Motivation: would your employees buy their own supplies?

This came from a local paper, but surely many teachers around the country behave similarly:

Like many colleagues, she said she spent about $100 on back-to-school supplies. She said she expected to spend another $400 of her own money over the rest of the school year.

Let's put it another way: suppose $500 is 1% of the teacher's annual wages, which seems like a fairly reasonable estimate.  They're spending money not for the employer, but for what you would call "clients", who should and are expected to provide for themselves. 

Now take a typical bond trader, and 1% of their salary is $5k to $10k.  (Yes, it could be a lot more.)  Would you think they would spend that much every year on client problems?  They might ask their company to pay, but if they didn't, how many do you think would dig into their own pockets?

The article goes on to say that many of these teachers have spouses that have lost their jobs due to the recession.  They spend the money anyway because they want to make sure every child has equal opportunity, and they want to provide a good environment.

How do you get an employee to care so much about their job that they take the quality of their work so personally?

Sure, it helps that teaching can be very rewarding.  Teaching can provide a meaningful purpose, which Dan Pink identifies as one of the three critical factors for employee motivation.

Another aspect is professional pride.  Teachers have a vision of how they want the lesson plan they've created to go, and every kid that doesn't have the right supplies is an obstacle to achieving that.  I know a number of software developers who pay for many pieces of software and hardware so that they can do their jobs better.  In both cases, autonomy about how to achieve their goals -- the teachers create their own lesson plans, the programmers can use their own tools -- imparts ownership of the results.  Yes, this covers both of the other primary inputs that Dan Pink discusses.

One personal aspect, though, is simply getting employees deeply involved with their customers.  Teachers see theirs everyday, and the desire to help springs forth.  (Or else, they become overwhelmed by it, shut down, and just see it as another job, the kids' problems as not part of their job description.)

Being around other people, personally sharing in their problems, unlocks a natural instinct to want to get involved.  We sometimes purposefully avoid knowing anything because we know beforehand that once we even put a toe in the water, we'll be compelled to jump all the way in.

If you're running software teams, get them in front of the users as much as possible, as much as the users allow.  That's one strong argument against separate support and development teams.  Programmers who see their users more won't need any more motivation than that to rush back and work quickly on that bug that seems so small (hey, there are workarounds!) but is in fact a major pain and awfully embarrassing.