Understanding microfinance loan officers' motivations

Motivation represents an important topic for organizational studies. Particularly, determining the best solution to motivate workers has always been an essential concern for all types of organization. A motivated staff would be more willing to make effort to enhance its productivity and its performance. While until the mid-20th century, researchers thought that employees can only be motivated by external drivers like rewards or punishments, this view has completely changed with the development of the human relations movement with authors like Herzberg or McGregor. Those ones explain that workers can also be motivated by the content of the work itself. The self-determination theory, developed by Ryan and Deci (2000), argues that intrinsic motivation has the highest impact on productivity compared to extrinsic motivation. However, we can ask us whether those findings can apply for all sectors as there is some evidence that motivations can differ according to the sector, particularly between the for-profit and non-profit sectors.
In this study, we have chosen to focus on a particular sector which belongs either to the non-profit or to the for-profit sector: the microfinance sector. Microfinance institutions, whether commercial banks or NGOs, need to be sustainable or even profitable. However, loan officers, even if they are only motivated by the social aspect of their tasks, are forced to be efficient as they play an important role in the financial performance of their MFI. Therefore, it seems to be essential for MFIs to develop adequate motivation mechanisms for those employees so that they increase their efficiency at work.
As loan officer's management in microfinance is poorly documented in the literature, this research aims to have a better understanding of the drivers that push loan officers of a large institution in Senegal to improve their performance. After having conducted thirty semi-directed interviews, our results show that the desire of recognition, of promotion and of personal accomplishment represent intrinsic motivations for this kind of employees. Moreover, this study also shows that not receiving financial incentives do not prevent them to be efficient. Another important result is that two types of intrinsic motivation seem to have a positive impact on performance: love of work and passion. However, sometimes, loan officers who declare being motivated by their work, also explain that it will be difficult to obtain the desired results if the working conditions are not satisfying.
Based on those interviews, a framework will be presented in order to see where motivations are coming from.