Work Motivation: Principles and Applications

Damodar Suar

After completing this chapter, you will be able to

Understand the relevance of work motivation. Define motivation and its process. Identify the different principles or theories of

motivation and their drawbacks. Apply and extend the principles to

management of motivation. Motivate yourself and others

Why Motivation? In two primary sectors-- industrial and agricultural-- of Indian economy,

motivation of the people and productivity are concomitant variables. Productivity or performance outcome of people: (a) individual’s attributes such as skill, knowledge, experience, etc. (b) his/her willingness to expand necessary effort to perform, and (c) support structure (such as technical, financial, maintenance support in industrial sector; or technical know-how, credit, irrigation support in agricultural sector). As a corollary to this, in a developing country like India (a) obsolete technology, poor infrastructure like road, electricity, and communication, etc., and (b) the cheap but a poorly motivated or an unwilling workforce to work hard. Hence, challenging puzzles are changing low-level of motivation, and sustaining high motivation.

Some industrialists and entrepreneurs feel that business is technology- or knowledge-driven. For example, about 70% of the cost of a semiconductor microchip is shared by knowledge and only 12% by labour (Johnson, 1987). Production control is largely out of the employees’ hands. With increasing number of unemployed people, those employed are bound to work for security and earning. Such arguments ignore employees’ creativity, turnover, absenteeism, morale, strikes, discontent and the like that have their impact on production. However, effects of motivation on performance are greatly felt as one moves towards a service-oriented economy which is in order at present.

Motivation is derived from the Latin word ‘movere’ which means ‘to move’. Motivation relates to the force, stimulus, or influence that guides people to do the things they do. It is the call for action or behavior.

The incidence: Miloni in Italy. First, motivation is a psychological force that contributes to a person’s

degree of commitment. It includes drives and desires for goal attainment that regulate the direction, intensity, and persistence of human action.

Second, desires and drives cause behavior, but they may be the result of behavior. For example, a person’s desire for accomplishment may be made keener by the satisfaction gained from achieving a preferred goal or it may be dulled by failure.

Third, motivation is not independent of environment. People in a business that has developed a reputation for excellence, quality, and service tend to be motivated to contribute to this reputation.

Fourth, what motivates one individual may not be the same for another. As money may be the most important motivator for some people, it may be praise, recognition, and interesting nature of work for others.

Fifth, motivation of each person changes from time to time even if s/he may continue to behave in the same way.

Six, motivation of people is beyond the carrot and the stick. Lastly, motivation is in need of periodic replenishment.

What is Work Motivation?

Common Features

Motivated people transform their lethargy to energy, desire to determination, aspiration to achievement, and non-utilization of their skill, knowledge, and attitude to the utilization of the same. They take responsibility, put efforts willingly, give their best, adhere to quality, show performance, and feel committed to the organization they serve. Contrarily, absenteeism, increased accidents, wastage of raw materials, indiscipline, violent behavior, tardiness, sloppy work habits, apathy, and errors in assembling materials, filing, and reporting are symptoms of demotivated people. Once these symptoms surface, executives must take steps through training, counseling, rewards, and other means to change the dysfunctional behavior. When employees exhibit motivated behavior, the executives can create conditions to sustain such behavior till organizational objectives are achieved.

Motivational Process  

Needs/Drives Expectations

Needs, drives, and Expectation Tension Overt/covert behavior Goal

Tension reduction and satisfaction

Barrier

FC DC

Some Commonly Used Ego-defense Mechanisms

Aggression : Destructive behaviour, verbal or physical, against an individual or object.

Displacement : Discharging pent-up feelings, usually of hostility, on objects less dangerous than those which initially aroused the emotions.

Rationalization: Justifying one’s behaviour by giving false reasons in place of true reasons.

Fantasy : Gratifying frustrated desires by imaginary achievements. Repression : Preventing painful or dangerous thoughts from entering

consciousness. Projection : Placing blame for difficulties upon others. Identification : Increasing self-worth identifying with a prestigious

person or institution. Compensation: Covering up weakness by emphasizing desirable trait or

making-up frustration in one area by overgratification in another.

