Since humans first came together to form civilisations, people have developed interests in distinctive areas of life. Commerce gave rise to merchants who saw the power in trade; the emergence of furniture, clothing and jewellery gave rise to artisans who saw the value in crafting things of beauty; healers saw a greater purpose in helping the sick; priests in the divine.
Over time, a group of researchers came to discover that there were six core interests (or values) that human beings universally tend to dedicate their careers and lives to:
What makes a person value the pursuit of knowledge over the pursuit of money? Or individual power over helping others?
Researchers generally agree that values are mostly the result of environmental conditioning. They are heavily influenced by our upbringing and particularly the first 20 years of life.
The formation process is relatively simple:
Basically, values are a set of positive or negative beliefs that determine what we like and what we dislike. Values are something we really want and so cause us to take action, or something we really want to avoid and so move away from; that means that they are the primary source of our motivations.
Eduard Spranger, a German psychologist, published the book "Types of Men" in 1928 which proposed 6 core motivators (or values) that people are universally drawn towards. After extensive research, a company called Target Training International (TTI) revised and updated Spranger's theory, which was developed into a psychometric assessment called the Workplace Motivators profile. ).
While the Motivators profile still exists, we now offer an updated version called Driving Forces. The original Motivators profile focused on six core human motivators, whereas Driving Forces expands this to twelve factors.