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Motivating Your Employees Motivation is the willingness to exert high levels of effort toward organizational goals, conditioned by the efforts ability to satisfy some individual needs. For some business analysts, employee motivation is a good way to increase productivity in an organization. When people get motivated, they will have a reason to put more efforts on what they are doing. Motivation is a crucial management tool in lifting the organizations work forces ability.
I like to start with a motivation success story. It wasnt necessarily the reward that was the largest motivating factor as much as much as it was the competition between the regional teams and the bragging rights that would come along with winning the competition, according to Sam Kotara, Senior Account Executive of Iona Technologies (IONA), one of the worlds leading vendors of standards-based platform middleware, motivation comes in many forms. (Greenberg) The National sales team was divided into regional units, creating six different teams. Each team had a quota based on a certain number of sales transactions, which would only count towards the competition if they were over a specified amount. The team with the highest percentage over the assigned quota won the contest, and received a gift certificate. Initially, the motivation was the prize, but according to Mr. Kotara, the motivation to win was based more on being the successful team.
In order to reach that goal, all the members of each regional team worked together, thus creating a fun and supportive atmosphere of teamwork. It was a lot of fun and we really worked together and gave support to all of our team members so that we could reach our team goal. The motivation from a team perspective positively impacted each individual contributor. An Account Executive from the East Coast team also commented on the efficacy of the program, It was crazy! We were so competitive but it was so much fun! We all wanted to win, and we all worked together, helping each other out. (Greenberg) We understand that there are many different ways to motivate employees with that example.
They motivate their employees in team and using their winning and success emotions. Employers can motivate their workers as individuals, groups, teams, or the organization as a whole. Motivation takes forms like offering rewards, improving working conditions, or employee recognition. There are many theories regarding motivation with the most prevalent being the theories of Abraham Maslow and Frederick Herzberg.
It is important to understand these theories and their implications to accurately comment on reinforcement theories of motivation. According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, there are five classes: (1) physiological, (2) safety, (3) social, (4) esteem, and (5) self-actualization. Each lower level need must be satisfied before individual experiences higher level needs. Also, Maslow hypothesized that as physiological, safety, social, and esteem needs were satisfied, they ceased to motivate, while the self-actualization needs actually motivate an individual more as they are satisfied.
Herzberg used this theory as a base to build his motivation-hygiene theory, which ties Maslow's needs to on the job achievement. The hygiene elements relate to low needs (physiological, safety, and social). For an individual, hygiene conditions include company policy and administration, supervision, relationships with peers and supervisors, work conditions, salary, status, and security. These concepts, according to Herzberg, account for 69 % of the factors that cause employee dissatisfaction or lack of motivation.
The motivation conditions, which include achievement, the job itself, recognition, responsibilities, and personal growth, accounted for 81 % of the factors that contributed to job satisfaction. (Griffeth, R. , Vecchio, R. & Logan, J. ) The hygiene conditions are extrinsic factors (behavior that is performed for material or social rewards as defined) while the motivation conditions are intrinsic factors (behavior that is performed for its own sake not for material or social rewards as defined), and the only way to sustain motivation toward organizational goals is through the achievement of intrinsic outcomes. (Tubbs, M. & Ekeberg, S. ) Each of these theories has proven to contain ideas consistent with human nature, but each also has its limitations within organizational settings. Because lower order needs are generally satisfied in the workplace today, managers have to deal with how to provide esteem and self-actualization to their employees, and that can be a vague concept to a manager who demands results immediately. For example: One of Herzberg's principles is: Making periodic reports directly available to the worker himself rather than to the supervisor On an un motivating factory line job, an idea which would implement this principle would be to allow the line workers to access a computer terminal located near the line which would report their daily / monthly /yearly progress toward some goal - themselves - without having to gain permission from a supervisor or without having the hear the news from their supervisor. In terms of Maslow's theory, the five levels of needs could be ensured in terms of physiological needs, money is the driving factor here as it provides the a means of achieve food, shelter, warmth and sleep, thus that management role is very limited, as it is controlled to a degree by relevant laws of the country. At the safety level provide their employees with agreeable contracts and work benefits such as health care. A work environment that is considered safe as well as adequate ongoing training is another aspect, also assurances of long-term employment.
Social level issues can be resolved by regions and encouraging group satisfaction, or perhaps even making sure contact is established by way of team sports days, or annual picnics etc, any activity that ensures worker contact. (Tubbs, M. & Ekeberg, S. ) The next level is perhaps the most crucial management is concerned, management may be able to fill esteem needs of the employee by showing recognition of a job well done, which may lead to a internal structure whereby levels of achievement are reached, and as the employee reaches these levels they may gain more responsibility within the organization. Self-actualization needs in terms of what management can do for employees to reach this stage, entirely depend on the individual, and the previous stage, as itself esteem is realized then self-actualization becomes of more importance, and so the employee is self-motivated. One other theory is equity theory; equity theory based on the nation of social comparison and is best applied to the workplace through the writing of L. Stacy Adams. Adams theory states that employees strive for equity between themselves and other workers. Equity is achieved when the ratio of employee outcomes over inputs is equal to other employee outcomes over inputs.