Theory: Content (what), Process (how)

   

Safety needs 

Physiological needs

 

Self-

actualization

Esteem needs

Belongingness and love needs

 

Figure 5.3 Pyramid representing Maslow’s hierarchy

Criticism First, Hofstede (1980,1983b) points out that Maslow’s theory

describes the value system of middle-class Americans. People in cultures that have different value systems may be concerned about satisfaction of belongingness and esteem needs before security needs become a major focus.

Second, people may not always move up in hierarchy. By downsizing, natural catastrophes, and technological disasters, people’s need for esteem, belongingness, and security may quickly fall and remain unsatisfied.

Third, Arthasastra warns against such satisfaction and suggests restricted need satisfaction. When no restraint is exercised by the individual, sense needs may turn into nonsense needs, survival needs turn into lust and greed, and psychological and sociological needs into pride and arrogance. The needs become personal weaknesses, which end up in wrong decisions and choices. Often, the downfall of people and business empires has occurred due to such weaknesses (Sharma, 1996, p. 105).

Herzberz’s Two-factor Theory

Herzberg (1966) collected information from 200 engineers and accountants from Pittsburgh area in USA.

Applying ‘critical incidents’ technique, the respondents were asked to describe “the situations when they felt exceptionally good or bad about their jobs, either in present jobs or the jobs they have had.”

Analysis of responses indicated that when people talked about good feelings or satisfaction, they mentioned the factors intrinsic in the job-- achievement, recognition, challenging work, responsibility, and growth or advancement. These were the factors inherent in the job that people experienced while doing the job. When people talked about bad feelings or dissatisfaction, they mentioned the factors external or extrinsic to the job. Included in these factors were (a) environmentally-mediated extrinsic job factors-- company policy and administration, working conditions, salary, personal life, status, and security, and (b) interpersonally-mediated extrinsic job factors-- relationship with supervisors, peers, and subordinates.

Criticism First, when ‘critical incident technique’ was not used to gather data, the

dual-factor theory was not confirmed. Second, these two factors were not independent constructs. Job

satisfaction as well as dissatisfaction of some employees resided either in a few or all extrinsic job factors, of other employees either in a few or all intrinsic job factors, and of still others in a combination of both.

Third, extrinsic factors were important to lower-level employees whereas intrinsic factors were important to higher-level employees. Notwithstanding the limitations, this theory provided a micro-view to understand motivation of employees in organized sectors and suggested work-restructuring interventions.

ERG Theory

A condensed need theory of Alderfer (1972) contained three groups of core needs-- existence, relatedness, and growth, and was called ERG theory. The theory demonstrated that (a) more than one need can be operative at the same time, and (b) if the gratification of higher-level need is stifled, the desire to satisfy lower-level needs increases. While in Maslow’s hierarchy, one can go up, in Alderfer’s theory one can move up and down the hierarchy depending on time and situations. The three theories described so far can be compared (Figure)

Comparison of Needs

Self-actualization needs

Esteem needs

Love needs

Security needs

Physiological needs

Intrinsic needs

Extrinsic needs

Relatedness need

Growth need

Existence

McClelland’s Theory

McClelland and his associates (McClelland, 1961; McClelland & Burnham, 1995; McClelland & Winter, 1969) specified three needs of people:

(a) need for achievement, (b) need for affiliation, and (c) need for power. These needs are acquired and taught, therefore, can be changed. These

needs vary from person to person. One might have a strong need for achievement, and another for affiliation.

First, in recent times, when organizations are made flat and decentralized, need for achievement rather than the need for power has once again surfaced to contribute to managerial success. This was found in many subsidiaries of PepsiCo. A constant concern for improvement and running the business in a cost-efficient way characterized successful managers.

Second, institutional managers, having high social competency and self-control have been found to emerge as world-class managers separated from the mediocre ones (McClelland & Burnham, 1995).

Process Theory Adam’s Equity Theory Whenever two individuals exchange anything, there is a possibility that one or

both of them will feel that the exchange is inequitable or unfair (Adams, 1965). Such is the case when a person exchanges his/her services for pay.

The inputs from a person’s side of exchange are his/her effort, education, experience, training, competence, and seniority. On the other side are an individual’s receipts or outcomes such as pay, promotion, recognition, seniority benefits, and others.

