2 questions
ABK
10.MotivationPerformance-Part1-10.29.18-K1.pptxCh. 13: Motivation and Performance (Part 1)
Maryana Arvan, M.A.
10/29/2018
Overview
Reminders / announcements
Motivation
What is it?
Intrinsic motivation
Extrinsic motivation
Operant conditioning theory
OB MOD
Intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation
Pay and motivation
Motivation
Internal psychological forces that determine the direction, intensity, and persistence of a person’s behavior towards attaining a goal.
Intensity
Whether behavior has strength; is relatively intense, resilient
Direction
Whether behavior has a purpose; is aimed or guided toward a particular goal or outcome
Persistence
Whether behavior has endurance; sustains itself over time and across different situations
Two kinds of motivation
Intrinsic motivation
Extrinsic motivation
Your textbook also adds a third kind: prosocial motivation
Behavior that is performed to benefit or help others
Behavior can be prosocially motivated in addition to being extrinsically or intrinsically motivated
Intrinsically motivated behavior
Behavior that is performed for its own sake
Intrinsic = internal, literally from within
Motivation comes from doing the work itself
Novelty, interest, self-improvement, enjoyment, accomplishment
Jobs high in the 5 core job characteristics of the JCM are more likely to lead to intrinsic motivation
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Intrinsic motivation
The principle source of life’s enjoyment
“I am doing this because it is [interesting, fun, satisfying]”
Arises because we have innate psychological needs for:
Autonomy
The need to personally endorse and self-direct our own behavior
Competence
The need to be effective in our interactions with the environment, seek out and master optimal challenges
Relatedness
The need to establish close emotional bonds and attachments with other people
Extrinsically motivated behavior
Behavior that results from environmental incentives (e.g., materials, social rewards) or consequences
Money, praise, attention, status
Motivation comes from the consequences of the behavior, not the behavior itself
“Do this and you will get that” behavioral contract
Environmentally-created reason to initiate or persist in an action
What kind of motivation? Talk to a partner (or two)!
In this class, I prefer to learn course material that really challenges me so I can learn new things.
I want to do well in this class because it is important to show my ability to my friends, family, classmates, or employer.
In this class, I prefer to learn course material that elicits my curiosity, even if it is difficult to learn.
I’m the most interested in trying to understand the content in this class as thoroughly as possible.
The most important thing for me right now is improving my GPA, so my main goal is to get a good grade in this class.
In this class, I prefer course assignments that I can learn from, even if they don’t guarantee me a good grade.
Operant conditioning theory
Theory that people learn to perform behaviors that lead to desired consequences, and learn not to perform behaviors that lead to undesired consequences.
Developed by B.F. Skinner
People will be motivated to perform at a high level & attain work goals to the extent that they are linked to outcomes they desire
People will be motivated to avoid performing behaviors that lead to outcomes they do not desire
Operant conditioning theory (2)
Provides managers with 5 tools to motivate high performance and prevent employees from engaging in absenteeism or other undesirable behaviors:
Positive reinforcement
Negative reinforcement
Positive punishment
Negative punishment
Extinction
Reinforcement and punishment
Type of goal:
Reinforcement = goal is to increase desirable behavior
Punishment = goal is to decrease undesirable behavior
Means
Negative = subtract something
Positive = add something
+ Punishment
e.g., goal is less cursing. Add one chore every time a curse word is used.
- Punishment
Ex: goal is less cursing. A child is allowed 2 hours of TV time every night. For each curse word used, 15 mins of TV time is taken away.
+ Reinforcement
e.g., goal is more studying. For every 30 mins of continuous studying, you earn one Hershey’s Kiss.
- Reinforcement
Ex: goal is more studying. You start with 10 Hershey’s Kisses. Every time you break during your 30 min sessions, one Kiss is removed. 🤷
Positive reinforcement
Giving people outcomes they desire (i.e., rewards) when they perform organizationally functional behaviors
Examples of desirable outcomes
Pay
Raises
Promotions
Examples of organizationally functional behaviors
High-quality customer service
Meeting deadlines
Negative reinforcement
Eliminating or removing undesired outcomes when people perform organizationally functional behaviors
Examples of undesired outcomes:
Nagging, criticism, undesirable assignments, threat of job loss
Examples of organizationally functional behaviors:
Producing high quality goods and services
Following rules
High-quality customer service
Meeting deadlines
Managers should try to avoid this whenever possible
Can create an unpleasant work environment
Can cause subordinates to resent managers and try to get back at them
A note about organizationally functional behaviors
Organizationally functional behaviors– i.e., the right behaviors to reinforce (ideally via the use of positive reinforcement)-- must be:
Those behaviors over which subordinates have control
Subordinates must have the freedom and the opportunity to perform the behaviors being reinforced
Those behaviors that actually increase organizational effectiveness
Otherwise valuable resources are wasted with no payoff; employees may be resentful
Positive punishment
Giving an undesired or negative consequence when dysfunctional behavior occurs
Examples of undesired consequences
Verbal reprimands, being written up, receiving a suspension, receiving a demotion, receiving a termination (i.e., being fired)
Examples of dysfunctional behavior
Presenteeism, absenteeism, sexual harassment, violating safety protocols, engaging in unethical behavior
Examples:
Being written up because you sexually harassed a coworker.
