Motivational Theory - Case Study Example

Motivational Theory: Case Study Example
Motivation is often best explained by reference to real examples. The

'Hellespont Swim' is a true story of unusual and remarkable personal
achievement which demonstrates several aspects of motivational theory, plus
various other principles of effective management and performance.
Use this case study as a learning exercise. Ask people to read and comment on
the story from a motivational and performance perspective:
1. What motivational forces and factors can you see in this case study?
What motivational theories and concepts are illustrated in the account -
for example, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs , McGregor's X-Y
Theory , McClelland's motivational theory and the ideas of Adams,
Bloom, Handy and Herzberg
2. Also, what can you say about the story from the perspectives of
teamwork, team-building, communications, planning and preparation,
capability and potential, targets and goals, inspiration and role-models,
skills/knowledge/attitude factors, humour and fun, project management,
encouragement and coaching, project support, achievement and
recognition, evaluation and measurement?
3. What aspects of the experience could have been improved or done
differently and why?
4. What other aspects of personal motivation and achievement can you see
in the story?
5. How might lessons and examples within this story be transferred to
yourself, to employees and organisations?
The contribution of this article by writer and adventurer Charles Foster is

gratefully acknowledged.
The Hellespont Swim

With a shout and a prayer and a curse, we leapt at dawn from a boat into the
water of the Dardanelles and started to swim from Europe to Asia.
It had all started in London over the umpteenth bottle of Bulgarian red. For a long
time, I said, I had wanted to swim the Hellespont - the narrow channel between
the sea of Marmara and the Aegean. The Hellespont hit the mythological
headlines a long time ago. Leander, who lived on the Asian side, had the
misfortune to fall in love with Hero, who lived in Europe. The course of true love
did not run smoothly. Geography was not on their side. The Hellespont has a
nasty current ripping down the middle of it and a reputation for chewing up ships.
And religion didn't help, either. Hero was a priestess of Aphrodite, and sworn to
perpetual celibacy. So their meetings had to be covert and at night. Just as in most
relationships, ancient and modern, the bloke did all the travelling. She held out a
lantern, and he swam each night towards it. They copulated all night, and he then
swam back. One night the wind blew out the lantern and that current took
Leander out into the Aegean. He never returned. The heartbroken Hero had the
decency to hurl herself into the Hellespont and the myth was born.
The Hellespont was assumed to be swimmable only by gods. But then, after one
failed attempt, Byron did it, and it has been done from time to time since. We
should have a go, I said to Steve and David (fat, pale, thirty-something pie-eaters
like me). If a club-footed syphilitic like Byron could do it, so could we. The
Bulgarian red spoke, and it said yes, and before it could withdraw I had put a
deposit down and committed us to the swim.
The paperwork is nightmarish. The European shore, at Abydos, is inside a

restricted military zone, and rumoured to be mined. The Hellespont itself is a
marine motorway, carrying a huge volume of traffic between the Mediterranean
and Istanbul and the Black Sea. The Turkish authorities don't like the idea of
Englishmen's bodies choking the propellers of container ships, and insist on lots of
permits. The man to sort all this out is Huseyin, whose long, white wispy hair
makes him look like a mammalian anemone. He has organised most of the
successful attempts on the Hellespont in recent years.
So we trained a bit. We lumbered over to municipal pools and floundered up and

