Motivation: From Concepts To Applications

The Job Characteristics Model

• Core Job Dimensions:
  • Skill Variety: The degree to which a job requires a variety of different activities so the worker can use several different skills and talents.
  • Task Identity: The degree to which a job requires completion of a whole and identifiable piece of work.
  • Task Significance: The degree to which a job has a substantial impact on the lives or work of other people.
  • Autonomy: The degree to which a job provides substantial freedom and discretion to the individual in scheduling the work and in determining the procedures to be used in carrying it out.
  • Feedback: The degree to which carrying out the work activities required by a job results in the individual obtaining direct and clear information about the effectiveness of his or her performance.
• Critical Psychological States:
  • Experienced Meaningfulness of the Work
  • Experienced Responsibility for Outcomes of the Work
  • Knowledge of the Actual Results of the Work Activities
• Personal and Work Outcomes:
  • High Internal Work Motivation
  • High-Quality Work Performance
  • High Satisfaction with the Work
  • Low Absenteeism and Turnover
• Employee Growth-Need Strength: Moderates the relationships.
• Motivating Potential Score (MPS):
  • The core dimensions of the JCM can be combined into a single predictive index.
  • MPS = \frac{\text{Skill Variety + Task Identity + Task Significance}}{3} \times \text{Autonomy} \times \text{Feedback}
• Evidence:
  • Evidence supports the JCM concept that the presence of a set of job characteristics does generate higher and more satisfying job performance.
  • A few studies have tested the JCM in different cultures, but the results aren’t very consistent.

Redesigning Jobs

• Job Rotation (Cross-Training):
  • Periodic shifting from one task to another.
  • Strengths: Reduces boredom, increases motivation, and helps employees better understand their work contributions.
  • Weaknesses: Creates disruptions, requires extra time for supervisors addressing questions and training time, and reduces efficiencies.
• Relational Job Design:
  • To make jobs more prosocially motivating:
    • Connect employees with the beneficiaries of their work.
    • Meet beneficiaries firsthand.

Alternative Work Arrangements

• Flextime:
  • Possible flextime staff schedules, offering flexibility in start and end times while maintaining core hours.
• Job Sharing:
  • Two or more people split a 40-hour-a-week job.
  • Declining in use.
  • Can be difficult to find compatible pairs of employees who can successfully coordinate the intricacies of one job.
  • Increases flexibility and can increase motivation and satisfaction when a 40-hour-a-week job is just not practical.
• Telecommuting:
  • Employees who do their work at home at least two days a week on a computer that is linked to their office (virtual office).
  • Some well-known organizations actively discourage telecommuting, but for most organizations, it remains popular.
  • Advantages:
    • Larger labor pool
    • Higher productivity
    • Improved morale
    • Reduced office-space costs
  • Disadvantages:
    • Employer:
      • Less direct supervision of employees.
      • Difficult to coordinate teamwork.
      • Difficult to evaluate non-quantitative performance.
    • Employee:
      • May not be noticed for his or her efforts.

Employee Involvement and Motivation

• Employee Involvement: A participative process that uses employees’ input to increase their commitment to the organization’s success.
• Examples of Employee Involvement Programs:
  • Participative management
  • Representative participation
• Participative Management:
  • Joint decision making.
  • Acts as a panacea for poor morale and low productivity.
  • Trust and confidence in leaders are essential.
  • Studies of the participation-performance have yielded mixed results.
• Representative Participation:
  • Workers are represented by a small group of employees who actually participate in decision-making.
  • Almost every country in Western Europe requires representative participation.
  • The two most common forms:
    • Works councils
    • Board representatives

Variable-Pay Programs and Motivation

• What to Pay:
  • Complex process that entails balancing internal equity and external equity.
  • Some organizations prefer to pay leaders by paying above market.
  • Paying more may net better-qualified and more highly motivated employees who may stay with the firm longer.
• How to Pay: Variable pay programs:
  • Piece-rate plans
  • Merit-based pay
  • Bonuses
  • Profit-sharing
  • Employee stock ownership plans
  • Earnings, therefore, fluctuate up and down.
• Piece-Rate Pay:
  • A pure piece-rate plan provides no base salary and pays the employee only for what he or she produces.
  • Limitation: not a feasible approach for many jobs.
  • The main concern for both individual and team piece-rate workers is financial risk.
• Merit-Based Pay:
  • Allows employers to differentiate pay based on performance.
  • Creates perceptions of relationships between performance and rewards.
  • Limitations:
    • Based on annual performance appraisals.
    • Merit pool fluctuates.
    • Union resistance.
• Bonuses:
  • An annual bonus is a significant component of total compensation for many jobs.
  • Increasingly include lower-ranking employees.
  • Many companies now routinely reward production employees with bonuses when profits improve.
  • Downside: employees’ pay is more vulnerable to cuts.
• Profit-Sharing Plans:
  • Organization-wide programs that distribute compensation based on some established formula centered around a company’s profitability.
  • Appear to have positive effects on employee attitudes at the organizational level.
  • Employees have a feeling of psychological ownership.
• Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP):
  • A company-established benefit plan in which employees acquire stock, often at below-market prices, as part of their benefits.
  • Increases employee satisfaction and innovation.
  • Employees need to psychologically experience ownership.
  • Can reduce unethical behavior.
• Evaluation of Variable Pay:
  • Do variable-pay programs increase motivation and productivity?
  • Generally, yes, but that doesn’t mean everyone is equally motivated by them.

Flexible Benefits

• Developing a Benefits Package:
  • Flexible benefits individualize rewards.
  • Allow each employee to choose the compensation package that best satisfies his or her current needs and situation.
  • Today, almost all major corporations in the United States offer flexible benefits.
  • However, it may be surprising that their usage is not yet global.

Intrinsic Rewards

• Employee Recognition Programs:
  • Organizations are increasingly recognizing that important work rewards can be both intrinsic and extrinsic.
  • Rewards are intrinsic in the form of employee recognition programs and extrinsic in the form of compensation systems.

Implications for Managers

• Recognize individual differences.
• Spend the time necessary to understand what’s important to each employee.
• Design jobs to align with individual needs and maximize their motivation potential.
• Use goals and feedback.
• You should give employees firm, specific goals, and they should get feedback on how well they are faring in pursuit of those goals.
• Allow employees to participate in decisions that affect them.
• Employees can contribute to setting work goals, choosing their own benefits packages, and solving productivity and quality problems.
• Link rewards to performance.
• Rewards should be contingent on performance, and employees must perceive the link between the two.
• Check the system for equity.
• Employees should perceive that experience, skills, abilities, effort, and other obvious inputs explain differences in performance and hence in pay, job assignments, and other obvious rewards.