Motivation

    On the question why do people work, most of them answer without hesitation that they need to make a living. Moreover, many of them sincerely consider that all become limited to it, until they begin to experience depressing feeling of missing something in this life. Exactly in that it wouldn’t happen is the motivation task of managers.

    Motivation - one of the most difficult pieces in the management puzzle. Many contrasting views of motivation exist. However, most experts agree that it energizes, maintains and guides behavior. Motivation refers to the force or energy that gets the "motor" of behavior started, keeps it running and provides it with direction toward specific goals. To motivate employees is to provide them wiht opportunity of implementing vital valuables, working for the benefit of a company.

    Two recent primers on the subject are Motivation Management by Thad Green and Intrinsic Motivation at Work by Kenneth W. Thomas. Both books discuss motivation through distinct learning structures, present models for understanding it, and provide tools to diagnose gaps. Green considers that motivation is the fuel for performance and without it, performance suffers. What an employee believes in is more important than what is offered to motivate. He maintains that a person's beliefs while using the model - a process that moves from effort to satisfaction - show up in three forms: confidence (in oneself), trust (in others), and satisfaction (with rewards).

    In the second book, Thomas says that employee motivation has changed - from extrinsic rewards with external demands for worker compliance to intrinsic rewards with acknowledgement of a competitive environment that insists on self-managed workers. The main difference in these books is the focus on intrinsic versus extrinsic rewards. Green briefly touches on the difference, in terms of outcomes, but his model provides a tool that, managers can use to understand and align both types of motivation for workers. As his book's title suggests, Thomas zeros in on complexities of intrinsic rewards.

    As far as I’m concerned, I hold the opinion that the intrinsic rewards influence on employees is stronger than  extrinsic rewards one. And that is why: 

    Today loyal and well-motivated personnel is one of the most important factors influencing on the company’s development. According to the research data of our magazine “The expert” a third of companies’employees will be ready to change a job as soon as they are offered a more attractive one. "If only our employees were motivated, then we'd get the results we need." It’s not surprising that weak motivating personnel is on the third place in the list of reasons impeding the buisness growth. Today’s executives put the high degree of subordinates’ motivation on the first place in the range of internal factors of their buisness competitivness increasing.

    Motivation problems which companies face form the pyramid which can be divided into 3 levels, conditionaly called so: “about money”, “not quite about money” and “not about money”.

The first level - “about money”

    Money is extrinsic reward, the plainest and the most used way with which an organisation can reward co-workers. Everything seems to be clear here, but in many managers’ opinion the problem №1 is untransparency of salary formation for employees. In a company each worker knows a salary size of his collegues, and if he not quite understands why he earns less money then some of them, unprofitable for the company conjectures will be born in the heads of employees. Therefore many executives indicate each worker his place in the company’s financial network and tell him about opportunities of promotion towards salary increasing. They use information management system opportunities to do scheme of employee salary formation accessible for personnel familiarizing. Thanks to it a person knows how much money and for what he receives.

    Also money is known to be given as bonus. But the problem is that always paid bonus is not considered motivating factor, because it is percieved as the binding part of salary in this case. When an employee gets a bonus, he realizes that he achieved such resalt which the management acclaimed and didn’t grudge money for its payment. The fact of bonus recieving plays the important role. In some companies bonuses are often paid when a worker isn’t late for a job, doesn’t lose documents or works without breakdowns for certain quantity of hours, and also for worker’s innovations, buisness risk, self-education and other.

The second level - “not quite about money”

    To manage personnel more successfuly and productively, it’s not enough to pay salary and bonuses. Surveys of managerial-level employees, who are usually covered by merit-pay plans, have consistently shown high levels of dissatisfaction with pay. This surprising finding was first reported by Herbert Meyer in the Harvard Business Review. Meyer's research shows that focusing attention on money in order to motivate people often produces the exact opposite result. To the extent that pay is connected directly to task performance, intrinsic interest in the task itself decreases. When salary becomes the primary goal, a person's interest becomes focused on the payment rather than the performance of the task itself. This situation is very dangerous for the company, because exactly employees having such goal are ready to leave the organisation.

    Starting from certain wellbeing level, the saturating with income begins. Since the financial resources and opporunities of employee promotion aren’t boundless, seeing such ceiling, a person relaxes, or is irritated, or start working on the side – and part of his resources leaves the company. And therefore in oder for it not to happen the buisnessman’s task is, as a matter of fact, to sell workplaces in his company. Moreover he should sell them to the same employees every day. In a word, the motivation problem is reduced to the problem of people’s interest in your buisness.

    Therefore many our entrepreneurs put giving employees opportunity to choose the kind of benefits they need into practice. Worker can choose something one of the benefit set consisting of insurance, payment of mobile phone, playing sports or different trainins and other.

The third level - “not about money”

    And I think it’s the most importiont  one of all levels. Meyer also proposes that the paternalistic nature of merit-pay plans explains why unions usually reject them. Under merit pay, employees are clearly dependent upon their supervisors for rewards. The primary goal of most people who join a union is to reduce their dependency on management. Employees start looking for the freedom to implement theirselves not only as professionals, but also as individuals. And an employer can help him in that. The only necessary condition is the meeting of basic valuables of the company with the employee’s ones. For example, the occupational growth may be one of the mainest valuables for both company and its employees. And therefore it’s important not so abilities of an applicant for a job as the reason for his coming this work. And how one our entrepreneur said: “For the work we hire vital positions, but not degree certificate”.

    First of all managers should understand what people, with whom they will build up their buisness, want and in what situation they will feel happier. By learning a person's motivational orientation, a manager can foster stimulating, interesting and self-rewarding work experiences that maximize individual potential. Such approuch to the personnel recruitment can prevent traditional problem – tensions with executive. Sometimes for implementation freedom it’s enough for people to have opporunity of having time at their disposal. That’s why many companies introduce flexitime scheme. Employees must work for certain quantity of hours, but when they work, it will be their buisness. Also many executives hold informal meetings improving employees’relationships and envirnment that promotes their motivation.

    But companies’executives often have typical mistakes and delusions which can nip the idea of motivation system building in the bud. They are as follows:

• Expectation of that everyrbody would respond straight away.

Most employees think about innovation with suspicions and at first only the each fifth worker responds to manager’s suggestions.

• Expectation of immediate indicaters improving.

It’s normal when the worsening occurs because of psychological disstabilisation straight away after some changes.

• Taking only one or two measures.

Managers should realize the motivation programme in stages, develope it wholly and be ready to change the company life philosophy.

• Stopping this programme.

There is not the ideal and unshakable system of personnel motivation. Any system needs to be constantly changed and it’s important to do it.

    In my opinion it’s worth for any executive always remembering the superiority of intrinsic factors over extrinsic ones and keeping in his mind the necessity of 3 critical successful motivation components: providing workers with knowledge or information, trust and feedback. The missing first ingredient leads directly to the absence of the second and third. Unhealthy speculation fills in the knowledge gap (for example, unknowledge of the company’s plans or the future changes within a department and other), creating mistrust on both sides and eroding any sense of connectedness.

    To my mind, worker’s motivating can be influenced with creating only conditions for its emergence. Motivation is help in realization of person’s vital objectives and valuables without giving up work. And the resalts of such help for a company are measured in quite appreciable sums of money.  
 
 
 

Bibliography: 

1. “HR Magazine”, Dec., 1992;
2. “HR Magazine”, April., 2004;
3. “The expert”, Sept., 2003;
4. “Training & Development”, Nov., 2000;

5. Handout “Applied Economics”.