down. We never seemed to get faster or less tired, but we did seem to get a bit
thinner. It was difficult to motivate ourselves because there really didn't seem to
be much connection between the heated human soup of the public baths and the
swimming of a major shipping lane. But the calendar ticked on, and we got on the
plane, still a bit bemused, and found ourselves somehow in Cannakale.
Huseyin met us, mapped out the route (head-on into the current for a mile, and
then a gentle swim home), made us eat moussaka and vitamin pills, told the
barman not to serve us any beer, and booked our early morning calls for us so
that we had no excuses.
With the dawn came renewed incredulity at our stupidity. It was cold, there were
some vast tankers plying up and down, and the rip current at the centre of the
channel was throwing up white horses that looked like Grand National winners.
Also, Huseyin had told the press about the attempt. A launch full of photographers
was following us, and failure would not be private.
As the sun came up our clothes came off. The lads on the boat rubbed us down
with axle grease and with a great scream we committed our bodies to the deep.
An underwater gust rolled me over, and from then on, the channel churned me
emetically around.
As soon as I hit the sea I was on my own. Yes, somewhere behind me was the
grumbling of the escort boat's engine, and somewhere way ahead Steve was
burrowing efficiently towards fame, and somewhere to one side David was
grunting and swallowing water, but I was in my own tiny world, hedged in by
waves and the sides of my goggles, vaguely conscious that stretching down and
down below was the vertiginous green of the channel. It was a lonely and
disoriented business. If I stretched my neck up I could sometimes see the hills of
Asia, but there was never any sense of movement. From the boat there were
occasional shouted hints and words of encouragement like: "Sewage slick ahead:
keep your mouth shut", and "This is where blood started to pour from the
Ukrainian's ears."
Steve had set purposefully off with a front crawl of the sort he'd only ever used
before to part crowds to get to the bar. I had thought that the waves would
prevent really effective crawl, and had trained mostly using breaststroke. This was
a stupid mistake. Breaststroke has a phase when there is little forward motion.
When you are swimming into the current this means that you lose half of
whatever distance the stroke has won you. It took me fifty minutes to realise this
and change to a continuously propulsive front crawl, by which time Steve was
almost in the arms of his very own Hero.
Rhythm is everything, the good swimmers say, and rhythm is hard when the sea
which surges around you has no sense of it. You seem to make no progress at all.
There was a vague sense of pressure against my chest as I ploughed into that
current, but there was no visible fixed point against which I could measure any
progress. Failure, though, was unthinkable. Too many people knew about this
venture. If I didn't reach Sestos I could never return home. So I kept striking
metronomically away and then, suddenly, the current eased. A shout from the
boat told me to turn up the strait. That was the indication I had been waiting for.
It meant that the back of the Hellespont was broken. I began to realise that there
was no need to keep a lot in reserve any more.
From then it all happened quickly. There was a wisp of green weed at the bottom,
and a stone appearing out of the gloom. Looking up, I could see the crenellations
of Sestos castle on the gorse covered hills of Asia. A thousand miles away there
was some cheering as the press men hauled Steve out of the shallows and asked
him what on earth he had done this for. And then suddenly we were there too,
stumbling out into towels and a posse of television camera men. They asked us for
comment. David, mentally enfeebled by the effort, gave them an elaborate and
deeply embarrassing pun about Leander's libido based on 'breaststroke' and
'breast stroking' which, laboriously translated into Turkish, started as gibberish
and ended as filth. We ate nuts and pulled our bellies in for prime-time silly-
season Turkish TV, and drank brandy to the memory of that great hard man,
Leander, who had done this every night and back, for love, not glory.
Greek deity, it seems, is a reasonably accessible career. This is a classic swim, but
not a particularly difficult one. David and I, who both used that pathetically
inefficient breaststroke over the two miles, did it in about eighty minutes. Steve,
who is a regular ten pints and three bags of chips man, wallowed home in under
an hour. The rumours we had heard about hammerhead sharks, giant squid and
solid rafts of jellyfish were unfounded. The rumours about diarrhoea and vomiting,
however, are completely true. Those denizens of the deep strait between Europe
and Asia are of truly mythological proportions. But that's another story. And who
cares? According to the best authorities on Olympus, we were officially gods.
- Charles Foster

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Motivational Theory: Case Study Example

Motivation is often best explained by reference to real examples. The

The contribution of this article by writer and adventurer Charles Foster is

The Hellespont Swim

The paperwork is nightmarish. The European shore, at Abydos, is inside a

So we trained a bit. We lumbered over to municipal pools and floundered up and

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