In 1964, Victor Vroom gave management a formula. Expectancy Theory said motivation was the product of three beliefs: that effort leads to performance, that performance leads to reward, and that the reward is worth having. Make the outcomes clear, make the rewards attractive, and people will show up and deliver.
Sixty years on, most performance management systems are still built on exactly this logic. Set the KPIs. Attach the bonus. Dangle the promotion. Assume rational actors will do the math and respond.
It’s a tidy model. It’s also wrong, incomplete and doing real damage.
The model that explains the burnout
Walk through any large organisation and you’ll find people who did everything the model asked of them. They hit the numbers. They delivered the outcomes. And they got looked over anyway — for the promotion, the bonus, the role — because when it actually comes time to divvy these things out, far more is in play than measured output. Communication style. EQ. The ability to connect, to lead, to carry a room. Things organisations struggle to define, let alone measure, and which Expectancy Theory’s neat effort-to-reward chain simply doesn’t see.
The result is predictable: people work harder inside a system that quietly rewards things the system never told them mattered. That gap, between the stated contract and the real one, is a burnout engine. Not the only one, but a big one. When effort demonstrably doesn’t convert to reward the way the model promised, people don’t just lose motivation. They lose trust.
The deeper flaw is what the model assumes about human beings. It treats us as interchangeable calculators of extrinsic value. But work isn’t just output for reward. Work is meaning, agency, capability, connection. Viktor Frankl made the point from the most extreme circumstances imaginable in “Man’s Search for Meaning”: humans can endure almost anything when the struggle means something, and wither when it doesn’t. No bonus scheme has ever manufactured that.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi got at it from another angle with flow, the state where challenge sits just ahead of skill, and the activity becomes intrinsically rewarding in itself. Not because of the carrot at the end, but because of the doing. Flow doesn’t appear anywhere in Vroom’s equation. Neither does identity, life stage, or the fact that what motivates a 24-year-old building a career is nothing like what motivates a 54-year-old protecting one.
Expectancy Theory isn’t useless. Clarity about outcomes matters. But as an operating system for human motivation, it’s dated, one-dimensional, and, six decades of organisational psychology later, indefensible as the default. Yet the performance systems haven’t largely moved on. We still act as if enough carrots and sticks will sort it out.
What this means in financial services
Here’s where it gets interesting for us, because Moroku’s mission is making financial wellness a strategic pillar for financial services organisations, and the same broken assumption about motivation shows up everywhere we look. Not only is there high levels of burnout and disillusionment with staff but so too with customers.
Look at how most institutions try to change customer financial behaviour. Cashback offers. Points. Rate incentives. A bonus interest rate if you make five deposits this month. It’s Expectancy Theory with a banking licence: dangle the reward, clarify the outcome, expect the behaviour. And it produces the same result it produces in the workplace — short bursts of compliance, no lasting change, and disengagement the moment the incentive stops. Nearly half of banking customers say their institution doesn’t reward them at all, and most are financially stressed not for lack of access to banking, but because nobody is helping them build better financial behaviours.
If people were motivated the way Vroom’s model assumes, budgeting apps would work. They don’t. Most are abandoned by week two, because the model of the human underneath them is wrong.
Building for how people are actually motivated
This is the problem Moroku Odyssey was built to solve, and why it looks nothing like a rewards program.
Odyssey starts from the premise the last sixty years of motivational science actually supports: people are motivated very differently, and dynamically. Our archetype model, which borrows from Jung’s work on psychological types and Richard Bartle’s player taxonomy doesn’t put customers in a box. Every customer holds a continuous blend across eight archetype dimensions, inferred from real transaction behaviour and updated constantly. The dominant archetype shapes the missions they’re offered. The secondary shapes the tone. The weakest becomes the growth edge. Combined with league, tier and level structures across seven money systems, that produces over 1.4 billion distinct player positions, a different and responsive journey for genuinely different people, at genuinely different life stages.
We also borrow heavily from Csikszentmihalyi on flow: missions are calibrated so the challenge sits just a little ahead of the customer’s current skill. Every unlock is earned. Every level is a real milestone built from real behaviour. The reward is increasingly the thing itself; momentum, capability, identity shift, not a carrot bolted on the outside.
That’s the full stack that Expectancy Theory misses, systematised:
- agency (customers choose and are prepared or their missions),
- capability (skills and content build progressively),
- intrinsic reward (real money progress they can see in their lives, not sprayed points), and
- meaning (the journey is about becoming someone who is genuinely good and feels good with money — which, per Frankl, is a struggle worth having).
The hard part was never knowing that motivation is nuanced. Psychology settled that decades ago. The hard part is systematising the nuance, running it continuously, at scale, on live transaction data, with AI that’s bounded, governed and auditable. That’s the work.
For institutions who recognise the problem but aren’t sure where to begin, this is exactly what our On Ramp engagement is for: a fixed-scope, twelve-week program that takes you from uncertainty to a user-tested prototype and roadmap, with game-based engagement architecture, personas, journeys and win states designed in from the start, not sprinkled on at the end.
Because the lesson cuts both ways. If your performance management system is still running on 1964 assumptions, you’re burning out the people who trusted it. And if your customer engagement strategy is still running on the same assumptions, you’re burning through incentive budgets to buy behaviour that evaporates the moment you stop paying for it.
People are more complicated than carrots and sticks. That’s not a design problem. It’s the design brief.