Being reassigned because you repeatedly violated safety protocols at work.
Negative punishment
Taking away a desired outcome when dysfunctional behavior occurs
Examples of desired outcomes
Breaks, access to social media websites at work
Examples of dysfunctional behavior
Presenteeism, absenteeism, sexual harassment, violating safety protocols, engaging in unethical behavior
Example:
Taking away access to social media because employees are spending time cyberloafing during work hours
Reducing length of employee breaks because they always take more than the allotted time
A note about punishment
Managers should only use punishment when absolutely necessary
Unintended side effects: resentment, loss of self-respect, desire for retaliation
If punishment is necessary:
Downplay the emotional element
Make it clear that you are punishing a person’s performance of a dysfunctional behavior, not the person themselves
Punish dysfunctional behaviors as soon as they occur
Make sure the negative consequence is a source of punishment for the individuals involved
Be certain org members know exactly why they are being punished.
A note about punishment (2)
If punishment is necessary, cont.
Try to avoid punishing someone in front of others
This can hurt a person’s self-respect and lower their esteem in the eyes of coworkers, and make coworkers feel uncomfortable
However, sometimes it can be helpful to make other org members aware that an individual has been punished for committing a serious infraction
It can teach an org members that certain behaviors are unacceptable, help prevent future infractions
Ex: informing employees that a manager who sexually harassed subordinates has been punished
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Positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive punisher, or negative punisher?
Scenario 1: A company offers its employees flextime hours. They can come in anytime between 7-10 AM, and leave anytime between 3-6 PM. It is difficult to track when employees arrive at the office. After quitting, a former employee informs upper management that many of her fellow employees have been taking advantage of this system. They have been saying that they arrive at 7 AM or 8 AM, but rarely arrive before 8:50 AM (managers always arrive at 9 AM). They then leave between 3-4 PM, without putting in an 8 hour workday. The management team installs a surveillance system to confirm this. They find that nearly 40% of their employees are taking advantage of flextime hours. Upper management takes away the flextime benefit, insisting that all workers be present between 9-5, in order to discourage the behavior of employees cutting their work hours short.
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Positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive punisher, or negative punisher?
Scenario 2: Let’s watch a short clip…
Office Space:
4:15-6:46
The management team at Innotech wants all of its employees to use new cover sheets for their TPS reports. When an employee fails to do this, multiple bosses will come and nag him or her about it in order to promote the desirable behavior of using the new cover sheets.
Positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive punisher, or negative punisher?
Scenario 3: You are trying to build social capital with a more established coworker. You send them a meme you think they might like one day, and s/he comes over to your desk afterward, laughing and smiling about the meme. It leads into a nice opportunity to talk about a mutual client of yours. You send them another meme the next day, hoping they will come back and talk to you again.
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Extinction
Sometimes members are motivated to perform behaviors that detract from org effectiveness
E.g., A subordinate frequently stopping by her manager’s office to chat about work, which turns into long conversations about personal matters (e.g., sports)
Extinction: curtailing the performance of a dysfunctional behavior by eliminating whatever is reinforcing it
Example:
The manager keeps conversations with the employee polite but brief, and stops acting interested in non-work-related topics. The employee is no longer reinforced by a pleasurable non-work-related conversation, and will stop initiating them.
Organizational behavior modification (OB MOD)
The use of operant conditioning techniques to promote the performance of organizationally functional behaviors and discourage the performance of dysfunctional behaviors
Works best for behaviors that are specific, objective, and countable
Attendance and punctuality
Making sales
Putting telephones together
Anything that lends itself to careful scrutiny and control
The five steps of OB MOD
Figure 13.4 Five Steps in OB MOD
Managers identify an important behavior.
Managers measure the frequency with which the behavior is occurring.
Managers determine if people know whether they should be performing the behavior and what consequences they receive when they do perform it.
Managers develop and apply a strategy entailing the use of positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, punishment, or extinction.
Managers measure the frequency of the behavior. If it worked, managers maintain the behavior by continuing to use the strategy.
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In-class activity
Consider the company you came up with several weeks ago. Think about one of the jobs you had to create for your company. Write it down. Then consider a behavior those employees might perform. Come up with a 5 step OB MOD strategy to increase or decrease this desirable or undesirable employee behavior. Be sure to specify whether your system involves positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive punishment, negative punishment, or extinction.
