Motivation: the psychological processes that underlie the direction, intensity, and persistence of behavior or thought.
Direction pertains to what an individual is attending to at a given time; intensity represents the amount of effort being invested in the activity; and persistence represents for how long that activity is the focus of one’s attention.
There are two types of motivation: extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation.
Extrinsic motivation: results from the potential or actual receipt of external rewards such as recognition, money, or a promotion.
Intrinsic motivation: occurs when an individual is inspired by the positive internal feelings that are generated by doing well.
Motivation is the fuel that drives results and performance.
Content theories of motivation: focus on identifying internal factors such as needs and satisfaction that energize employee motivation.
Examples: McGregor’s Theory X & Y, Maslow’s Need Hierarchy
Process theories of motivation: focus on explaining the process by which internal factors and situational characteristics influence employee motivation.
Examples: Expectancy Theory, Equity Theory
The answer is C. Persistence. Persistence represents how long an activity will be the focus of attention.
Douglas McGregor formulated two contrasting sets of assumptions about human nature in Theory X and Theory Y.
Theory X: a pessimistic view of employees which contends that they dislike work, must be monitored, and can only be motivated with rewards and punishment.
Theory Y: a modern and positive set of assumptions about people at work which contends that they are self-engaged, committed, responsible, and creative.
Abraham Maslow proposed that motivation is a function of five basic needs: physiological, safety, love, esteem, and self-actualization.
Figure 5-2 lists the five levels in Maslow’s model.
Maslow contended that the five needs are arranged in a prepotent hierarchy, and he believed that human needs generally emerge in a predictable stair-step fashion.
Once a need is satisfied, it activates the next higher need in the hierarchy until the highest need, the need for self-actualization is activated.
Because employees need more than a paycheck to maintain motivation, organizations offer other benefits such as health care benefits, filling a physiological need. Some companies go beyond traditional organizational benefits. For example, SC Johnson has an onsite employee concierge service to
help employees with some of life’s chores. Concierges send packages and flowers, pick up groceries, shop for the best deals on car insurance, take employees’ cars in for service, and even stand in line for concert tickets.
Since a satisfied need may lose its motivational potential, managers are advised to motivate employees by devising programs or practices aimed at satisfying emerging or unmet needs.
Acquired needs theory: states that three needs—achievement, affiliation, and power—are the key drivers of employee behavior.
David McClelland’s theory presented in Figure 5.3 directs managers to drive employee motivation by appealing to three basic needs:
Need for achievement: the desire to excel, overcome obstacles, solve problems, and rival and surpass others.
Need for affiliation: the desire to maintain social relationships, to be liked, and to join groups.
Need for power: the desire to influence, coach, teach, or encourage others to achieve.
People vary in the extent that they possess these needs, and often one need dominates the other two.
People motivated by the need for achievement prefer working on challenging, but not impossible, tasks or projects and like to be rewarded for their efforts.
People motivated by the need for affiliation like to work in teams and in organizational climates characterized as cooperative and collegial, and they tend to avoid conflict.
People with a high need for power like to be in charge, and they enjoy coaching and helping others develop.
Self-determination theory: assumes that three innate needs influence our behavior and well-being: competence, autonomy, and relatedness.
This theory focuses on needs that we are born with which are proposed to produce intrinsic motivation, which in turn is expected to enhance task performance.
Competence need: the need to feel efficacious; the desire to feel qualified, knowledgeable, and capable to complete an act, task, or goal.
Autonomy need: the need to feel independent to influence one’s environment; the desire to have freedom and discretion in determining what you want to do and how you want to do it.
Relatedness need: the need to be connected with others; the desire to feel part of a group, to belong, and to be connected with others.
Managers can apply this theory by trying to create work environments that support and encourage the opportunity to experience competence, autonomy, and relatedness.
Managers can provide tangible resources, time, contacts, and coaching to improve employee competence.
Managers can empower employees and delegate meaningful assignments and tasks to enhance feelings of autonomy.
Many companies use fun and camaraderie to foster relatedness.
The answer is A. Three innate needs – competence, autonomy, and relatedness.
Motivator-hygiene theory: proposes that job satisfaction and dissatisfaction arise from two different sets of factors—satisfaction comes from motivating factors and dissatisfaction from hygiene factors.
To improve motivation, managers can improve the motivators that drive satisfaction and improve hygiene factors that otherwise reduce job satisfaction.
Hygiene factors: cause a person to move from a state of no dissatisfaction to dissatisfaction and include company policy and administration, technical supervision, salary, interpersonal relations with one’s supervisor, and working conditions.
