The concept of personality orientation and motivation of activity

Focus and motivation

The orientation of personality in psychology in terms of motivation to achieve is considered from various points of view. Some psychiatrists, by defining motivation, mean mental urges to action, others - a specific reason that encourages action.

There is an opinion that a motive is a need formed in a person to satisfy significant interests. Of all the theories of motivation, a general definition of the concept can be distinguished. Motivation is an internal stimulus of an individual that encourages activity aimed at satisfying a specific need.

The needs themselves can be different, from simple, biological, to sublime social.

American doctor of psychology Maslow developed a structure that includes five basic needs in a strict hierarchy:

Physiological needs are the most powerful and urgent of all. Until a person satisfies the basic need for food, comfort, and a healthy balance in the body, he cannot set higher goals.
Security - this need comes to the fore after the first essential need is provided. Personal security is not only protection from enemy attack, which may arise in rare cases of hostilities or outside aggression. Household safety involves the desire for stability and legislative protection. This concept also means freedom from chaos and uncertainty about the future. In everyday life, this desire manifests itself in the desire to get a stable job and create a reserve of funds for various unforeseen cases.
The need for love and affection includes the desire for communication, friendship, and love relationships. This desire is always inherent in a person, but is especially activated after the first two needs are satisfied.
The need for recognition includes personal growth and the desire to gain respect in society. A person needs to feel needed and useful to others. The absence of such a feeling leads to weakness and self-doubt. Loss in this matter leads to depression and neurological diseases.
Self-actualization is the search for one’s essence, one’s “I”, the desire to idealize oneself. It can manifest itself in different ways, depending on your personal interests. Some people strive for sensational scientific discoveries, while others want to become an ideal parent or housewife. The need for a high form of self-realization appears at the highest stage of development, when all previous needs are satisfied.

Any activity carried out by a person is greatly influenced by motivation factors.

External motivation encourages you to perform some task in order to express yourself in public opinion, in order to receive approval and praise.
Internal motivation is a much stronger mechanism for the movement of the individual. The result is not achieved for fame or approval, but to satisfy personal interest. It is internal motivation that encourages discoveries and new inventions.
Awareness is a correct understanding of the need for the process and the expected result. Carrying out incomprehensible tasks and unconscious activities creates boredom and lack of interest in such work.
Interests and satisfaction of needs. When an activity brings excitement, satisfaction and elation to a person, the result is very high. If at the same time the person also receives satisfaction of his needs, recognition, his desire to find the meaning of life intensifies. In case of dissatisfaction of spiritual and personal interests in a person, doubt in his abilities increases, his aspirations and energy are suppressed.

Needs

One of the main sources of human activity is needs. Need expresses a person’s dependence on certain conditions of existence. The specificity of human needs is determined by the social nature of human activity, especially labor.

Need is a state of a person that arises in conditions of need for objects necessary for his existence and development, and serves as a source of his activity.

In this context, the process of satisfying a need acts as an active, purposeful process of a person’s coping with a form of activity that is determined by the level of social development. Human needs have a social and personal nature, which is expressed in the fact that to satisfy needs a person uses those methods and techniques that have historically developed in a given social environment and are necessary under certain conditions.

Needs may take a different form.

For example, they may be perceived differently by people. In this case they take the form of attraction. This is an incentive to activity, which is an undifferentiated, insufficiently realized need.

Attraction is the primary emotional manifestation of a human need for something, a motivation not yet mediated by conscious goal setting. In Russian psychology, attraction is considered as a stage in the formation of a motive for behavior, that is, it acts as a transitory phenomenon: the need presented in it either passes or is realized in the form of a specific desire. Thus, attractions are determined not only by biological, but also by social factors. Moreover, in home economics the prevailing opinion is that in a person with developed consciousness, drives do not play the main role as motives of behavior, but serve as “building material” for conscious motives. On the other hand, drive is one of the central concepts of psychoanalysis, which gives it a leading role in the activity and regulation of human behavior.

Another unconscious impulse is attitude. This is an unconscious state of a person’s readiness for a certain form of activity.

