Work Motivation

• Set of energetic forces that originate internally and externally to initiate work-related behavior and to determine its form, direction, intensity, and duration

• Extrinsic Motivation: originates outside the individual (pay)

• Intrinsic Motivation: originates from inside the individual (enjoyment of work)

Flow

• Person can make themself happy or miserable, regardless of what is happening outside, just by changing the contents of consciousness

• The state of being completely involved in an activity for its own sake

• Need pressure to be outside of comfort zone

• Not challenged - bored

• Too challenged - exhaustion

• Comfort zone, fear zone, learning zone, growth zone

• Components:

  • Clear goals

  • Clear and immediate feedback

  • Concentrating and focused

  • Loss of self-consciousness

  • Distorted sense of time

  • Perfect equilibrium of skill and challenge

  • Sense of personal control

  • Activity becomes intrinsically rewarding

• Artistsfeel less creative doing commissioned work because of payment, more pay could also be unmotivating

Need-Based Theories

• Focus on which individual needs must be fulfilled for an employee to be properly motivated

• Hierarchy of Needs

  • Abraham Maslow 1943

  • Fulfillment Progression: basic needs must be met before higher level needs

  • Apple uses Maslow’s theory in business

    • Start with self-actualization

    • Getting brand loyalty

• ERG Theory

  • Clayton Alderfer 1972

  • 3 core needs:

    • Existence: physiological and security needs

    • Growth: esteem and self-actualization

    • Relatedness: social needs

  • Strive for existence, relatedness, and growth needs at the same time

  • Move between the needs in a nonlinear manner

  • Some empirical support

• Two Factor Theory

  • Frederick Herzberg 1966

  • Motivator-hygiene theory

  • Factors: do not motivate when present but may reduce

  • Motivator Factors: do motivate if they are present

  • Improving the motivator factors increases job satisfaction

  • Improving hygiene factors decreases job dissatisfaction

  • Job Dissatisfaction: influenced by hygiene factors

    • Working conditions

    • Coworker relations

    • Policies and rules

    • Pay

    • Supervisor quality

  • Job Satisfaction: influenced by motivator factors

    • Achievement recognition

    • Responsibility

    • Work itself

    • Advancement

    • Personal growth

  • How to use:

    • Give workers more autonomy and leads to greater sense of self achievement

    • Provide more feedback and if constructive and meaningful will build trust increasing motivation

    • Improve working conditions so that they are clean, safe, and aesthetically pleasing

    • Poll employees to find out worker’s views

    • Take a macro view of worker welfare to improve both factors to avoid low motivation

  • Identify what you’re good at not go straight into flaws

• Acquired Needs Theory

  • David McClelland 1985

  • Motivation is determined by the needs of the person and that each person has a different constellation of three needs:

    • Need for Achievement

      • Wanting to excel and succeed

      • High: must win at any cost, must be on top and receive credit

      • Low: fears failure, avoids responsibility

    • Need for Power

      • Wanting to influence others and make an impact

      • High: demands blind loyalty, doesn’t tolerate disagreement

      • Low: remains aloof, maintains social distance

    • Need for Affiliation

      • Wanting to have friendships, to feel accepted, and to engage with others

      • High: desires control of everyone and everything, exaggerates own position and resources

      • Low: dependent, subordinate, minimizes own position and resources

  • Each individual is thought to have a dominant need that motivated that individual more than others

  • Received the most consistent empirical support compared to other theories

• Self-Determination Theory

  • Deci and Ryan 1980s

  • Posits that motivation can be framed on a continuum of extrinsic to intrinsic motivation

  • Meta-analytic evidence suggests that both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are important for performance

  • Application to Work

    • Extrinsic rewards should be considered with caution - too few can lead to underappreciation, and too many may inhibit intrinsic motivation

    • Managers should support their employees’ need for satisfaction

    • When managers are high in autonomy, subordinates are high in autonomy leading to better performance

    • Good leadership encourages employees to set their own autonomously conceived and regulated goals, more likely to succeed than goals assigned to them by management

    • Intrinsic motivation works well with competence, autonomy, and relatedness

Process-Based Theories

• Focus on how motivation arises and what factors cause motivation to exist

• Include a cognitive component, suggesting that motivation may be a cognitive choice or a cognitive appraisal and self-regulation process

• Equity Theory:

  • John Stacey Adams 1965

  • Understand how individuals compare themselves to others when assessing fairness

  • Concerned with:

    • Inputs: things a person brings and contributes to the situation

    • Outputs: things a person gets from the organization

  • An individual compares their own ratio of outputs to inputs to a referent comparison of other person’s ratio of outputs to inputs

  • If perceived inequity exists, the individual will be motivated to resolve it

  • People strive for equity relative to others

  • People vary in their equity sensitivity:

    • Benevolents: tolerate lower ratio of outputs to inputs compared to others’ ratio

    • Equity Sensitives: prefer equal ratio of outputs to inputs as compared to others

    • Entitleds: prefer higher ratio of outputs to inputs compared to others’ ratio, putting in less effort and receiving more

  • Implications for HR

    • Want to achieve a balance between output-input ratio to reduce strain on HR resources, maintain high retention rates, and achieve workplace positivity

      • Regularly review worker performance, salaries, and benefits

      • Foster environment of honesty where workers can tell supervisors how they feel

      • Make swift and genuine effort to rebalance any inequity when it happens

      • Give new hires clear expectations regarding what kind of salary, promotion, and reward to expect

      • As a manager don’t fall victim to offering something that is not warranted

• Organizational Justice Theory

  • Originated from equity theory but differs in that it also focuses on the fairness of process and interpersonal treatment

  • 3 general forms of justice:

    • Distributed Justice: perceived fairness of the actual outcome of a decision or action

    • Procedural Justice: perceived fairness of policies and guidelines used to make decisions

    • Interpersonal Justice: perceived fairness of how people are treated within the organization

• Expectancy Theory

  • Victor Vroom 1964

  • Explains what motivates people to behave one way vs another

  • VIE theory

  • 3 core components:

    • Expectancy: expectation that effort = performance

    • Instrumentality: belief that performance = outcome

    • Valence: degree to which outcome or reward is valued

  • Met-analytic evidence indicates that the VIE components predict work-related outcomes

  • Managers find the theory to diagnose why an employee may lack motivation

    • Has the employee done this job effectively in the past?

    • Does an employee’s good performance lead to good outcomes in this organization?

    • Does this employee appear to value the reward for a job well done?