Motivating factors/motivators: cause a person to move from a state of no satisfaction to satisfaction and include achievement, recognition, characteristics of the work, responsibility, and advancement.
Herzberg proposed that individuals will experience the absence of job dissatisfaction when they have no grievances about hygiene factors and that managers can motivate individuals by incorporating motivators into an individual’s job.
Insights from Herzberg’s theory allow managers to consider the dimensions of both job content and job context so they can manage for greater job satisfaction overall.
Motivator-hygiene theory: proposes that job satisfaction and dissatisfaction arise from two different sets of factors—satisfaction comes from motivating factors and dissatisfaction from hygiene factors.
To improve motivation, managers can improve the motivators that drive satisfaction and improve hygiene factors that otherwise reduce job satisfaction.
Hygiene factors: cause a person to move from a state of no dissatisfaction to dissatisfaction and include company policy and administration, technical supervision, salary, interpersonal relations with one’s supervisor, and working conditions.
Motivating factors/motivators: cause a person to move from a state of no satisfaction to satisfaction and include achievement, recognition, characteristics of the work, responsibility, and advancement.
Herzberg proposed that individuals will experience the absence of job dissatisfaction when they have no grievances about hygiene factors and that managers can motivate individuals by incorporating motivators into an individual’s job.
Insights from Herzberg’s theory allow managers to consider the dimensions of both job content and job context so they can manage for greater job satisfaction overall.
Equity theory: a model of motivation that explains how people strive for fairness and justice in social exchanges or give-and-take relationships.
Equity theory is based on cognitive dissonance theory, which contends that people are motivated to maintain consistency between their beliefs and their behavior.
Equity theory contends that when people are victimized by unfair social exchanges, their resulting cognitive dissonance prompts them to correct the situation.
The key elements of equity theory as described in Figure 5.6 include outputs, inputs, and a comparison of the ratio of outputs to inputs.
Outputs: “What do I perceive that I’m getting out of my job?”
Inputs: “What do I perceive that I’m putting into my job?”
Comparison: “How does my ratio of outputs to inputs compare with relevant others?”
Your feelings of inequity revolve around your evaluation of whether you are receiving adequate rewards to compensate for your collective inputs in comparison to the ratio of relevant others.
There are three different equity relationships resulting from an equity comparison: equity (i.e., person fares comparably), negative inequity (i.e., person fares worse than others), and positive inequity (i.e., person fares better than others).
Organizational justice reflects the extent to which people perceive that they are treated fairly at work based on three different components:
Distributive justice: the perceived fairness of how resources and rewards are distributed or allocated.
Procedural justice: the perceived fairness of the process and procedures used to make allocation decisions.
Interactional justice: the quality of the interpersonal treatment people receive when procedures are implemented.
Equity and justice theories offer practical lessons:
Employees’ perceptions of the equity of the organization’s policies, procedures, and reward system are what count.
Employees' perceptions of justice are enhanced when they have a voice in the decision-making process.
Voice: the discretionary or formal expression of ideas, opinions, suggestions, or alternative approaches directed to a specific target inside or outside of the organization with the intent to change an objectionable state of affairs and to improve the current functioning of the organization.
A voice climate is one in which employees are encouraged to freely express their opinions and feelings.
Employees should be given the opportunity to appeal decisions that affect their welfare.
Employees’ perceptions of justice are strongly influenced by the leadership behavior exhibited by their managers.
Team performance was found to be higher in companies that possessed a climate for justice.
Expectancy theory: holds that people are motivated to behave in ways that produce desired combinations of expected outcomes.
The essence of Vroom’s expectancy theory described in Figure 5.8 is that motivation is the decision of how much effort to exert in a specific task situation.
Expectancy: an individual’s belief that a particular degree of effort will be followed by a particular level of performance.
Instrumentality: the perceived relationship between performance and outcomes.
Valence: the positive or negative value of a reward or outcome.
Motivation is based on a two-stage sequence of expectations:
Motivation is affected by an individual’s expectation that a certain level of effort will produce the intended performance goal.
Motivation is also influenced by the employee’s perceived chances of getting various outcomes as a result of accomplishing his or her performance goal.
Individuals are motivated to the extent that they value the outcomes received.
According to expectancy theory, employee motivation will be high when all three elements in the model are high (i.e., expectancy, instrumentality, and valence), and low if any element is near zero.
Goals that are specific and difficult lead to higher performance than general goals like “do your best” or “improve performance.”
In order for goal setting to work, people must have the ability and resources needed to achieve the goal, and they need to be committed to the goal or goal setting will not lead to higher performance.
Performance feedback and participation in deciding how to achieve goals are necessary but not sufficient for goal setting to work.
