Staff Motivation in the Present Context

Staff Motivation in the Present Context

[Abstract]

For the corporate world, human resource management is a very important and integral part of talent development and management. It is done mainly through appropriate incentives to achieve. Issues related to employee motivation concepts, methods and implementation of incentive can be successfully used to solve the problems faced.

At times, it's difficult to find why employees are not motivated; whether they're bored, not invested, just don't like their work or it's not about the work but the environment they have. Today, it can be difficult to find ways to motivate employees without a monetary incentive. As an incentive, money cannot be always a better option to motivate employees. Many survey show that money is not the only motivator. Giving bonus would provide only a short-term boost whereas praise and recognition along with a career advancement may appear far more powerful influencers in the long term. By utilizing various tools traditional businesses can keep their workers motivated and engaged without use of money as an incentive.

Thus, employee motivation becomes a factor or factors which causes employees to pursue their given tasks to achieve effectively. Motivating staff is, therefore, essential to the success of any business or corporate world. Employees who are well engaged and motivated may go the extra mile and may contribute more than expected to achieve business objectives.

Keywords: incentive, motivator, employee motivation

Staff Motivation in the Present Context

For the corporate world, human resource management is a very important and integral part of talent development and management. It is done mainly through appropriate incentives to achieve. Issues related to employee motivation concepts, methods and implementation of incentive can be successfully used to solve the problems faced.

Personnel policies are often designed to motivate employees and thus influence their behaviour. Employers redoubled these efforts in the 1980s with the deployment of Human Resource Management (HRM) practices in various configurations (White & Bryson, 2013).

But question arise, do incentive policies work? The answer lies in what type of incentives are we talking about. If it is extrinsic motivator, it works, but for the short term only and it is ineffective in a long run. People tend to fall back to their old behavior once effect of extrinsic motivators have been exhausted. Incentives as extrinsic motivators do not change human attitudes, at least in a long run, that underlie human behaviors. They merely change, temporarily, what we do. Thus, incentives as such monetary benefits can be only temporary in its short-term approach. Whereas, intrinsically motivated person moves to act for the fun or challenge entailed rather than because of external prods, pressures, or rewards (Ryan & Deci, 2000, p. 56).

Motivation

According to the Oxford Reference, motivation is “the mental processes that arouse, sustain, and direct human behaviour. Motivation may stem from processes taking place within an individual (intrinsic motivation) or from the impact of factors acting on the individual from outside (extrinsic motivation); in most cases these two influences are continually interacting (http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100212318).”

Thus, the intrinsic motivator is, as per the Oxford Reference, “an incentive to do something that arises from factors within the individual, such as a need to feel useful or to seek self-actualization (http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100 009153),” and the extrinsic motivator is “an incentive to do something that arises from factors outside the individual, such as rewards or penalties. The promise of a bonus if one meets agreed performance targets is an obvious example of such motivation (http://www.oxfordreference .com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095 806427).”

Intrinsic Task Motivation. Essentially, intrinsic task motivation involves positively valued experiences that individuals derive directly from a task. In the present cognitive model, intrinsic task motivation involves those generic conditions by an individual, pertaining directly to the task, that produce motivation and satisfaction. Here, task refers to a set of activities directed toward a purpose (a task can be assigned or chosen). Thus, a task includes both activities and a purpose (Thomas & Velthouse, 1990, p. 668).

Motivators

Motivators are associated directly to the content of job itself. These factors include achievement, recognition, advancement, work itself, responsibility, growth, etc. The presence of motivators leads to satisfaction whereas the absence of which will prevent both satisfaction and motivation. According to Herzberg's theory, only challenging jobs that have the opportunities for achievement, recognition, responsibility, advancement and growth will motivate personnel (Venugopalan, 2007, pp. 41-42).

What motivates employees? While rewards may serve as incentives and those who bestow rewards may seek to use them as motivators, the real motivation to act comes from within the individual. Managers do exert a significant amount of influence over their employees, but they do not have the power to force a person to act. They can work to provide various types of incentives in an effort to influence an employee in any number of ways, such as by changing job descriptions, rearranging work schedules, improving working conditions, reconfiguring teams, and a host of other activities… while these may have an impact on an employee’s level of motivation and willingness to act, when all is said and done, it is the employee’s decision to take action or not (Shanks, 2007, pp. 24-25).

Managers, we often assume that employees are motivated or will respond to inducements from managers. While this is perhaps a logical and rational approach from manager’s perspective, it is critical to understand that this is not always the case. While the majority of employees do, in fact, want to do a good job and are motivated by any number of factors, others may not share that same drive or high level of motivation (Shanks, 2007, p. 25).  

Is pay an effective motivator? There is arguably support both for monetary reward as an effective motivating factor and being a counter-productive.  Deci argues that money actually lowers employee motivation, by reducing the "intrinsic rewards" that an employee receives from the job (Baker, Jensen & Murphy, 1988, p. 596). Yet for many classes of tasks, the most reliable way for getting crowd workers engaged remains through explicit external rewards, in particular monetary payment (Feyisetan, Kleek, Simperl & Shadbolt, 2015, p. 334).

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