Fundamental Motives and Business Decisions

You walk into a crowded negotiation room. Who do you notice? Who do you later remember? Do you try to fit in, or attempt to stand out from others? Do you accept the first reasonable offer, or do you balk at that offer? The answers likely depend critically on your current motivational state. Emerging evidence shows that a person’s behavior differs—sometimes dramatically—depending on whether that person is concerned with personal safety, romance, status-seeking, affiliation, or is motivated to attain some other evolutionary important goal. A growing body of research suggests that certain motivational states are considered “fundamental” in a biological sense because of their implications for evolutionary fitness. In this chapter, we overview the fundamental motives framework, highlighting its applications for business decision-making in marketing, management, entrepreneurship, and finance. We then review recent research that has used this approach to study specific business-relevant topics such as risky financial decision-making, negotiation, advertising, and innovation. Bridging evolutionary biology and business, the fundamental motives framework not only provides novel insights into workplace decisions, but also holds promise as a powerful approach for understanding how behavior in business contexts connects to other aspects of human and animal behavior.