When someone fell that he / she gets from the work he / she contributed is unfairly with what others get for their work. If this happens the workers will felt negative inequity for what they get. Opposite of this felt positive inequity means that the person felt that he / she gets more than others from the work he / she contributes. In either way, individual will restore a sense of felt equity.
Researches with equity theory indicate that people, who felt overpaid, positive inequity, will try to increase the quantity or quality of their work. Those who fell underpaid, negative inequity will try to decrease the quality or quantity of their work. Possible ways to overcome that are changing work input, changing the outcomes, withdrawing from the situation, changing comparison points, distorting comparison, and trying to change the inputs or outputs of the comparison person. (Griffeth, R. , Vecchio, R. & Logan, J. ) Goal setting is the process of developing, negotiating, and formalizing specific outcome target or task objectives that a person is responsible for accomplishing. First, difficult goals are more likely to lead to higher performance that is less difficult ones.
The goal must be challenging but achievable. In other words set a goal very specific but difficult to attain, researches show that specific goal motivates better than do your best. If the goals are seen too difficult or impossible performance may suffer with a loss of motivation. Second, knowledge or feedback of results motivate people to higher performance, knowing results seems to encourage the setting of higher goals for future. Finally, goals are most likely to lead to higher performance when people have and are confident in the repaired task ability. It is important to note that an individual must have the necessary abilities and feel the confident in them as well.
A way of showing this to workers gives them a sense of ownership of the goal. (Olsen, J. ) Example for goal: An incentive program was run for the packaging machine operators to reduce the amount of give-away in each bag of chips. As an industry standard, Frito-Lay strives to maintain. 4 grams in give-away of product in their bags of chips. If they give away too much, they give away their profits. The Frito-Lay plant in Lubbock was running high on give-away, so they decided to run a contest for the operators to lower the amount.
The operator who was able to reduce the waste by 33 % in give-away product would win the competition Jason Gray, Department Manager of Frito-Lay (PEP) in Lubbock, Texas explains that the motivating factors arise from what is important to the employees. It may be a gift certificate to Wal-Mart so that they can help make some ends meet, or it could be a gift certificate for him and his wife to go out and eat. You have to know your technicians. You have to create motivation through something they enjoy because many times their salary is already spent by the time they get it. Frito-Lay give their employees a specific goal that they can achieve, it was not too heart but employees work hard to reach that goal to get the reword and be successful to win the competition. Company set a specific goal that helps the company to make profit and help worker to show them selves and this is a very good goal setting there is noting to break employees motivation to reach the goal.
Job design is the process of planning and specifying job tasks, as well as the work arrangements through which they are to be accomplish, jobs that people desire to perform because they are so intermittently appealing. Goal should be to create jobs that best fit the needs and talents of workers while also offering high performance opportunities for them organization. Job enlargement: give works to employee at the same level. In an early case example IBM introduced changes to machine operators jobs to include machine setting and inspection. In addition they introduced other wide-ranging changes in both the production system and the role of foremen and supervisors. However, workers often expect higher payment to compensate for learning these other jobs and for agreeing to changes in working practices.
The new jobs are often only a marginal improvement in terms of the degree of repetition, the skill demands and the level of responsibility; as a result workers have not always responded positively to such change. This was a good job enlargement but the company didnt know the exception of the workers, company give them new work arise to improve them selves and not to get bored from the same work. But employees get that like more work to do, idea is good, communication with workers is not so good. Company should explain them why are they giving more jobs at same level first to make employee to understand.
Job enrichment give employee works on upper level. Company give chance to their workers to work in more complex and upper levels and did that very good, employees didnt feel like more work however they like the enrichment they get new works and change from the daily routine work. Also they can see that they can do more and be proud of them selves to increase their trust to them selves. They get recognition by their work from company, those thins appeal to employees higher order needs for self-esteem. In conclusion I chose to give definitions and examples of the motivation theories, it was better that choosing one company or one story. By this way I found out much more ways to understand how to motivate people to work.
Motivating people to work is not with only money or rewards for what they achieve it is also about recognition, understanding and be friendly to employees. Let them know that you care about them, you are there for them to help, not to make things harder for them. Motivate employees is very important to get more out of them, and now I know that how to do that by analyzing many companies attempt to motivate their employees. Motivation is crucial in the process of management. Without any motivation as a manger of an organization will not be able to get as much from your employees as you may need. Motivation is the driving force in people.
It makes people feel committed to others, and feel responsible for the actions of an organization. When the goals are clear and challenging but doable, both individual and organization communicate clearly and well served. In short good job environment, continue improvement will allow job satisfaction and this would motivate employee to work better. Bibliography: Jerald Greenberg, Managing Behavior In Organizations, web - web - web Olsen, J. (1996) Motivation - Nothing would ever be created without it. web - Griffeth, R. , Vecchio, R. & Logan, J. (1989) Equity theory and interpersonal attraction. Journal of Applied Psychology, 74, 3 394 - 401.
Tubbs, M. & Ekeberg, S. (1991) The role of intentions in work motivation: implications for goal setting and research. Academy of Management Review, 16, 1, 180 - 199.
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Research essay sample on Frito Lay Equity Theory
