Relationship of Sales Incentive and Employee Motivation

Assesment of Sales Incentives and

Employee Motivation in

Chemworld Marketing Corporation

Trisha Mae R. Requintel

INTRODUCTION

Motivation represents the forces within a person that affect his or her direction, intensity, and persistence of voluntary behavior (Campbell & Pritchard, 1976, Prinder 1998). It has been viewed as a powerful tool that reinforces behaviors and triggers the tendency to continue. This only means that motivation is an internal drive to satisfy a need and to achieve a goal. It also shows that in order to attain assured targets, an individual must be satisfactorily energetic and clear about their destination. Accordingly, if an employee lacks motivation, his or her productivity and efficiency may be affected. This may include low morale, higher incidence of absenteeism and tiredness, increase number of defective productive, higher number of accidents, higher level of waste materials and many other more possible negative outcomes.

Having the fact that employees who lack motivation produce unsatisfactory results, it became very vital for the top management to take care of their employees in order to ensure that they are motivated and satisfied in the work that they do. The success of any organization depends on the ability of the managers to provide a motivating environment for its employees. The challenge for managers today is to keep the staff motivated and perform well in the workplace. As a result, organizations design different strategies to compete with the competitors and for increasing the performance of the organization. One of this is by providing incentives. Incentives may refer to the tools that hopefully contribute to firm’s effectiveness by influencing individual or group behavior. Businesses use pay, promotion, bonuses or other types of incentives to motivate and encourage high level performances of employees (Reena et al,2009).

The purpose of this research is to determine if the sales incentives implemented by Chemworld Marketing Corporation affects the motivation of its employees. This will help the top management assess the incentives that they provide and then determine if those are enough and effective to motivate their employees. This may also help the employees to know the drive that pushes them to do more or perform better.

Literature Review

Motivation is viewed as a process of stimulating people to achieve organizational tasks as well as the process of stimulating oneself to action to gratify a felt need. (Ajibola,1976) Ajibola also mentioned that employees are being encouraged to achieve not only the organizational goals but also their own goals through motivation. This definition only demonstrates that in an organizational perspective, a good employer aims not only for the goals of the company but also at the same time strives to help its employees achieve its own goals.

Moreover, employee motivation is one of the policies of managers which aim to increase effectual job management amongst employees in organizations (Maduka, 2014).  A motivated employee is responsive of the definite goals and objectives that he/she must achieve, therefore he/ she will direct its efforts in that direction. An organization should take into consideration employee motivation because of the following reasons: (1) It improves the level of efficiency of employees; (2) It puts human resources into action; (3) It builds friendly relationship; (4) It leads to the achievement of organizational goals. (5) It leads to stability of workforce. Also, when one thinks about it, the success of any facet of the business can almost be traced to motivated employees.

Employees want to earn reasonable salary and payment while employers desire their workers to feel that is what they are getting (Houran J.) Money is the fundamental inducement; no other incentive or motivational technique comes even close to it with respect to its influential value It has the supremacy to magnetize, maintain and motivate individuals towards higher performance.(Sara et al,2004). Also, Frederick Taylor and his scientific management associate described money as the most fundamental factor in motivating workers to attain greater productivity. On the other hand, Luthan (1998) opposed to this perspective. He noted that money is not the only motivator. There are other incentives or factors such as good working relation, praises, security, encouragement, opportunity for growth and development, etc which can also serves as motivators. He emphasized that an employee is a common person with unlimited needs and money alone cannot cater for all its needs. These arguments only show that money is not the only incentives that a company could offer. The top management could think of other form of incentives especially nonfinancial that could possibly help them in motivating their employees.

In accordance to this, Robbins (2001) suggested two classifications of rewards that could be implemented in an organization. These are the intrinsic and the extrinsic rewards. Intrinsic rewards may include participation in decision making, job autonomy, greater responsibility and personal growth while extrinsic rewards can be divided into two: (1) the financial rewards such as bonus and (2) the nonfinancial rewards such as welfare, holidays, etc. Urbanski (1986), divided incentive system into four categories namely money-based incentive, travel system, the system of four prizes and commendations system. Furthermore, Johnstone, Boles & Hair (1987) provided a most detailed classification of incentive systems, he divided sales incentive system into thirteen categories, namely: a recognition system, three individual performance bonus system, travel system, commission system, payroll system, promotion system, education and training system, goal management, specify the quota system, business people meeting, announced results system, department (or group) performance bonus system. Among all these systems, the incentive systems that were implemented in Chemworld Marketing Corporation are the individual performance bonus system, promotion system and specify the quota system. If ever these types of incentives were found to be not effective, the management may consider the other incentives mentioned.

On the previous years, financial incentives have long been thought, both theoretically and practically, to affect employee motivation and performance. There have been a lot of studies and examinations which are concerned about the relationship of financial incentives to employee behaviors like their motivation and performance at work.  Some of these would be briefly discussed on the succeeding paragraphs.

Reena Ali and M. Shakil Ahmed (2009) revealed that there is a statistically significant relationship between reward and recognition respectively, and motivation and satisfaction. More so, their study proved that if rewards or recognition were to be altered, them there would be a corresponding change in work motivation and satisfaction.