principle of management paper 2 pages long

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Chapter 12

Motivating People

Motivation is an inner drive that directs behavior toward goals.

Motivation explains why we do what we do; at times, a lack of motivation explains why we avoid doing what we should do.

One important individual characteristic that affects motivation is morale, the sum total of employees’ attitudes toward their jobs, employer, and colleagues.

A major goal of management is to help employees satisfy their needs in ways that benefit both the individual and the organization.

What Is Motivation?

Motivation is more than a tool that managers can use to foster employee loyalty and boost productivity.

It is a process that affects all the relationships within an organization and influences many areas such as pay, promotion, job design, training opportunities, and reporting relationships.

Our current understanding of motivation comes from three distinctive historical approaches:

The traditional approach

The human relations approach

The human resources approach

What Is Motivation? (continued)

Content theories assume that workers are motivated by the desire to satisfy needs and that they seek to identify what their needs are.

Abraham Maslow defined five basic needs and arranged them in the order in which they must be satisfied: physiological, security, social, esteem, and self-actualization.

Clayton Alderfer classified needs into three categories: (E)xistence, (R)elatedness, and (G)rowth.

Content Theories of Motivation

Frederick Herzberg identified two types of factors that relate to motivation:

Maintenance factors, such as adequate wages and comfortable working conditions, relate to the work environment; they must be present for employees to remain in a job.

Motivational factors—recognition, responsibility, advancement, and the job characteristics—relate to the work itself; they encourage employees to be productive.

Herzberg’s maintenance factors can be compared to Maslow’s physiological, security, and social needs.

Content Theories of Motivation (continued)

Motivational factors may include Maslow’s esteem and self-actualization needs.

David McClelland identified three needs:

Achievement―An individual’s desire for goals that are well-defined and moderately difficult and include employee participation and feedback

Affiliation―The desire to work with others in the organization rather than alone

Power―A function of the influence and control an individual has over others

Content Theories of Motivation (continued)

Process theories try to determine “how” and “why” employees are motivated to perform.

Process theories differ from content theories in that they attempt to determine the reasons why employees become motivated, whereas content theories look only at what motivates the individual.

Process Theories of Motivation

Equity theory suggests that how much people are willing to contribute to an organization depends on their assessment of the equity of the rewards they will receive in exchange.

Each person develops a personal input-outcome ratio of his or her contribution (inputs) to the organization divided by the rewards (outcomes) offered by the organization.

The worker then compares his or her ratio to the input-outcome ratio of some “comparison other” and adjusts effort accordingly.

Equity Theory

Expectancy theory states that motivation depends not only on how much a person wants something but on the person’s perception of how likely he or she is to get it.

Expectancy is a person’s expectation that effort will lead to high performance.

Expectancy theory suggests that managers can influence an employee’s motivation in three ways:

By helping the employee to believe he or she can achieve successful performance

By having faith in the employee

By providing needed support, such as training and guidance

Expectancy Theory

Goal-setting theory recognizes the importance of goals in improving employee performance.

The particular advantages of goals include directing attention and action, mobilizing effort, creating patterns of persistent behavior, and developing strategies for goal attainment.

Specificity, difficulty, feedback, participation, and competition improve commitment to and acceptance of goals.

Goal-Setting Theory

Learning theories postulate that employees can be motivated to achieve goals by associating outcomes with certain types of behavior.

While reinforcement theory often involves firsthand experience with the outcomes of a particular action, social learning theory is based on observation, behavioral outcomes, and beliefs.

Learning Theories

Reinforcement theory assumes that behavior may be strengthened by relating it to its consequences.

Behavior modification involves changing behavior and encouraging appropriate actions by relating the consequences of behavior to the behavior itself.

There are four types of reinforcement:

Positive reinforcement

Negative reinforcement or avoidance

Punishment

Extinction

Reinforcement Theory

Four schedules of reinforcement are:

Fixed-interval schedule―Provides reinforcement at specified periods of time, regardless of behavior

Variable-interval schedule―Varies the period of timing between reinforcements

Fixed-ratio schedule―Offers reinforcement after a specified number of desired performance behaviors, regardless of the time elapsed between the behaviors

Variable-ratio schedule―Varies the number of behaviors required for reinforcements

Managers who want to motivate employees should consider the long-term effects of punishment and reward.

Reinforcement Theory (continued)

Social learning theory maintains that employees learn not only through direct experience but also through observation and personal qualities.

Three components of social learning theory are:

Vicarious learning―Learning through observation

Self-reinforcement―Employees regulating their behavior by offering themselves rewards for achieving desired performance

Self-efficacy―An employee’s confidence that he or she can perform a task or behavior successfully

Modeling acceptable behavior is one way managers can motivate employees to behave as expected.

Social Learning Theory

Motivation theories have helped managers to develop strategies for motivating their employees to achieve organizational objectives and for boosting morale.

Many of these techniques involve job design, which applies motivational theories to the structuring of jobs to increase productivity and morale.

Motivation and Job Design

The job characteristics model tries to determine how managers can motivate workers by helping them to achieve more of their higher-level needs.

It identifies five core job characteristics:

Skill variety

Task identity

Task significance

Autonomy

Feedback

The more of these five characteristics managers can design into jobs, the higher will be employees’ motivation.

Hackman and Oldham’s Job Characteristics Model

These job characteristics lead, in turn, to three psychological states that affect workplace motivation:

Experienced meaningfulness

Experienced responsibility

Knowledge of results

Growth-need strength is the extent to which an employee desires a job that provides personal challenges, a sense of accomplishment, and personal growth.

It determines whether or not a more enriched job will actually motivate a worker.

Hackman and Oldham’s Job Characteristics Model (continued)

Managers may also employ flexible scheduling strategies as solutions to motivation issues:

Flextime―Employees choose their starting and ending times as long as they are at work during a specified core period.

Compressed work week―Employees work 40 hours in a four-day (or shorter) period.

Job sharing―Two employees do one job.

Part-time work―Full-time workers work part-time for a certain period.

Working at home―Employees work at home part-time or even full-time.

Flexible Scheduling in Work Design

Managers can create pay plans that motivate if they:

Show employees that good performance leads to high levels of pay

Minimize any negative consequences of good performance

Create conditions that provide desired rewards other than pay for good performance

Companies today are increasingly striving to relate pay to performance at both the hourly and managerial level.

Noncash incentives include merchandise, travel, recognition, and status.

Paying for Performance

To understand motivation, it is best to look at all the theories of motivation in conjunction with one another.

Content, process, goal-setting, and learning theories can all be integrated.

This is because many of the ideas and relationships are similar from model to model, and the ultimate benefit comes from their synergy.

Integration of Motivation Theories