· Define Motivation
· Early Theories of Motivation:
· Contemporary Theories of Motivation
· Integrating Contemporary Theories of Motivation
Motivation is defined as the individual’ intensity, direction and persistence of effort toward attaining a goal.
· Intensity: how hard a person tries.
· Direction: along with hard work, another important thing is direction.
· Persistence: it is to stay with a task (despite the difficulty or opposition) long enough to achieve the goal.
There are four employee’s motivation theories, which were formulated in 1950s. summary of each is discussed below.
Hierarchy of Needs Theory:
Abraham Maslow presented the best-know theory of motivation i.e., Maslow’ hierarchy of Needs
· Physiological: It includes body needs like hunger, shelter, thirst, sex etc.
· Safety: Protection and security from emotional and physical harm.
· Social: Acceptance, friendship, belongingness, affection etc.
· Esteem: Person’ internal factors like self-respect, achievement, autonomy and external factors like, recognition, status and attention.
· Self-Actualization: drive to become what a person is capable of becoming, includes achieving potential, growth and self-fulfillment.
Although there is no need, which is ever fully satisfied, if a need is substantially satisfied, then the next need becomes dominant.
Lower-order Needs: these needs are satisfied externally, which are Physiological and Safety needs.
Higher-order Needs: these needs are satisfied internally, which are social, esteem and self-actualization.
Theory X and Theory Y:
Theory X and Theory Y was proposed by Douglas McGregor. He presented two characteristics of human beings, one basically negative labelled as Theory X and basically positive labelled as Theory Y.
Under Theory X, managers believe that employees inherently dislike work and therefore must be directed or even forced to perform it.
Under Theory Y, managers believe that employees can view work as natural as rest or play, so they can learn to accept and take responsibility.
McGregor himself believed that Theory Y assumptions were more valid so participative decision making, challenging jobs, good group relations can maximize employee’ job motivation.
But no evidences confirm that, whether Theory X or Theory Y will surely lead to employee motivation.
Two-Factor Theory:
Fredrick Herzberg, A psychologist, asked people, what do they want from their jobs? In which situations they feel good or bad? That led Two-Factor Theory also known as motivation-hygiene theory.
Intrinsic factors like, achievement, recognition, responsibility, growth is related with job satisfaction.
On the other hand, extrinsic factors like salary, policy and administration, supervision and working conditions and relationship with others cause dissatisfaction and also named these factors as Hygiene Factors
Herzberg proposed that, the opposite of satisfaction is not dissatisfaction. The opposite of satisfaction is no satisfaction. If managers remove the factors that cause dissatisfaction may bring peace but not necessarily motivation for employees.
The theory had its critics,
· Herzberg’s methodology is limited because it relies on self-reports. When things work well then people take credit. On the other hand, they put the blame of failure on the extrinsic environment.
· The reliability of Herzberg’s methodology is questionable. Raters have to make clarifications, so they may contaminate the results by interpreting one response in one manner while treating a similar response differently.
· Complete measure of satisfaction was utilized by Herzberg. A person may dislike a part of job but still find the job is acceptable overall.
· Herzberg assumed a relationship between satisfaction and productivity, but he focused just at satisfaction. To make his research relevant, we must assume a strong relationship between satisfaction and productivity.
McClelland’ Theory of Needs:
David McClelland presented theory of Needs, as per him and his team there are three needs, which are:
Need for Achievement: it is to excel and achieve a set of standards in relationship.
Need for Power: it is to change to others behavior the way you want.
Need for Affiliation: it is the desire for having friendly and close interpersonal relationships.
High achievers perform best, when there is challenging task, this provides them satisfaction. They don’t like success through gambling means.
High power and high affiliation need is necessary for manager’ success. Best managers are high in need of power and lower in need for affiliation. High power may be important for manger’ effectiveness.
There are seven contemporary theories, these theories have one thing in common that, each one has valid supporting document but this don’t make these theories unquestionable.