Write down your answers!
(May draw a flowchart)
Intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation
Intended effects of extrinsic rewards
Promotes compliance
Unintended side effects of extrinsic rewards
Can undermine intrinsic motivation
Can interfere with the quality and process of learning
Can interfere with a person’s ability to self regulate their own behavior
(Cerasoli et al., 2014)
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Intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation (2)
Why can extrinsic rewards work against us?
They compromise our psychological need for autonomy
“Play” “Work”
“I do it for fun” “I do it because they pay me well”
Rewards are in some ways coercive– they shift our behavior as arising from our own choices to arising from an external environmental
If you work out only to eat an entire jar of cheese puffs, then you are not working out because you want to. You are working to have something enticing in the environment (cheese puffs).
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The importance of intrinsic motivation (3)
What is so great about intrinsic motivation?
Engagement
Effort, proactivity, resilience
Creativity
Spontaneity, originality, personal authenticity
Enhances conceptual understanding
Flexible thinking, active information processing, concentration, effective use of learning strategies
Promotes optimal functioning and well-being
Happier, more productive, more well-adjusted
Let’s watch a short clip…
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Intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation (4)
Which types of rewards decrease intrinsic motivation?
Expected rewards (vs. unexpected rewards)
Receiving an unexpected reward at the end of a task, for instance, does not undermine your intrinsic motivation
If you begin a task with the expectation of being rewarded at the end, however, it does undermine your intrinsic motivation
Tangible rewards (vs. verbal rewards)
Money, awards, food tend to decrease intrinsic motivation
Praise and positive feedback do not undermine intrinsic motivation
Intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation (2)
Extrinsic motivation is not always bad!
Some extrinsic motivation is necessary (e.g., pay)
Extrinsic motivation can be helpful for certain behaviors, tasks, and outcomes
It can be helpful to promote behavioral compliance (e.g., safety compliance, rule following)
It can be helpful to motivate people on mundane tasks
Extrinsic motivators only threaten interesting activities, where there is some intrinsic motivation to be lost
They have no (zero) effect on uninteresting activities, where there is no intrinsic motivation to lose
Recent research suggests that intrinsic rewards are important for the quality of performance, whereas extrinsic rewards are important for quantity of outcomes
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Intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation (3)
Best practice: use both
Use extrinsic motivation for certain things:
Pay
Mundane behaviors (e.g., rule following, safety compliance)
Tasks that are fairly routine / simple / “boring”
When quantity of outcomes, not quality of outcomes matters
…but do your best to promote intrinsic motivation in your employees for their everyday work.
One way to accomplish this is through job enrichment
Increasing jobs in all 5 core dimensions of the JCM (autonomy, skill variety, task identity, task significance, and feedback)
Pay and motivation
Variable pay plans: base a portion of an employee’s pay on some individual and/or organizational measure of performance.
Individual earnings therefore fluctuate up and down
Types:
Piece-rate plans
Merit-based pay
Bonuses
Profit sharing
Employee stock ownership plans
Note: your textbook uses slightly different terminology. Please stick to the terminology used in the slides.
Variable-pay programs (2)
Piece-rate pay
A pure piece-rate plan provides no base salary and pays the employee only for what he or she produces.
Limitation:
Not a feasible approach for many jobs.
The main concern for both individual and team piece-rate workers is financial risk.
Variable-pay programs (3)
Merit-based pay
Allows employers to differentiate pay based on performance.
Creates perceptions of relationships between performance and rewards.
Most large organizations have merit pay plans, particularly for salaried employees.
Limitations:
Based on annual performance appraisals.
Merit pool fluctuates based on economic conditions
Union resistance.
Variable-pay programs (4)
Bonuses
An annual bonus is a significant component of total compensation for many jobs.
Increasingly include lower-ranking employees.
Many companies now routinely reward production employees with bonuses when profits improve.
Pro:
Effects of performance bonuses should be higher than those of merit pay because rather than paying for performance years ago (rolled into base pay), bonuses reward recent performance
Downside: employees’ pay is more vulnerable to cuts.
Variable-pay programs (4)
Profit-sharing plans
Organization-wide programs that distribute compensation based on some established formula centered around a company’s profitability.
Can be direct cash outlays or, particularly for top managers, allocations of stock options
Pros:
Appear to have positive effects on employee attitudes
Give employees have a feeling of psychological ownership.
Variable pay programs (5)
Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP)
A company-established benefit plan in which employees acquire stock, often at below-market prices, as part of their benefits.
A narrower, more restrictive variant of profit sharing
These are not used as much to reward past individual performance, but to motivate employees to work for the good of the entire company
Increases employee satisfaction and innovation.
Employees psychologically experience ownership
Downside: can lead to unethical behavior