Persons compare their job inputs and outcomes with those of others and then respond so as to eliminate any inequities. Inequity exists for a person whenever the person perceives that the ratio of his outcome (Op) to inputs (Ip), and the ratio of others outcome (Oa) to others input (Ia) are unequal.

This can happen when employees compare themselves with friends, coworkers, and colleagues in the same organization, or from different organizations. A condition of inequity exists for the person, when:

Equity

Person’s outcomes < Others’ outcomes (inequity due to being underrewarded)Person’s inputs Others’ inputs

Person’s outcomes > Others’ outcomes (inequity due to being overrewarded) Person’s inputs Others’ inputs  A condition of equity exists, when:Person’s outcomes = Others’ outcomes Person’s inputs Others’ inputs

The magnitude of inequality would decide the extent of dissatisfaction, anger, and tension in the person. To reduce inequity and achieve a stable state, people use different tactics. Some persons may change their inputs (either increase or decrease productivity or the quality of work), change their outcomes, or distort their inputs and outcomes cognitively, whereas others may quit the job, obtain a transfer, remain absent, force referent coworkers to change their behaviour, or change the comparison target. An employee who perceives being underpaid may reduce the inequity by exerting less effort, another failing to receive a promotion may reduce inequity by justifying that the previous job involved too much responsibility, and still another comparing with high performing referent colleagues may reduce the inequity by influencing them to change their behaviour.

Expectancy Theory

In expectancy theory (Vroom, 1964), the force to act (F) in a certain way is a product of expectancy (E) and valence (V). Expectancy refers to the extent to which an individual believes that a certain action will result in a particular outcome. Expectancy can take a probability value from 0 (absolutely no belief that an outcome will follow a particular action: hard work would not result in promotion) to 1(complete certainty that an outcome will follow a particular action: hard work would definitely result in promotion). Valence is the attractiveness of an outcome, and may take on theoretical values from +1 to –1. A person may be strongly attracted to a particular outcome, such as promotion, and may assign promotion a high positive value. Or, the person may avoid strongly the outcome such as being fired and may assign a negative valence to promotion.

To put it simply, motivation to work is determined by (a) what people expect as rewards for their efforts, and (b) the importance or value of rewards to them.

Goal-setting Theory One path to performance is motivated by goal (Locke, 2000; Locke & Latham,

1990). A specific, important, and difficult but attainable goal, when accepted, leads to higher performance than a general, unimportant, and easy goal. Giving a salesperson a specific quota, a worker an exact number of units to produce, or instructing a trucker to make a fixed number of trips between Delhi and Bombay would result in outperforming their counterparts with the generalized goal of ‘do your best’. One puts more efforts to accomplish an important and harder goal than to those which entail something unimportant. Also, objective and timely feedback on how well one is progressing towards the goal increases performance than does non feedback. People perform better in accepted goal arrived at through participation than assigned goal. When people participate in setting the goal, they set a difficult goal and feel committed to act upon it than upon an assigned goal.

Social Identity Theory

Motivation stems from the ‘self-categories’ (Haslam, Powell, & Turner, 2000; van Knippenberg, 2000). When people categorize themselves in terms of personal identities (‘I’), that are different from other members of an in group, they feel motivated to satisfy personal needs that promote their personal identities as individuals. If personal identity is salient, it will be associated with needs to self-actualize and to enhance personal self-esteem through personal advancement and growth. When people categorize themselves in terms of social identities (‘we’), that are shared with other members of an in group but not with members of an out group, they feel motivated to satisfy social needs that promote their social identity as group members. Social identification reflects a depersonalized self-categorization. If social identity is salient, it will be associated with the need to enhance group-based self-esteem through a sense of relatedness, and achievement of group goals. If the identification with the organization or its subunit (team, work group) whose goal is high performance, is salient, group members will release effort for high performance.

Management Of Work Motivation: Application of Principles

Satisfaction of lower or

higher-order needs

Employee Work

OrganizationalStructure

Other(Interpersonal)

Individual

OrganizationalGoals

Objectives

Self-motivation

Most of the researches on motivation are conducted in western countries in ‘factory-type’ organizations, where the legacy of machine metaphor dominates. Man is a cog in the wheel, is more like a robot, whose switch must be put on and off administering rewards and punishments.

