Motivation And Reflection: The Four Principles Of Persuasion

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According to McLean (2010), persuasion is an act or process of appealing to reason or presenting arguments to induce your audience to do something or to change their beliefs or values. Motivation, on the other hand, is the force or stimulus to influence your audience to consider your arguments and adopt your position (McLean, 2010). In short, persuasion is the process and motivation is the stimulus to bring about the change. For example, when you want to pitch a sale, persuasion involves presenting good features associated with the products, potential profit, offering good customer service and analysis of current market demand. Motivation, in contrast, involves incentives like commission, profit, flexible payment term and negotiability in
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We will be better off, of course, with the overtime payments since the management tried to cut the corner with the fixed raise. I felt so unfair that I started to persuade all my coworkers to demand for the right payment that we deserved. I used four principles of persuasion: scarcity, authority and consensus. I started off with a few of my best coworkers. I argued with them that if we do not act now (applying principle of scarcity here), our chance of getting a fair pay in the future will get rare. There is no guarantee that the management will pull off another stunt like this one in the near future, if they discovered that we will take whatever they give. Some supported, but some were too reluctant to react in fear of getting layoff.
This is where the principle of authority came in. I restated what our supervisor has mentioned in the meeting, “the company is growing, always in need of talents and it takes time to train new employee.” Therefore, we are very unlikely to get fired. As the amount of supporters increase, it gets easier to persuade since the principle of consensus kicks in, where individual follow the lead of the group. However, not all the 6 principles were applied to the process of persuasion.

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