The primary motive for professional work should be service to others. This motive is actually intrinsic to professional work, “built in” we could say. Each professional has a certain expertise which he exercises for others. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers all dedicate their time and energies to helping other people. Their work is good work when it provides a good service for those who have come to them for help. This service should be a primary motive for one’s work. It is entirely proper that a professional have other goals besides that of service (no one expects them to work for free), but it would constitute a deficiency for a professional not to want the true good of the client (including patients, customers, students, etc.).

In point of fact, it is quite rare to find a professional who has no interest in providing a real service to others. If it seems that one’s work is not meeting a real need of other persons, people generally consider it meaningless and find it difficult to be motivated at all. For most people their professional work is, apart perhaps from raising their children, their principal mode of contributing to the good of society and making a difference in the world.

Personal satisfaction refers to a more self-centered motive: the sense of achievement that a person derives from doing or having done something good and worthwhile. It is normal and healthy to take pleasure or satisfaction in seeing one’s talents and powers at work, to see oneself as an agent. And this sense of achievement becomes more intense when one has to meet a challenge, overcome obstacles and difficulties, when one does things that have not been done before (innovates) or does them better than they were done before.  Hence it is normal that people seek work that they find interesting and challenging, work that allows them to develop their talents, and work that allows for innovation and growth.

Here we should note that the sense of achievement that comes from work well done is not wholly distinct from professional work’s intrinsic ordering toward service. One’s sense of achievement depends (or should depend) on knowing that the work that has been accomplished has actually rendered a real service to others. And if someone is able to develop a new and better way of achieving a good, the consequent satisfaction depends on recognizing that the innovation will actually make life better in some way for other people (at times for all future generations).

Related to this sense of achievement is the sense of self-esteem that comes from exercising a profession. By one’s work, one derives a sense of carrying out a meaningful role within society and also a certain confidence that others see one as contributing to the good of society. Anyone who has been unemployed, especially for long periods of time, knows how much one’s self-esteem and sense of self-worth depend on engaging in work that engages his talents and allows him to achieve true goods for others.

Like most good things, this legitimate motive of achievement and sense of self-worth can be corrupted. It can lead to vanity, the excessive desire to have one’s excellence be recognized by others. This excessive desire for recognition and honors can easily cause a professional not to do what is actually best for the client, but rather to do what will be perceived by others as some sort of outstanding or singular achievement. So, for example, an architect might try to convince his client to accept a design that is different from what the client really needs, because the architect thinks that he will receive some sort of recognition for his creativity. This excessive desire for recognition can also lead to a competitive spirit that works against the teamwork among various professionals that is usually required for successful work. A person who insists on receiving credit for whatever good is accomplished and refuses to accept blame for the inevitable errors, is never easy to work with. Finally, this vanity can cause a person to be unwilling or unhappy to do tasks that he considers to be “beneath” his talents or abilities, even though the work needs to be done for the client and he is best positioned person to do it; in some cases vanity will lead a person to try to do work for which he is not really suited with a consequent professional instability that can last a life-time.

It is certainly fair or just that a person receive remuneration or compensation for the services he renders to others, although is it is also necessary to recognize that many services are, and indeed should be, rendered freely, as happens within a family, or in a church or in not-for-profit service organizations. Generally speaking, a person is remunerated for his professional work, and, in a normal market economy, with this money the person is able to pay for the services of all the other various professionals on whose work he depends. Hence it is entirely legitimate to seek to be remunerated for one’s work. Moreover, this desire is not, or at least need not be, selfish or egocentric; a person can desire this money to take care of his family or to donate it to a church or any number of charitable, not-for-profit enterprises. Hence a professional will normally seek remuneration commensurate with the (real) services he renders.

This motivation too, however, can be corrupted. It can often lead to greed, the excessive desire for money and material wealth generally. As happens with vanity, greed can lead to a professional providing services that are not what the client really needs or, perhaps more often, cutting corners and not providing the full service for which he is billing the client. So for example, a doctor might prescribe unnecessary procedures that will generate profit for his practice, while a builder may, without informing the client, substitute cheaper materials for those specified in the contract. Greed also leads professionals to engage in many unethical and illegal activities, that are often harmful to the client, to ones’ own firm or corporation and, at times, harmful to the larger society. An excessive desire for wealth can also lead a person to enter upon a profession for which he is not well suited instead of one in which he could provide a good service to his clients with personal satisfaction.

There are some types of professional work–actually rather few–which a person can engage in simply because the activity itself is enjoyable, apart from the fact that it is providing a service to other persons and even apart from the sense of achievement a person might gain from it. It is quite possible and quite normal that a person finds satisfaction in activity, not because the activity itself is pleasant, but rather because it is difficult and provides a sense of achievement and also because it provides a real good to a person. Surgery might be an example of this. A professional athlete or a musician, on the other hand, may find their activity enjoyable just in itself and this enjoyment can provide a motive for engaging in it. Even they, of course, can also have a sense of achievement and can want to serve others (usually providing some sort of entertainment).

Given a certain context of religious belief, a person can understand his work as a fulfillment of the will of God and also as some kind of service to him or his glory. This sort of motivation could easily be found among clergy (or among those consecrated to God, like monks or nuns), but could also be found where a person thinks that the ordinary activities of life, and especially one’s professional work, is part of the God’s plan for the person. In this latter sense, a person could engage in his professional activities with the motivation of doing God’s will and as a manifestation of one’s love for God.

Normally a person’s motivation in carrying out his professional work will be a mix of the motives described above. The motivations will generally be good so long as the person wants to do what is for the good of the client. If a person finds that he cannot do both what is for the good of the client and also fulfill other motives (e.g., cannot earn enough to support his family), then he may have to find other work where he can both serve the client well and satisfy his own needs. A person’s motivation becomes bad when other motives displace service and lead a person to neglect the good of the client. Most commonly it is greed or vanity that corrupts one’s motivation. Usually if a person finds that he is not really doing what is for the good of the client, he needs to examine his motivation and try to rectify it if it has become skewed.