and task B. So, in a sense that you have some kind of variety and not doing the same task. Question is does that make a difference? No, it does not. It’s like put down things in a row, does not really add up too much.  Job Enrichment: In Job enrichment, not only you do 2-3 different tasks, but also you have some degree of responsibility. So, in a sense you can, for example, you can order parts, you can make a decision in your work environment. It makes a lot of difference. So, if you have some control over your job situation, some decision making, it makes bigger difference. Lewin’s TheoryIntroductionLewin was a German gestalt psychologist. He came to USA in early 1930’s. Before that in University of Berlin. He came to IOWA in 1933 after that to MIT. Within a period of 15years, established huge amount of stuff. He is called total psychologist, practical psychologist, father of social psychology. He talked about Topological psych and Field theory. Theory and its application to variety of situations. Interesting thing about his line of thinking is that, he applied his theory to whole bunch of stuff. For example, motivation, conflict, attitude change, memory, problem solving, leadership, organizational change, planning. The most famous of them is organizational change. Question is what was he thinking? Gestalt psychologists had phenomenological approach. The idea that they had was to trying to get a description of what they are experiencing. Lewin was interested in human actions. But the approach is the same. So, he wants to know something about your psychological situation. So far, in this course we have said that there is something wrong with these personality theories because they don’t consider these psychological situations. Now we’ll see why his line of thinking ended up being so successful. Point of DepartureHere from where his thoughts came from are discussed. So, one thing he had problems with psychology, perhaps not unlike the kind of criticism we faced, is that you got too many static concepts. You got these static categories that you try to use to explain people’s behavior. Example, in personality you have these categories type A or type B. These static categories are supposed to explain person’s behavior. Same is for motivation. Is it need for affiliation, people get together because I got this static category that will explain things for me. So, he thought this is not getting anywhere. He did not like that.Second thing he talked about in use of ordinary language that we do, we have added values that get added to these concepts. For example, somebody might say that need for achievement is good. Like to increase need for achievement for everybody. Or need for power is bad, people get nasty too much if they have too much of power. This kind of stuff from Lewin’s point is useless. It does not help in understanding anything. He had an interesting analogy with physics. He wrote an interesting paper called Aristotelian vs Galilean Modes of Thought. What he does here is that if you go back and see physics, as a theory, what happens in physics is for example if you go back to Greeks, Greeks had a exponation of objects and their movements in terms of these static categories. Example, they would classify objects in two parts. One part would be the objects they call as heavenly. These tend to go up like smoke or gases and again value is added heaven is up somewhere. Why is heaven up? There are earthly objects that fall down. Example you have a book. You drop it. It falls down. He makes the point of saying that the progress in physics happens as a result of somebody like Galileo coming and saying, wait a minute, what’s happening with objects is that force is acting on it at every point in time. This idea to go up and down does not make sense. What we need to do is account the object for all forces acting on it at every point of time. Another point is that he was convinced that one of the problems in psychology is representational system. Why enlarge psychologists are still in the same mode. Their representation of system is ordinary language and language is not a very good representational system. We know that other sciences got away from language. In physics, you don’t describe motion by saying that objects seem to be going up. And coming down now. So, Newton invented calculus to describe motion. He had the idea that psychologists need to have different kind of representational system than just kind of static categories, words with values, and to explain the stuff. His question was how do I explain human actions? After this investigation on studies, he came up with the idea that topology is the appropriate way to represent human situations. What is topology? It is the area of mathematics that does not deal with any Euclidian properties other than things touching each other. So, imagine if you draw a triangle connected to a square and a circle, and then put it all on a rubber sheet, and then stress the rubber sheet in any direction you would like, you will destroy all Euclidian properties such as size, triangular properties etc. All that remains, objects that are connected to each other, areas that are connected to each other or not connected to each other. So basically, representation of systems which deals with connectivity of things is topology. He does not use all the properties of topology but he uses some properties of topology. Then he starts talking about ways to represent somebody’s immediate psychological situation. He