Self-Determination Theory:
Self-Determination Theory: People like to have control over their actions, so anything that makes the previously enjoyed task (a freely chosen activity) feel more like an obligation will undermine motivation.
Much work on Self-Determination Theory led to Cognitive Evaluation Theory which says that extrinsic rewards will reduce intrinsic interest in a task.
Example: When you read a novel, because your teacher asks you to, your attitude toward reading that novel is due to external pressure. But when you keep reading that novel when the course is over then it will make you feel good and you can provide inner explanations.
The original authors of self-determination have acknowledged that extrinsic rewards such as praise and positive feedback about competence can even intrinsic motivation under specific situations, but deadlines and specific work standards reduce motivation, if people see them as forced.
The latest edition of self-determination theory is Self-Concordance, which says, how strongly people’s motives for perusing goals are consistent with their core values and interests.
Example: If person is pursuing goal due to an intrinsic interest, then he is more likely to achieve his goal and happier and satisfied than the one who is pursuing goal because of extrinsic reasons (status, money or other benefits).
For this reason, managers in the organization should provide both intrinsic as well as extrinsic incentives to employees to keep them motivated and need to make the work more interesting, provide recognition and make them grow.
Job Engagement:
Job engagement is the involvement of employee’ emotions, cognitive and physical energies in the job performance. It is to turn all the thoughts and behavior towards performing a particular job.
There are several things that keep employees involved in the job;
· One is, employees think, its meaningful to be engaged in the work, it is determined by job characteristics and access to sufficient resources.
· The likeliness of employee’ values and those of organizations.
· Leadership behavior also turn employee’ positive attitude towards job.
A critic says, there may be a dark side, like, more engagement in the job can raise work family-conflicts.
Goal-Setting Theory:
It tells the notable effects of goal specificity, challenge and feedback on performance. In 1960s, Edwin Locke intentions to achieve the goal is the major source of work motivation. Specificity itself seems to act as an internal stimulus.
Goal itself describe the employee how much effort is required and what needs to be done. Evidences have shown that difficult goals increase work performance than the easy goals, once a hard task is accepted, employee will put extra effort achieve it.
People perform better when they get feedback. Feedback leads to higher performance than getting no feedback, because feedback let people know the discrepancies between what has been done and what was expected. It guides behavior. Self-generated feedback is more powerful than the external one.
Why people are more motivated by difficult goals;
· Challenging goals get more attention and so help people to focus.
· Hard goals energize people to attain them, do you study hard for easy exams, obviously no.
· Third, when goals are difficult, people are persistent in trying to achieve them.
· Finally, hard and difficult goals let us to devise strategies to perform the job more effectively.
There are three other factors which effect the goals-performance relationship, these are goal commitment, task characteristics and national culture.
· Goal Commitment: Two things are, the individual wants to achieve the goal and he can achieve the goal. It occurs when employee have internal locus of control and when goals are self-set.
· Task Characteristics: if tasks are simpler, well understood and independent, these characteristics positively effects the performance
· National Culture: individual goals, difficulties and settings specific have different effects in different cultures. In collectivistic and high-power distance cultures, attainable reasonable goals are more motivated than the difficult ones.
Implementing Goal-Setting:
The very systematic approach to apply goal-setting is Management by Objective (MBO), it is to set goals, which are verifiable, tangible and measurable.
MBO works from top down as well as bottom up i.e., hierarchy. It provides specific performance objectives.
Four ingredients are common to MBO programs, which are:
· Participation in decision making
· Goal specificity
· An explicit time period
· Performance feedback
Self-Efficacy Theory:
Self-efficacy theory also known as Social Learning Theory or Social Cognitive Theory. It is the belief of an individual that he or she is capable of performing a task. Higher the self-efficacy in an individual, the more he is confident about his abilities to achieve the goal.
Self-efficacy can create a positive spiral, where individuals with high efficacy engage themselves in the tasks and in return their performance increases which increases efficacy further.
