apply-intrinsic-motivation

apply-intrinsic-motivation is a skill for Claude Code from jeffreytse/grimoire-core. It costs 49 tokens per session (2,215 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A management approach that sustains motivation by designing roles around autonomy, mastery, and purpose: control over work, opportunities to improve, and meaningful outcomes.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to shape responsibilities, development opportunities, and connections between daily work and larger goals.
Why use it?
It helps managers address declining engagement without relying mainly on pay, perks, or other external rewards.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the grimoire-business plugin — 145 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to shape responsibilities, development opportunities, and connections between daily work and larger goals.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/jeffreytse/grimoire-core/apply-intrinsic-motivation
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add jeffreytse/grimoire-core --skill apply-intrinsic-motivation
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jeffreytse/grimoire-core

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install grimoire-business, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 145 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for apply-intrinsic-motivation

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jeffreytse/grimoire-core/apply-intrinsic-motivation/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/jeffreytse/grimoire-core/apply-intrinsic-motivation)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jeffreytse/grimoire-core/apply-intrinsic-motivation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jeffreytse/grimoire-core/apply-intrinsic-motivation/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for apply-intrinsic-motivation

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/jeffreytse/grimoire-core/apply-intrinsic-motivation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/jeffreytse/grimoire-core/apply-intrinsic-motivation.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 49 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,215 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00049 $0.02215
Opus 5 $0.00024 $0.01107
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00443
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00221

Measured 8d ago against content hash d2cc12cd2193, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

apply-intrinsic-motivation scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 8d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/business/leadership/skills/apply-intrinsic-motivation/SKILL.md · 130 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 130 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Apply Intrinsic Motivation

Design work conditions that sustain long-term motivation by building autonomy (control over how work is done), mastery (opportunities for skill growth), and purpose (connection to meaningful outcomes) into each direct report's role.

Why This Is Best Practice

Adopted by: Pink's Drive framework is the most-cited popular synthesis of intrinsic motivation research, used in management training at Google (which built "20% time" as an autonomy experiment), Microsoft, and Deloitte; Google's Project Oxygen explicitly includes "connects work to purpose" as a core manager behavior; the Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan) is the dominant academic framework for human motivation with 800+ published studies; Atlassian runs "ShipIt Days" (quarterly hackathons) as an institutionalized autonomy experiment modeled on Google's 20% time Impact: Deci & Ryan meta-analysis (2000, 128 studies) found that external rewards (bonuses, prizes) consistently reduced intrinsic motivation for creative and cognitively complex tasks — the "crowding out" effect; Gallup's 2022 engagement report (112,312 business units) found that purpose-connected employees are 3× more likely to stay, 2.6× more likely to take initiative, and have 41% less absenteeism; Google's Project Oxygen research found that managers who help employees see the meaning in their work drive the highest team engagement scores Why best: Compensation increases motivate performance up to the point where basic financial needs are met — beyond that, additional pay produces diminishing engagement returns (Kahneman & Deaton, 2010, Princeton Woodrow Wilson School); what sustains motivation in knowledge work is not more pay but more meaningful work, skill growth, and control; managers who understand this stop reaching for incentive programs as the default and start designing the work itself differently

Sources: Pink "Drive" (Riverhead Books, 2009); Deci & Ryan "Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations: Classic Definitions and New Directions" (Contemporary Educational Psychology, 2000); Hackman & Oldham "Motivation Through the Design of Work" (1976); Gallup "State of the Global Workplace" (2022)

Read the full file on GitHub · 130 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 8d ago First seen · 130 lines · 49 tokens per session scan A d2cc12cd2193

Subscribe to this mod's changes

apply-intrinsic-motivation is a skill published in the GitHub repository jeffreytse/grimoire-core (4 stars, last pushed 22d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 49 tokens to every session and 2,215 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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