Motivation

14th of April 2006

Have a look at several academic theories involving the nature of motivation. How do they all fit in with your own understanding of what motivates you at work and what motivates your staff and colleagues? How does this understanding help in improving job performance?

Introduction

Motivation of the workforce is a topic that has been discussed by many people and very rightly so. If one could just find the one motivation that works for all employees!

The importance of motivation

Employee motivation is important! We all want to start our day excited about what we are doing. At the end of the day, we want to feel like we have accomplished something and that someone has noticed, appreciated, and benefited from our efforts. Recognition encourages us to want to come back tomorrow!

Motivation can have an effect on the output of the business quantity and quality.

So knowing that motivation is that important; let us have a closer look at some of the most important Motivation Theories and how they still influence our day-to-day work.

We will explore in this paper the theories of Herzberg (the Hygiene factors/motivators and his vertical loading), we will revisit Maslow's Hirarchy of needs and some more.

I would like to link some of these theories with my own work experience.

Main body

Theories and their implications:

Talking about Motivation Theories, one cannot help but start with Maslow's Hierarchy of needs. Even so, Maslow's theory was not originally concerned with work motivation it has nevertheless become on of the earliest work theories.

In most publications, you will only see these five steps, but originally Maslow listed nine needs. The highest being self actualisation. Maslow sees this as: 'what humans can be, they must be' or 'becoming everything that one is capable of becoming' (Management and Organisational Behaviour, Laurie J. Mullins 2005)

Maslow also argued that these needs are not necessarily in a fixed order. However, he also suggests that (David Buchanan and A Huczynski, Organizational Behaviour, 2004):

- A need is not an effective motivator until those lower in the hierarchy are more or less satisfied.

- A satisfied need is not a motivator.

- Lack of need satisfaction can affect mental health.

Of course his theories have been criticized, some of the major criticisms being that his theory was targeted at middle class white Americans in the 1940s.

However, is it really that much farfetched nowadays?

I personally think that there are elements in his theory that are still valid today. I entirely comprehend that as long as my needs for basic things, like food, water, shelter and affiliation are not met - I will not be interested to go to university and improve my skills at work. I suppose one could argue however, that the lack of these basic needs might drive me to improve my work situation and therefore I need to study, to earn more money.

Maslow's is a content theory. Content theories are more concerned with what motivates the individual person.

One of the content theories that I have seen often at work is Herzberg's two-way theory.

Frederick Herzberg proposed a theory of motivation based on the idea that some factors motivate and some demotivate.

Herzberg saw that hygiene factors caused dissatisfaction by their absence, but did not cause motivation by their increased presence. In my experience this would be very often expressed through the call centre's being too cold or too hot. Some agents had to sit under an air-conditioning unit. These agents were constantly disgruntled and de-motivated. In comparison their colleagues not sited directly under the unit, felt the temperature was ok but did not feel motivated positively because of it.

Conversely, motivation factors include things such as achievement, growth and crucially work itself.

Hygiene factors include for example: interpersonal relationships, work conditions, salary, and status.

Resulting from Hertzberg's theory was something called 'vertical loading', the concept of enrichment of the individual's job. The expectancy theorists Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham (Buchanan, Organizational Behaviour 2004) took on this idea. Their job characteristics model is the basis of the job enrichment theory.

Give the employee more autonomy in their roles, more feedback, give their tasks more significance, and more variety in order to improve their skills; the result will be motivated employees.

I personally respond best to this theory. When working at Boden as a team leader I felt that I was underachieving, my job was very monotonous, my task not very significant. There was no autonomy; I could not decide anything about my team without the consulting my manager, who would very often discard my opinion with no constructive feedback. I started disliking the idea of having to go to work, started calling in sick. I would passively attend team meetings with other team leaders and managers and completely lost interest in the company and its aims.

When I finally managed to move on, I took on a job as HR Officer. All of a sudden, I was presented with a load of new responsibilities and challenges. I worked with one of the best managers I have ever met. He not only challenged my knowledge and opinions, he supported and worked with me. In this environment I strived, I would work long hours without realising the strain, I called in sick only once in a year and loved to get up in the morning to go to work.

When my manager left, the person that took on his role did not think that the HR function was important within the call centre. My situation changed; once more, I had responsibilities taken off me bit-by-bit. No interest was shown in the work I was doing. My workload changed from a variety of tasks to recruitment only. I could analyse my de-motivation systematically, I felt less inclined to come to work, as my responsibilities reduced so did my enthusiasm and motivation. My sickness leave went up together with the feeling that