Individuals with high self-efficacy respond to negative feedback with more effort and motivation and vice versa in case of individuals with low self-efficacy.
Managers can help their employees attain high level of self-efficacy by assigning difficult tasks to employees, in this way employees will think that managers have trust in them, this thing stimulate psychological process in which employee is more confident and so they will set higher goals for their own performance.
Trainings can also increase self-efficacy, employees with high self-efficacy will get more benefit of such trainings.
The researcher of this self-efficacy theory, Albert Bandura has suggested four ways to increase self-efficacy.
· Enactive mastery
· Vicarious modeling
· Verbal persuasion
· Arousal
Enactive mastery: it is to gain relevant experience with job or task. If the employee has successfully performed task in the past, he will be more confident of performing the task in future.
Vicarious modeling: becoming more confident when you see someone else doing the same task. Example: when your friend loose weight, it increases your confidence that you can lose weight too.
Verbal persuasion: you become more confident when someone persuade you that you have the required skill to be successful. Example: motivational speakers use these tactics to motivate the audience.
Arousal: arousal increases self-efficacy and leads to an energized state and so he performs better.
Managers can use verbal persuasion through Pygmalion effect or Galatea effect. It is the form of self-fulfilling prophecy in which believing something can make it true.
Reinforcement Theory:
It says behavior is a function of its consequences.
Reinforcement can be anything which strengthens or encourage behavior. It includes specific tangible rewards, situations and events. Reinforcement theorists view behavior as environmentally caused.
This theory ignores the inner state of individual and focusses on just what happens when he or she performs some action. It provides a powerful means of analyzing what controls behavior.
Operant Conditioning Theory: it says, people learn to behave, to get something they want or to avoid something they don’t want. Reinforcements strengthens a behavior and increases the possibility; it will be repeated.
Rewards play important role in the repeat occurrence of the same behavior, and the behavior that is punished or not encouraged is less likely to be repeated.
In its pure form, this theory ignores attitudes, expectations, feelings and other cognitive variables known to effect behavior.
Behaviorism: Behavior follows stimuli in a relatively unthinking manner.
People can learn when they are told something or when they observe what happens to others. We learn a lot by observing our parents, teachers, film and drama producers, peers etc. this view, that people do learn by observing others or through direct experience is called as Social-Learning Theory. This theory acknowledges the effect of perception and observational learning. Individuals respond to consequences the way they perceived and defined.
Four processes determine the influence of different models of an individual are:
· Attentional Process: People learn from the model which they find identical to their own personality, attractive, repeatedly available and important to them.
· Retention Process: the model is more influenced if the model’s actions are recallable when the model is not readily available.
· Motor Reproduction Process: if a person has seen a new behavior by observing the model, the watching should be converted into doing. This model says that a person can perform the modeled activities.
· Reinforcement Processes: individuals will exhibit the modeled behavior if rewarded with positive incentives. Positively reinforced behaviors are learned better, given more attention, and preformed more often
Equity Theory/ Organizational Justice:
Employees compare their outcome-input ratio with their colleagues. If they perceive their ratio to be equal as of others, a state of equity exists, they then find that situation is fair and justice prevails. When employee find this ratio unequal, then he feels unrewarded and experience equity tension which leads to anger. And in the last, if employee find himself as overrewarded in comparison with others, then this tension creates guilt and is motivate to correct it.
Four different comparisons are:
Self-Inside: the experience of employee at different positions in the same organization.
Self-Outside: the experience of employee in a situation or position outside the current organization.
Other-Inside: another individual or group of individuals inside the employee’ current organization.
Other-Outside: another individual or group of individuals outside the employee’ current organization.
Employees may compare themselves with colleagues, friends, neighbors, co-workers etc., Four moderating variables are gender, level in the organization, amount of education and professionalism and length of tenure.
While comparing both men and women prefer same-sex comparisons. Reason behind are the stereotypes, like, women’ work is less valuable, women are less committed to the organizations etc.