Also, dominate themes in content and process theories, developed in western culture, are that employees work harder and smarter only when they are given specific economic rewards such as hiking pay, bonus, performance-based compensation, and so on.

The self-conscious human being is beyond this input-output calculus. We have seen instances where everything seems the same to everybody. But one person decides and invests his/her energies and efforts, while others just hang back. In the same laboratory, with the same level of education, experience, competency, and with the same infrastructure; why do few scientists surpass their colleagues? Why do some employees outperform their peers under the same operating conditions? A person’s ‘will to do the work’ will nip many of the problems in the bud. He will find out ways and means to accomplish the goal without pointing out ungenuine constraints, lack of resources, non cooperation of colleagues, etc. The annual calendar of Tata Steel for its employees in 1995 rightly mentioned at the top, “will to work, will to win”.

Read the success stories of leaders, executives, reformers, and others available in books, journals, internet sites, and business magazines. Set a moderately difficult, challenging, but achieveable goal considering your competency in accordance with Locke’s goal-setting. The set goal needs to match with your passion as in Maslow’s self-actualization and to be aligned with organizational goal. If the goal is too difficult, it becomes impossible to succeed, and creates a negative attitude towards the goal. If the goal is too easy, it kills motivation to work hard. A self-set difficult goal affects attention, effort, and persistence.

Break down the long-term goal into short-term goals to make each goal more specific rather than general. Remember the goal everyday. Decide the priority of goals. Set the deadline for accomplishment of each sub-goal. Try with the easiest short-term goal. Initiate actions and improve your skill, knowledge, and attitude to accomplish short-term goals successively.

Get the feedback based on your actions and new expertise to assess how well you are progressing towards short-term goal. With every success, reward yourself or celebrate. Continue similarly with other short-term goals till you accomplish the long-term goal (Box 5.4). This process is similar to plan, do, check, and act.

Awareness and Inspiration :In the great war of Kurukshetra, Arjun was gripped with despair and despondency and was reluctant to slay the noble-minded elders and his kinsmen. Sri Krishna with persuasive and fair logic made Arjun aware of his duties and inspired him. Sri Krishna mentioned: either killed in battle, you will attain heaven or being victorious, you will enjoy the earth. In either case, you will only be a gainer. Performing one’s duty in warfield is the only way to salvation. Such dialogues leading to awareness and inspiration from Sri Krishna elevated Arjun to a higher plane leading to action (Vireswarananda, 1948). So can managers or superiors do to transform the employees from inaction to action.

NGO : Critical awareness

Goal-setting for Self-motivation

Interpersonal Level

Mapping the characteristics of Indian employees--dependency, preference for hierarchy, personalized relationship, familial ethos, and leisure ethics-- Sinha (1980) had developed a leadership style similar to the above description. It is called ‘Nurturant-task’ (NT) style.

Luthar, Lee Iaccoca leading by example Communication: Normally, letters, memos, notices, fax, e-mail, and phones are used to

disseminate information. First, in many multi-location and large organizations, or high-tech business, computer networking creates the possibility for dissemination of transparent and accurate information. Second, collectivists like social gatherings and collective decisions. Accordingly, through a number of meetings with different departments, the authorities can provide information on organization’s objectives, operations, and requirements so that employees can ask questions, interpret business information, and become aware to fulfill organizational objectives. This can induce social identity with organizational objectives. However, only in a climate of trust, support, openness, collaboration, and empathy, can employees communicate their ideas and views without fear and participate actively in the meetings.

Interaction: Indians show fatalistic attitude, and low self-esteem in interpersonal work-context. In the language of transactional analysis, their activities remain more akin to child (‘felt concept’: help seeker) and parent (‘taught concept’: advice giver) ego states than to adult ego state (‘thought concept’: data collector, analyzer, and problem solver). If the employee, remaining in child ego state, is seeking help and not taking the initiative to solve problems, the manager as a mentor can intervene to solve the problem. The manager can encourage the employee to analyze and solve similar problems in future independently. The aim is to change the employee from dominating child or parent ego state to adult ego state so that s/he can analyze causes, find out resources, solve problems, and implement solutions.