Goal achievement leads to job satisfaction, which in turn motivates employees to set and commit to even higher levels of performance.
The four motivational mechanisms that fuel the power of goal setting are that:
Goals direct attention and effort toward goal-relevant activities and away from goal-irrelevant activities. For example if a student has a term project due in a few days, their thoughts tend to revolve around completing it.
Goals regulate effort and have an energizing function in that they motivate us to act. For example, the deadline to turn in the project would motivate a student to act.
Goals increase persistence (effort expended on a task over an extended period of time) when they are important.
Goals foster the development and application of task strategies and action plans so that we can accomplish them. For example, teams of employees at a company may meet every 45, 60, and 90 days to create action plans for accomplishing goals.
The answer is C. Instrumentality.
Instrumentality is the perceived relationship between performance and outcomes. It reflects a person’s belief that a particular outcome is contingent on accomplishing a specific level of performance.
Job design/job redesign/work design: any set of activities that alter jobs to improve the quality of employee experience and level of productivity.
Top-down approaches to job design are manager led, bottom-up approaches are driven by the employee, and idiosyncratic deals (i-deals) are jointly negotiated by employees and individual managers.
Job design focuses on increasing employee motivation by changing the type of tasks employees complete.
Scientific management: the kind of management which conducts a business or affairs by standards established by facts or truths gained through systematic observation, experiment, or reasoning.
On the positive side, designing jobs according to the principles of scientific management increases employee efficiency and productivity.
On the negative side, designing jobs according to the principles of scientific management results in simplified, repetitive jobs, which can lead to job dissatisfaction, poor mental health, higher levels of stress, and a low sense of accomplishment and personal growth.
Job enlargement: putting more variety into a job by combining specialized tasks of comparable difficulty.
This strategy is also referred to as horizontally loading the job because employees perform additional tasks of similar difficulty.
Used alone without other motivational methods, it does not have a significant and lasting positive effect on job performance.
Job rotation: moving employees from one specialized job to another to give them greater variety in their work.
By using job rotation, managers believe they can stimulate interest and motivation while providing employees with a broader perspective of the organization.
The cross-training used with job rotation can increase worker flexibility and ease scheduling.
Employees might be more promotable with their new knowledge and abilities.
Job enrichment: modifying a job to give employees an opportunity to experience achievement, recognition, stimulating work, responsibility, and advancement.
Job enrichment is achieved by vertical loading, which consists of giving workers more autonomy and responsibility.
Job enrichment is the practical application of Herzberg’s motivator-hygiene theory.
Job characteristic model: promotes high intrinsic motivation by designing jobs that possess the five core job characteristics.
Figure 5.10 shows intrinsic motivation is determined by three psychological states and five core job characteristics, which are influenced by moderator variables.
The core job characteristics of this model are:
Skill variety: extent to which the job requires an individual to perform a variety of tasks that require him or her to use different skills and abilities.
Task identity: extent to which the job requires an individual to perform a whole or completely identifiable piece of work.
Task significance: extent to which the job affects the lives of other people within or outside the organization.
Autonomy: extent to which the job enables an individual to experience freedom, independence, and discretion in both scheduling and determining the procedures used in completing the job.
Feedback: extent to which an individual receives direct and clear information about how effectively he or she is performing the job.
Moderator variables, including knowledge and skill, growth need strength, and context satisfactions, impact an individual’s responses to job enrichment, and not everyone desires a job containing high amounts of the core job characteristics.
Research demonstrates the model can be used to increase employee job satisfaction.
Job crafting: employees' attempts to proactively shape their work characteristics.
The job-crafting approach to job design represents proactive and adaptive employee behavior aimed at changing tasks, relationships, and cognitions associated with one’s job.
Table 5-2 defines and illustrates the three key forms of job crafting.
The first form of job crafting involves changing one’s task boundaries by altering the number, scope, or nature of job tasks.
The second form of job crafting changes the relational nature of a job by changing the quality and/or amount of interaction with others encountered in a job.
The final form of job crafting is cognitive crafting by altering perceptions or thoughts about the tasks and relationships associated with a job.
Job crafting can change how employees perceive their jobs, resulting in more positive attitudes about their jobs, which, in turn, results in increased employee motivation, engagement, and performance.
Idiosyncratic deals (i-deals): employment terms individuals negotiate for themselves, taking myriad forms from flexible schedules to career development.
I-deals tend to involve task and work responsibilities, schedule flexibility, location flexibility, and compensation.
The goal of such deals is to increase employee motivation and productivity by allowing employees the flexibility to negotiate employment relationships that meet their needs and values.