This may be readiness for activity, for behavior, for understanding or interpreting something. Attitudes manifested in the interpretation of events, phenomena and facts can take the form of prejudices or stereotypes.

Attitudes usually develop as a result of repeated situations in which a person reacts in a certain way.

D.N. Uznadze developed a theory according to which the needs and situations that arise during a meeting determine the direction of the subject's behavior until the behavior encounters certain obstacles. In these cases, unconscious behavior is interrupted and conscious mechanisms of objectification come into play. Obstacles that arise are noticed and realized. After consciously finding a new way of regulation, control over behavior is again exercised through unconscious attitudes. This continuous transfer of control ensures a harmonious and more economical interaction between the conscious and unconscious.

Classification of needs

In the history of psychology, there have been attempts to reduce all human needs to one - primary and basic (in the works of Freud and Adler these are libido and the “desire for power”, respectively).

At the same time, Murray's classification of needs includes more than 140 human needs.

Thomas asked himself in 1924: what are the minimum human needs? In response to his question, he listed 4: the need for security, recognition, friendship, new experiences (his answer was based on a study of prostitution among young people).

J. Peter (1938) argued that throughout human history the most frequently competing needs were: Food, freedom, sexual partners, faith (beliefs, ideals).

Motives as a factor in shaping direction

Orientation is associated with the motivational-need and cognitive sphere of the individual. The orientation of the individual, on the one hand, is determined by environmental conditions, and on the other hand, it itself determines the behavior of the individual.

In the motivational aspect, the following types of personality orientations can be distinguished:

Ideological and spiritual. The desire to understand the universe, solve issues of a universal scale, think in the direction of preserving and developing all humanity.
Individual and personal. The desire to satisfy the needs of one’s “I”, self-expression, and maintaining individuality.
Instinctive-physiological. The desire to satisfy bodily needs to preserve the species and the individual.

Based on the consideration of several approaches to the theory of personality orientation (Myasishchev and those described above), 9 types of orientation can be distinguished (figure below).

Options for personality orientation

Formation of personality orientation

Despite the differences in interpretations of personality, all approaches highlight its orientation as the leading characteristic. In different concepts, this characteristic is revealed in different ways: as a “dynamic tendency” (S. L. Rubinshtein), “meaning-forming motive” (A. N. Leontyev), “dominant attitude” (V. N. Myasishchev), “main life orientation” (B. G. Ananyev), “dynamic organization of the essential forces of man” (A. S. Prangishvili). Thus, orientation acts as a generalized property of a personality that determines its psychological make-up.

The set of stable motives that guide a person’s activity and are relatively independent of given situations is called the orientation of a person’s personality. It is always socially conditioned and formed through education.

The focus includes several related forms, which we will briefly describe:

attraction is the most primitive biological form of orientation;
desire - a conscious need and attraction to something specific;
desire - arises when a volitional component is included in the structure of desire;
interest is a cognitive form of focus on objects;
inclination - occurs when a volitional component is included in interest;
ideal is the objective goal of inclination, concretized in an image or representation;
worldview - a system of ethical, aesthetic, philosophical, natural science and other views on the world around us;
conviction - the highest form of orientation - is a system of personal motives that encourages it to act in accordance with its views, principles, and worldview.

The main role of personality orientation belongs to conscious motives. And the function of motive is to give direction to the activity being performed. It is not enough to just launch activities and constantly “feed”. It needs to be carried out and implemented. Another function of motive is meaning formation, thanks to which the concept of motive reaches the personal level. Meaning is the answer to the question: why? Why does a person need the object of his needs and activities? Man is a meaning-oriented creature. If there is no convincing personal meaning, then the motive as an incentive will not work. There will be no activity and an unrealized motive will remain.

It should be noted that the need-motivational sphere characterizes the orientation of the individual only partially, being its foundation, basis. On this foundation, the life goals of the individual are formed. In view of this, it is necessary to distinguish between the purpose of activity and the purpose of life. A person performs many diverse activities throughout his life, each of which realizes its own goal. A life goal acts as a combination of all private goals associated with individual activities. The level of achievement of an individual is associated with life goals. Awareness of not only the goal, but also reality is considered by a person as a personal perspective.

