Changing un-human models of motivation

I recently interviewed professor Manuel Guillén, the author of Motivation in Organisations: Searching for a Meaningful Work-Life Balance, edited by Routledge as part of its Humanistic Management series. By his first words “the current motivation models in business education have been quite un-human for the last several decades, and are leading to wrong and harmful practices in many organizations,” I realized that our conversation was going to be extremely promising and inspiring.

He explained that he had written the book because he became aware of his own mistaken teaching of incomplete and limited theories of motivation. This led him to go deeper into the foundations of this relevant issue in our daily lives. Certainly, the new approach to human motivation that he proposes debunks some of the myths that have been presenting a vision of the human being as almost completely selfish, materialistic and non-transcendent with an inevitable consequence: fostering an equally dehumanized and negative conception of the meaning of work.