essay on motivation in a workplace

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Motivation in the Modern Workplace, Essay Example

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Introduction

As the concern of increasing productivity through improved employee performance has been there for ages, most companies currently pay more attention on the factors that can lead to such achievements. This translates to encouraging the employes to perform exceptionally through motivation. Motivation may be defined as the psychological method that leads to the achievement of direction, arousal, and persistence of voluntary activities that lead to accomplishment of pre-determined objectives. Examples of motivations include incentives, work place promotions, and rewards. Numerous motivational theories help businesses in encouraging workers put more efforts and hence exploit their full potential in meeting of goals and objectives. These theories suggest factors that result to job contentment. The following essay investigates factors that lead to motivation in modern work places, their impacts, and differences between motivated and unmotivated work places performances.

Motivational theories endeavor to explain what makes people behave in a particular manner in the work place. The theories also explain what makes some workers to work harder than others do or why some workers are more committed than others in their work. The study of the theories by managers enables them to understand how they can motivate employees so that they can perform at their peak levels. Application of these theories in the workplace can improve your leadership skills (Buch et al 2014, p. 20).

Setting of Clear and Reasonable Expectations

The utilization of reinforcement to motivate employees in the workplace should be a positive experience for both the worker and the manager. Failure to set clear and reasonable expectations often frustrates employees and reduces their tendency to behave in the right manner. For instance, imagine a situation where the employee was not told to do better without further details. The employee might end up guessing what the boss meant, yet he would not have adequate information to make positive changes without further additional feedback. Moreover, rewarding only the difficult or impossible tasks may result to anger or a sense of helplessness and therefore leading to worse performances than even before the reinforcement program (Hülsheger et al 2013 p. 12). Expectation of absolute perfection in tasks or consistent excellency in sales, for instance, can be considered unreasonable and may lead to increasing errors as well as declining sales as the employee gradually gives up.

Identification of Strong Motivators

Working along with employees in the identification of personalized motivators or reinforcement is more likely to motivate employees to produce the desired results. For instance, a single childless employee may not work very hard to earn a week off free babysitting, or a vegetarian may not appreciate a gift certificate to a steak house. On the contrary, the employee can work very hard past the manager’s expectation pursuing to earn a reward that he or she has chosen. However, if permitting employees to choose seems impractical to the manager, the manager can consider offering a range of rewards from which the employee can choose from in case they meet the required conditions (Hülsheger et al 2013 p. 45).

Encouraging Desirable Behaviors and habits

The desire of most managers is to encourage their employees positively. They endeavor to develop positive employee behavior such as punctuality, quality production, as well as strong teamwork. In accordance to the reinforcement theory, choosing the most appropriate positive attitudes to target at a time as well as the application of positive reinforcement techniques focusing on the elimination of negative behaviors is expected to turn undesirable negative traits into better working traits (Barrick, et al 2013 p. 34). The extinction of undesired employee traits results from the presence of positive reinforcements, which encourage the employee rather than punishment that discour5ages the employee. This means offering employees with incentives when a work or exceeds the managers expectations, positive reinforcements, as well as concentrating on the elimination of the negative traits. For instance, a manager may decide to offer a bonus for sales in excess for his or her weekly target, a long lunch break for meeting the target sales as well as a standard lunch.

Effective Use of Reinforcements

Careful Timing of reinforcements because of different strategies yields a range of results. Rewarding a positive behavior, such a good performances, every time it happens will consistently result to excellent performances. Nonetheless, rewarding the same positive occasionally also yields even better outcomes as the workers work harder in pursuit of the reward, consequently this leads to the lasting change of behavior (Barrick, et al 2013, p. 10). Irregular reinforcement also enables winning of the employees away from his or her dependence on reinforcements and hence turns the desired behavior into habit overtime. However, future reinforcement endeavors can target different behaviors with the expectation of even better results generally.

Significance of motivation to performance

In the competitive modern world of business every company wants to outdo its rivals, this is achieved through better performance than competitors. This is first attained by having the right workers in the right job. This is one factor of motivation as people to perform best in the things they love to do. For example, a social person can do better as a sales person than an unsocial person can. Motivation of workers provided by the management team enhances both quantity and quality of performance (Gillet, et al 2013, p. 21).

The connection between performance and motivation is that contented workers perform better and hence high productivity. Therefore, improved productivity is one of the significances of motivation in connection to employees’ performance. Moreover, the higher the employees are motivated, the higher the productivy in addition to quality improvement in the production process.

In addition, motivation leads to consistency, speed, and effectiveness of work processes and production. This led to high performance and production rates and, therefore increases the competitivenss of the company in comparison to others. The motivated employees work harder and smarter as they identify themselves with the organization’s goals and target (Gillet, et al 2013, p. 11).

Comparison between employees’ motivated and unmovited companies

A highly motivational company such as the Starbucks has a very high and efficient performance that can be attributed to the fact that the company is a motivator to the employees. In the company, the employees are referred to as partners. This encourages then to identify themselves with the company’s goals and hence worke towards them. Moreover, Starbucks’ “just say yes” slogan motivates workers to do their best in all areas ranging from production to customers’ satisfaction and hence high performance. Besides, through its “partner” spirit of worker, the employees are motivated to perform well as there are chances they will one day become stakeholder. Therefore, the association and motivition provided by the company to employees has improved performance, productivity, and profits. On ther hand, a company that does not motivate employess lead to low morale at the work place. Therefore, the worker do not have the desire or drive to work towards the goals of the organization. This results to company failure as the coordination of the workers is shawdy and the employees distance themselves from the company needs.

In summary, performance of businesses are positively influenced by motivation of worker. The approaches of the workforce towards the company and identifying with its goals are primarily triggered by having them motivated through various processes. The motivated employees are seen to put more efforts in production than the unmotivated ones, and hence the qwuantity and quality of products are improved. Consequently, the business is capable of meeting customers’ needs with better quality commodities than their competitors’ products. Moreover, because of increased efficiency and speed in production, the company is able to produce high quality commodities and services at lower costs than their competitors and hence improving their relative competition.

Bibliography

Gillet, N & Gagné, M & Sauvagère, S & Fouquereau, E 2013, The role of supervisor autonomy support, organizational support, and autonomous and controlled motivation in predicting employees’ satisfaction and turnover intentions, European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology , 22 (4), 450-460.

Barrick, M & Mount, M & Li, N 2013, The theory of purposeful work behavior: The role of personality, higher-order goals, and job characteristics, Academy of Management Review , 38 (1), 132-153.

Hülsheger, U & Alberts, H & Feinholdt, A & Lang, J 2013, Benefits of mindfulness at work: The role of mindfulness in emotion regulation, emotional exhaustion, and job satisfaction, Journal of Applied Psychology , 98 (2), 310.

Buch, R & Kuvaas, B & Dysvik, A & Schyns, B 2014, If and when social and economic leader-member exchange relationships predict follower work effort: The moderating role of work motivation, Leadership & Organization Development Journal , 35 (8).

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