Responsibility is the gutter sweeper of motivation

Motivation and responsbility.  Are the two intertwined, or completely different? If one is motivated do they take responsibility more seriously, or do they feel less responsibility and more intrinsic motivation.  Is responsibility an “understanding” of things that must be done or an extrinsic motivator?

responsibility - The state or fact of having a duty to deal with something or of having control over someone.

motivation - The reason or reasons one has for acting or behaving in a particular way.

(Oxford American Dictionaries)

As I have come to see it, responsibility is a form of motivation, but one of the lowest.  By no means am I implying  that I want no responsibility, but what I know is that I achieve more when my motivation amounts to more than a duty.

In the office today I constantly hear that we have a responsibility to make the company profitable and a succe.  As the person in charge of the operations I not only want to remove the word responsibility, but replace it with athe much more powerful intrinsic motivation.  I believe in a sressed economy we as managers and leaders have the “responsibility” (one I take gladly) to remove extra stress from our employees.  Think about how wel you work with things piled up and weighing on you.  I work hard in those situations, but only enough to avoid impending doom.  Once disaster has been avoided I try to find other “stress free” methods of motivating myself.

With that I conclude that managers need to take the time to replace responsibility with better forms of motivation.  I believe that by doing this our businesses will achieve more and our employees will be happier.  My only questions are: Doe not feeling responsible leave you vulnerable in stressful times? Can an approach like this scale to large copmanies?  Am I looking through rose colored glasses?  I think not.