uses the terminology that he used called as Life Space. So, the story about Lewin that wherever he went, whenever anybody ask him a question, he would draw an egg on board and he would have a person there with regions and so on and so forth. So now we see what he is doing here. The equation he got is that behavior is always function of the person and not personality. Person because person brings a past with her and environment. When you combine the two, then you have the psychological situation. So right away you see psychological situation is something that changes all the time, and also the environment is accounted for too. Notice, in many other theories discussed, there is no environment. There is just person with their motivation, person with their personality. So, he thinks environment and the person both. Now let’s take a look at representation of system and how he does this. The idea is that, this is how you see your immediate psychological situation. That’s what he is after. Same question when we had circles, what did you see. So, he likes to represent your experience of your immediate psychological situation. That’s what he is after. How do you see your immediate psychological situation? Structural PropertiesFirst of all, notice, there are speedax the person. It’s not too Far from what has happened already. So, these kind of stuff is yet to happen. So here the interesting question is, in your immediate psychological situation, how far off the past is represented?  How far into future is represented in your immediate situation? Next thing he realizes is that each little region he draws, he is trying to make the point that shape doesn’t matter because he does not feel Euclidean geometry reflects these regions. The point is you are always in some region of activity. Region of Activity: Your life space is made up of region of activity means you are always doing something. Sometimes, you ask people, what are you doing and they say nothing. They don’t mean nothing. Either they don’t want to tell you or they don’t know themselves what they are doing. But they do something. When we were doing Lewin’s theory of learning, the idea was that you enter a region of activity driving a car, and if you don’t know, you don’t know the parts for it. And when you learn the parts, this the part to use the break. There can be little sub-regions in their developing. But if somebody asks you what you are doing, you will say learning to drive a car. Any situation you are in, you are always doing something. It could be sitting in the lecture, and trying to figure out what Lewin is saying or I am too tired and checking my messages on the phone. So, the point is, in order, for me to understand what is happening with somebody, I have to understand in what region of activity they are in. There is no other way of doing it other than knowing what are you doing. When you got a region of activity, it’s not everything is included in it. Somehow, our capacity does not allow us to have region of activity for the entire range. You cannot say, I am starting in the morning, and I am in same life space. Life space changes all the time depending on what region you are in. Connection between the regions is the boundaries. Significance of the boundary is that some boundaries are thin that the region can get easily connected or if there is tension, it can get spread to the other. And some are so thick that it keeps it separate. So, if you are in a given region of activity, the adjacent regions could be other regions that are available to you. For example, your home and you are studying for an exam. So, you could be in the region of activity for studying for an exam of MSCI 603. That region could itself have sub-regions like now I am doing this class of problems, go over my notes, do this example in class etc. So, you somehow organize that there are sub-parts to it. But at the time when you are doing your study, there could be certain adjacent regions like getting a snack. So, from the region of activity of studying for optimization, you can move to the region of activity of prepare a snack for myself. That region is available to you. You can move to that region. There could be another region of activity that I am taking a break and checking my messages. That could be another region of activity that is available to you. So, in a sense there is not only your region of activity but other region of activity that you can move to. Different people organize it differently. It is unique to the person. For example, I GET UP IN THE MORNING AND GETS INTO THE REGION OF ACTIVITY OF getting ready to go to the work. Getting ready for me has parts such as washing up, preparing cup of coffee. These are all sub-regions of getting ready. I put my clothes on and enter to next region of activity called driving to work. So, that is my life space in the morning. Viewed psychologically as a unit: When you called something as a region of activity, it means psychologically you see as a unit. For example, getting ready to go to work. For me that is the region of activity. Another example of region of activity could be I am getting ready for an exam, or I am listening to a lecture, I am sending message on my phone. Sub-Region as perceived sub-unit within the region: Region of activity will have sub-regions to it. For example, getting ready for work for me, it has getting dressed, washing off, having breakfast. So, there are at least three recognizable regions. Noticing each of those, there