Goals of research
The overal goal of our thesis is to show that an evolutionary psychology based method to measure motivation is a reliable and valid method to predict human behaviour acting within team management and can be applied for optimising team structure for organisations.
This overal goal can be divided in a number of coherent scientific subgoals:
- To demonstrate that an evolutionary theory based approach could provide a sound theoretical basis and thereby a clear starting point for the determination of variables. This may seem strange but Kline (2000) concludes after thorough research that there is (still) no clear agreement in the area of motivation and interest testing as to what the theoretical basis should be.
- To demonstrate that the underlying adaptive functions for human motivation (is dat een doel? eerder een middel?) can be revealed by costly signalling theory in relation to indicating individual fitness by rejecting specific attributes that are visualised in a questionnaire.
- To find a scientifically valid method to optimise team management, using the here developed instrument
- To make it scientifically justified, or at least very plausible, that our theory and the accompanying instrument, will also be relevant with respect to a wide range of human social interactions and relational behaviour.
Next to these scientfic goals, a number of aims in terms of general interest are important to mention, such as:
- To contribute to support organisations with employee selection and structuring team management. In doing so, we also aim to contribute to corporate and marketing strategies as well as enhancing employee commitment and ipso facto customer commitment.
- To be able to contribute to the development of evolutionary personality psychology in general and motivation testing in particular in a way that will further the development of evolutionary insight into the individual performance of people in modern society.
lees verder: introductie Evol.Psy.