A state of frustration, depression, opposite to the experiences characteristic of a person aware of the prospect, is called frustration. It occurs in cases where a person, on the way to achieving a goal, encounters really insurmountable obstacles, barriers, or when they are perceived as such.

Orientation as a system

Direction as a system of relationships of an individual to reality represents the following triad: attitude towards other people as members of a team; attitude towards work and results, products of labor; attitude towards oneself, one’s personality. It includes the drives, desires, interests, inclinations, ideals, views, beliefs of a person, his worldview, character traits and self-esteem. In other words, the orientation of a person’s personality is a set of stable motives that orient the activity of the individual and are relatively independent of existing situations.

In accordance with this, a distinction is made between interaction orientation (ID), business task orientation (TO) and personal orientation or self-direction (NS).

Determining the orientation of the personality of a particular employee is of utmost importance for the practice of personnel work, since the effectiveness of the selection, placement and further use of personnel in production depends on this. This position will become clear after familiarization with the characteristics of various types of orientation.

Focus on interaction

Focus on interaction

occurs when an employee’s actions are determined by his need for communication and the desire to maintain good relationships with fellow workers. As a rule, people with a focus on interaction yield to group pressure and do not take leadership. Such an employee shows interest in joint activities, even if this does not contribute to the successful completion of the task, and his actual assistance is minimal. He is interested not so much in the final result of the activity as in the joint activity itself.

Business orientation

Business orientation

reflects the predominance of motives associated with the group achieving its goal. An employee with this orientation takes leadership into his own hands. When it comes to choosing a task, he tries to reasonably prove his point of view, which is considered useful for completing the task. Typically, such an employee strives to cooperate with the team and achieve the greatest productivity in the work of his subordinates. It is characterized by passion for mastering new skills and abilities, the process of activity itself, and the desire for knowledge.

Personal focus

Personal focus

creates a predominance of motives for one’s own well-being, the desire for personal primacy and prestige. Such a person is most often busy with himself, his feelings, experiences and little reacts to the needs of the people around him, ignores employees or the work that he must do. In work he sees, first of all, an opportunity to satisfy his aspirations, regardless of the interests of other employees and colleagues.

Directional qualities

The level of orientation
is the social significance of a person’s orientation (his beliefs and worldview).
The breadth of focus
characterizes the range of interests of an individual. It should be remembered that broad focus does not mean scatteredness and amateurism in all types of activities in which a person is engaged. Among a wide range of interests, there must be a central, main interest aimed at the professional activities performed by the individual.
The intensity of the focus
is related to its emotional coloring. It can have a wide range of expression, ranging from vague, fuzzy drives through conscious desires and active aspirations to deep convictions.
Stability of orientation
is characterized by the duration and preservation of impulses throughout life. This quality of personality orientation is associated, first of all, with the volitional characteristics of the individual: perseverance, determination.
The effectiveness of the individual’s orientation
determines the activity of realizing the goals of the orientation in activity.

Functions

Guide: indicates the path, where to go, what to strive for, how to develop. The problem is that many motives and needs remain unconscious, but even in this form they can influence a person’s choices and actions;
Encouraging: inspires, provokes active activity of the individual. After all, it is very difficult to force a person to do something that he does not want. And the results of such work will be sad;
The regulatory function is closely related to prioritization. What is more important in a given situation has greater significance;
Meaning-forming: gives value to what a person does.

What is creativity?

Creativity is any human activity (spiritual or material), as a result of which something qualitatively new appears, which did not exist before and has value for the whole society. The main criterion of creative activity is the uniqueness of its result.

The mechanism of creative activity:

Combining existing methods and methods of activity in another option.
The presence of imagination , that is, a person’s ability to create sensory and mental images in his mind.
Fantasy , capable of creating bright, unusual images.
Intuition is knowledge, foresight, the appearance of which cannot be explained.

The difference between human activity and animal activity

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