How to demotivate your top performers: Lessons from professional cricket

Motivation is one of the most studied facets of the management of employees and team members. Countless scholarly papers, articles in magazines, and best-selling books have been written on the subject. The role of coaches in motivating successful sports teams is also a much-loved topic of popular conversation and receives considerable attention in broadcast media and the press. However, almost all of the advice on motivation is prescriptive rather than proscriptive. As far as sport is concerned, the games that get most of the attention in North America are baseball, basketball, football, and hockey, and the rest of the world seems to be soccer mad. Many nations are oblivious to the world’s second-most popular sport: cricket. We take an opposing perspective on motivation in this article: Rather than instructing how to motivate employees and team members, we suggest four ways to demotivate them. Based on a series of in-depth interviews with some of the world’s best professional cricketers, we identify coaching behavior that frustrates and angers them. We use the insights gained to suggest ways in which coaches of all kinds can demotivate. Hopefully, by understanding these behaviors, coaches and managers can strive to avoid them.