Organizational Level Reward System The economic and non-economic rewards serve to attract, retain and motivate employees. In

accordance with reinforcement theory, a behaviour that is rewarded has a high chance of being repeated in future for further reward.

Motivation can be enhanced if rewards are administered considering their equity, contingency, tangibility and immediacy. In interdependent jobs, group-based reward can be used to motivate the group doing the job. The reward system becomes salient, if employees are involved in designing of reward system and it is openly communicated to them.

Work Design:Vertical collectivists emphasize group assignment and teamwork controlled by top management (Erez, 1997). Following ‘scientific management approach’, for routine, low tech, and high interdependence jobs, the jobs can be broken into simplest components, and a group of six to eight people can be assigned the tasks under a supervisor, such as in packing, despatch, order entry, filing, etc. It is the expanding of jobs horizontally or job enlargement.

Taking clues from Herzberg’s theory, job enrichment (Hackman & Oldham, 1980) focuses on objective attributes of task, namely skill variety (the degree to which a job requires a variety of skills), task identity (the degree to which a job involves the completion of a whole or an identifiable piece of work), task significance (the degree to which the task has substantial impact on other people’s lives), autonomy (the degree to which the job provides freedom, independence, and discretion), and job feedback (the degree to which the job directly provides information of effective performance). The person would react to these objective characteristics in terms of changes in three critical psychological states-- experienced meaningfulness of work (affected by skill variety, task identity, and task significance), experienced responsibility of work outcomes (affected by autonomy) and knowledge of results (affected by feedback). These three psychological states are presumed to lead to personal and work outcomes such as high internal work motivation, high quality of work performance, high work satisfaction and to low absenteeism and turnover. These ultimate affects are moderated by employees’ strength of growth needs.

Socio-technical systems design

Performance Appraisal Performance appraisal has two purposes. First, it helps employees to know where

they stand, their successes and failures, and how they can improve and develop. Second, it helps the administrators in wage and salary determination, career planning, transfers, promotions, man-job matching, etc. Various methods used in appraisal such as graphic rating scale, critical incident method, forced choice method, field review, and work standard method, are not free from errors and biases. Performance appraisal retains importance only in the context of key performance areas on which the person will be evaluated, such as evaluation of a salesperson’s performance on target realization, and a professor on teaching, research, training, and administrative aspects.

The subordinates can be involved in reviewing their performance against specific targets and standards agreed upon jointly by superior and subordinates. With this, subordinates can gain insights into how they can improve their performance. Counseling is a part of performance review to help subordinates in developing strengths and overcoming weaknesses.

Executives are responsible for overall functioning and their roles affect multiple stakeholders. They need to be evaluated adopting 360 0 appraisal-- by themselves, subordinates, colleagues, and superiors. This will provide a mirror to see them in the context of stakeholders, and generate scope and desire for personal change.

Participative Decision Making and Problem Solving

Management by Objectives (MBO), Quality Circles (QC), and Total Quality Management (TQM) are participative goal-setting, decision-making and problem-solving techniques that rest on goal-setting theory.

Organizational Survey:Efforts should be made periodically through questionnaires to assess the employees’ attitudes and perceptions about different aspects of the organization--organizational culture, leadership, welfare facilities, expectations of employees, etc. Then this information can be processed, shared with employees using graphs and figures to analyse problems, identify trouble spots, create solutions, and develop action plans. In such sharing, representatives of management can mention the constraints whenever required for revision, mutual acceptance and implementation of action plans. This method is problem-focused and solution-centered. Thus the management can act from a position of understanding and knowledge rather than one of uncertainty and ignorance. Implementation of action plans reduces the resistance to change and spurs up the motivational level of employees.

.Creating Opportunities & Removing Obstacles

.Training

.Organizational Survey

Conclusion: Cultures shapes the mental programmes: Matching

national and organizational culture to leadership styles, job design, performance appraisal, reward system ,etc.

A basket handful of choices. The technique needs depend on the situation.

Self-motivation based on introspection and change in mind set is the most effective tool.

THANK YOU