Motivation Essay

What is motivation? As manager’s, motivation is one of the most vital and crucial assets to possess in managing a business. This drive is a critical tool to use in the work place and determine the success or failure of an organization. Motivation is a driving force that initiates and directs behavior. In other words, motivation is an internal energy that drives an individual to do something in order to achieve a certain goal. Therefore, creating a motivating environment in the workplace will lead to happy employees. Creating a work environment like this, managers can expect low staff turnovers, improved productivity, happy customers, and better financial performance. Therefore, the input of motivation use towards employees determines the output efficiency of the company. However, everyone involved in an organization is motivated differently. Everybody has their own individual needs in regards to motivation. Depending on how motivated a person is, determines the effort that individual puts into the work and therefore, how productive they are.

An Organization’s productivity and efficiency depends to a large extent on what employees think or perceive about their organization. It is a well-known concept that “If you keep your employees happy, they will make your customers happy”. So to make them happy or motivated, challenging jobs, tasks, assignments are to be provided along with better or superior environment to excel in. As a result, we can have two benefits; on one hand it will enhance the employees’ job experience and on the other hand organization’s productivity will increase. Turnover and absenteeism will be low, employee commitment will be high. In short, job satisfaction and dissatisfaction play a major role behind overall employee motivation. Herzberg’s Motivator-Hygiene

(1959). According to Herzberg, individuals are not content with the satisfaction of lower-order needs at work; for example, those needs associated with minimum salary levels or safe and pleasant working conditions. Rather, individuals look for the gratification of higher-level psychological needs having to do with achievement, recognition, responsibility, advancement, and the nature of the work itself. (Figure 1) This theory suggests that to improve job attitudes and productivity, administrators must recognize and attend to both sets of characteristics and not assume that an increase in satisfaction leads to decrease in unpleasurable dissatisfaction. Herzberg concluded that these factors not only cause job satisfaction, but to have a positive and lasting influence on motivation, if they are present. Therefore these factors became known as “motivators”. Dissatisfaction on the other hand was caused by factors in the job environment that did not directly contribute to the work itself, Herzberg, Mausner, Boch Snyderman (1959). The positive handling of these factors, according to Herzberg, could have only a short-term effect on motivation, while these factors caused severe dissatisfaction with the job, if they were handled badly. Herzberg referred to these factors as “hygiene”.

Motivation is the desire or willingness of someone to do something. Craig C. Pinder (1998) defined work motivation as a “set of internal and external forces that initiate work related behaviour and determine its form, direction, intensity and duration.” Motivation plays an important role in a business environment, as employee motivation is believed to improved work performance.

Motivation is often something intuitively understood but not always easy to precisely define. One early definition of motivation was formulated by Vroom (1964, cited in Van Eerde and Thierry, p. 576) in which he defined it as a psychological process controlling choices made by people that cause the arousal, direction, and persistence of voluntary actions that are goal directed. However, a more applicable definition of motivation to the workplace describes it as “the degree to which an individual wants and tries hard to do well at a particular task or job” (Mitchell, 1982, p. 82). A more general and recent definition was put forth by Waddell et al (2008) in which they sum up motivation as the

This essay will discuss about what is motivation? what motivate people toward satisfy needs. The paper will includes three main artical theory by Abraham Maslow ( Maslow's Hierarchy of needs ), Clayton Alderfer ( Alderfer's ERC Theory ) and Psychologist David Mcclelland ( McClelland's Theory of needs ). The author will explain why motivation is important in an organization and how it will impact the organization. The three motivation theories will also be used together in order to enhance the staff’s motivation level to work and help the organization towards success. In the end will be the conclusion and opinions with my own expreriences.

Motivation originates from the word "move" and represents the reasons for people 's actions, desires, and needs. Motivation can be considered as the arousal, direction and maintenance of human behavior towards attaining some goal (Greenberg, J. and Baron, R.A. in Buelens et al., 2011).Motivating employees is vital if employers are willing to achieve maximum performance and productivity. The company shall attach great importance on its staff incentive system to enhance the loyalty and professional dedication of staff.