According to equity theory, if employees find inequity will make one of following six choices;
Some of the above-mentioned propositions were supported but others haven’t. For example: People have more tolerance for overpayment inequities than of underpayment inequities.
Organizational Justice: employees perceive organizations the way organizations distribute rewards are fair or not.
Equity theory focused on Distributive Justice, Employees analyze fairness of amount rewards among different individuals and who received them. It also means, how much an employee is get paid relatively to what he should be paid.
Very rare people perform mathematical calculations of their inputs relative to their outcomes, most of the people base distributive judgements on feelings or emotional reactions.
Procedural Justice: the perceived fairness of the process used to determine the distribution of rewards. How much employees get paid relative to how much should they be paid, along with this, how they get paid is also important.
Two key elements of Procedural justice are:
· Process control: it is the opportunity to present your point of view to decision makers about the desired results.
· Explanations: these are the clear reasons provided by the management for results.
Employees will find such process as fair, if they have some control over the outcomes and were given an adequate explanation about why the outcome has occurred. So, for this, managers need to be Consistent, Unbiased, make decision on Accurate Information and is Open to Appeals.
Procedural justice become more important where distributive justice lack, and it make sense, if we don’t get what we deserve or want then we ask Why.
Interactional Justice: it is the individual’ perception to which degree he or she is treated with respect, concern and dignity. When people are not treated with justice they simply retaliate in any form.
Among these three forms of justice, distributive justice is related with organizational commitment and satisfaction, like salaries.
Procedural justice is related with job performance, job satisfaction, withdrawal from organization, employee trust and citizenship behavior.
And there are very less evidences found about interactional justice.
This equity culture has gained huge praise in US as they are highly sensitive to equity in reward allocation.
In collectivist culture, employees keenly look for fulfillment of individual needs as well as their performance.
Materialistic cultures see cash rewards and compensation attractive.
Relational cultures find social rewards and status as important outcome.
Meta-analytic evidence finds that people of both individualistic and collectivistic culture prefer equitable distribution of rewards. Among nations across the world the same basic principles of procedural justice are respected. And workers around the globe expect rewards distribution based upon skills, performance and on seniority basis.
Expectancy Theory:
Victor Vroom presented Expectancy theory; it is widely accepted explanation of motivation. It also has its critics but most of the evidences show support.
This theory says that “Strength of our tendency to act in a certain way depends upon the strength of our expectations of the given outcome and its attractiveness.”
Example: employees put more effort when they believe that this effort will lead to good performance appraisal (bonuses, salary increase, promotion etc.).
This theory focusses on following three relationships:
· Effort-Performance relationship: the perception of employee that putting given amount of effort will lead to performance
· Performance-Reward relationship: the belief that, performing at a particular level will lead to achievement of desired outcome.
· Rewards-personal goals relationship: do the organizational rewards satisfy’ individual’ personal goals.
This theory gives the reason, why many workers don’t put their maximum efforts in the jobs. For better understanding let’s convert these three relationships into three questions.
If I Put maximum effort, would it be recognized in my performance appraisal? There is a possibility that set standards for performance appraisal are loyalty, courage or initiative, and putting maximum efforts are not under considered. Second, employee may think boss have personal grudges with him, so these are some examples which shows, the likelihood of getting a good performance appraisal is low.
If is received performance appraisal, would it lead to organizational rewards? There is a possibility that organizational rewards are based on seniority, being cooperative or “kissing up” to boss. So, employees find performance-reward relationship as weak and demotivating.
If I am given rewards, do these rewards will attract me? There is a possibility that employee wanted promotion but was given pay raise. Second, most of the managers don’t have the authority to reward his subordinates, third managers wrongly assume every employee want same benefits. In either case, employee motivation is sub-maximized.
Critics:
The theory is more idealistic, but is of very limited use.
It works where individuals clearly perceive effort-performance and performance-reward linkages.
This theory works well if organization rewards employees for performance regardless of seniority or skill level and job difficulty.
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