are sub-parts. Having breakfast means, make some coffee, making toast. Having toast, I have a sub region of putting butter and jam and then have a sub-region of eating it. He is trying to keep a count of exactly how the behavior happens. Each region is connected to other region: As in the diagram you see, the basic topology thing is connectivity. So, I see this region of activity of getting ready to go to work as connected to other region of activity of driving to university. That has its own property. In winters, I have to clean the car, make sure there is no snow on the windows. During other days, I don’t have to do this. Then I park my car and come to office. And then my day starts and I have a structure to my day whether I have to give a lecture, I have meetings and so on. So, I kind of look at here and see what are the regions of activity I have to go through. Psychological distance or path as the number of regions and their internal properties between two regions. If somebody’s region of activity is goal, and they all are in a sense, because anything you would like to do, you’ll be political. Like my goals is to go to university in the morning. Then there is a path to the goal. The path is composed of these regions of activity. So. My psychological distance to the goal is measured in terms of the number of regions of activity I have to go through in order to get. So there is a path to the goal, whatever goal you have got and then there are regions in order to get this. For example, If you want to do well in the exam, it means reading the material, understanding the notes, memorizing possibly somethings and then practicing it. So, you go through all these regions of activities. These all lead to the region of activity saying I am ready now. I have achieved my goal of being ready for the exam. Life space continuously changes as we move. As you move through these regions of activity, he calls that locomotion. Locomotion: Movement in the life space. It means moving through regions of activity psychologically. For example, there is locomotion as I go through getting ready. My toast is ready, get dressed and so on. Interesting point is you don’t have to physically move. You can psychologically move and locomote. For example, you are working on a puzzle and can’t solve it initially and you are stuck. Finally, you discover a solution to it. So, psychologically you moved to the goal region but physically you did not move. Another example, imagine there is a concert you would like to see and you go early and buy a ticket and box office has not open yet. There are 20 people ahead you in the queue. Before the box office opens, another 100 people show up behind you. Now you feel that you are at the beginning of the line. You did not physically move but psychologically the length of the line became so big that now you feel that you are at the beginning. You have locomotion to the beginning of the line. Whereas previously you felt at the end of the line. Dynamic Properties: Point that lewin makes is that region of activity has valence to them. By valence he means relative positive and negative value of a region of activity at a given point in time. Valence is never constant. For example, if you are hungry, then region of activity is attractive. It has a valence to it. After you finish eating, it has no valence to you. You are sick of food. Don’t want to eat anymore. The positive could become negative if you are forced to eat more. Valence got consumed. It is done. Lewin talks about these regions of activity that has valence to them, they set up FORCE fields. This is where field theory comes from. Positive Valence: It will set up a force field of attraction in your life space. So, you are attracted to move towards that region. Negative Valence: It pushes you away. So, it is a force field of pushing you away. So, for positive we used eating as an example. For negative valence, if you eat more you begin to feel bad. Another example, you have to interact with somebody you don’t like. That is a negative region. You are trying to avoid the person. Induced Forces: Externally exerted on the person to move towards a region of activity. It is not the valence of the region but somebody else is pushing you. For example, your boss wants you to do something. You did not choose to do. Your boss wanted it. But if you are asked to do it, there is a force acting on you to move to a region of activity of prepare a report under this item. Force and Distance. Valence itself is the relative attractiveness of something at a given point in time. It changes. The life spaces are always changing both structurally and dynamically. There is nothing stable about it. Lewin has got the following idea with respect to positive and negative forces. Valence set ups the force. It is the scalar value. It sets up the force field. The forces are the one you feel are acting on you. Positive Valence: If the force is positive, meaning positive valence, you will feel that from much longer distance. So, if you are moving towards some region of activity that you really like, then you would feel that positivity, the force towards that region such as you have taken a vacation and going to a new place, you expect this to be a positive region of activity visiting some place you have never been before. Negative Valence: Negative region of activity you only feel it when you are very close to it. If you have sufficient distance from it you won’t feel it. Applications of Lewin’s Theory