One’s personality can be understood from the people they mingle with.” With this said, I find myself most influenced and inspired by personalities similar to mine. Whether it is an innate biological factor or a result of my upbringing, I find myself to be an anthology of all the personalities within my immediate family. My family’s personalities and leadership qualities are all similar and have been highly instrumental in my own personality.

The word motivation was derived from Latin words “mover” which simply means to move (Kretiner, 1998). Motivation is a predisposition to behave in purposeful manner to achieve certain unmet needs (Buford et.al 1995). Moreover, motivation can also be described as a drive internally to satisfy unsatisfied needs (Higgins, 1994). Motivation is a psychological process that makes an employee behaves in a purposeful manner and direction (Kreitner, 1995). Robins (1993) defined motivation as willingness to put

To start with, it is useful to infer from the literature and research that motivation in organisations refers to the process by which employees are enabled and induced to behave in particular ways. Thus, motivation is often associated with a search for the means by which people 's job performance and productivity may be improved or maintained. Many theories about motivation begin by addressing the interrelated issues of human needs and how these influence the direction and maintenance of an individual 's intentional behaviour.

In any job setting, it is important for employees to be motivated to work hard and produce the best product or service they can for the consumer. This motivation is either intrinsic (coming from inside the person) or extrinsic (an external motivator). The Herzberg Hygiene-Motivator Theory makes clear the necessity of using these factors to ensure your employees feel enriched and fulfilled while at work. The “hygiene” aspect of this theory refers to external motivators that can be encountered at the work place. This can include an employee’s supervision while at work, salary, job security, and working conditions. Oppositely, intrinsic factors can include the actual work the employee is doing, their growth, and responsibility (Brody & Nair, 2014). While internal factors tend to have a larger influence on motivation within the job, it is likely that an employee will be dissatisfied if there is a lack of either of these factors.

Motivation is a state of mind, desire, energy or interest that translates into action. (Nahavandi, Denhardt, & Aristigueta 2015). An employee’s willingness to respond to an organization’s requirements, or productivity is directly related to how motivated they are in their workplace. It is important for managers to motivate their employees if they want their company to be successful. In order for this motivation to happen, the manager must understand the employee’s needs and perceptions. There are several different theories in which link job satisfaction and motivation. This essay explains two of them in more detail: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and McGregor’s X/Y theory. Both theories see motivation as the main factor in maximizing productivity in the workplace.

Motivation is the inner power or energy that pushes one towards performing a certain action. Motivation strengthens the ambition, increases initiative and gives direction, courage, energy and the persistence to follow one 's goals. Motivation is usually strong, when one has a vision, a clear mental image of a certain situation or achievement, faith in one 's abilities and also a strong desire to materialize it. In this case motivation pushes one forward, toward taking action and making the vision a reality. Motivation, in its broadest sense, can be defined as forces acting either on or within a person to initiate behaviour. It’s what gets you going. And in the

Frederick Herzberg’s theory consists of two factors- motivator and hygiene. He refers to hygiene factors such as salary, job security, working conditions, status and interpersonal relationships and to motivational such as achievement, recognition, work itself, responsibility, advancement, personal growth (Herzberg, F, 1959). The main idea of the theory is that satisfaction and dissatisfaction are independent variables. The hygiene factors can be described as a basis, if they are missing they can cause dissatisfaction but when present they cannot cause satisfaction by themselves, they can only prevent people from feeling dissatisfaction. Consequently, what motivates employees is included in the motivator factors which, on the other hand, when present provoke satisfaction but in absence do not cause dissatisfaction. Alan Chapman (2008) makes an interpretation of the theory by distributing the different factors in the form of a rocket.

Motivation has two meaning: expanding effort toward the accomplishment of an organizational goal, and the managerial process of getting workers to accomplice organizational goal. Motivation is one of the important contributor two performance and productivity.