Motivation in the Workplace

So far in this module, we’ve discussed the components of motivation and some of the most well-known and valuable motivational theories. There are more theories out there, and we could go on for quite a while describing them. However, it’s important for managers to understand that all of them seek to predict human behavior and understand the mystery of motivation, and that all of them bring some clarity to the issue.

Now it’s time to dig into how exactly motivation impacts the workplace.

Job Design

“What kind of skills do I need to do this job?” “How important is this job to the success of the organization?”

These are the answers an employee seeks before he or she agrees to accept a job with an organization. Individuals are looking for interesting work—work that will foster positive internal feelings. Those feelings might come in the form of achieving high production, overcoming obstacles, or being innovative and coming up with new ideas that help the organization succeed. The right job design can help a manager get to those intrinsic motivations an individual brings to work each day, rather than just the extrinsic factors, like pay and benefits.

When reviewing Vroom’s expectancy framework, we can see that job design affects both the effort to performance piece and the performance to outcome piece. The question managers look to answer is, “What’s the right balance for the job design?”

Early management theorists suggested that the easier the job, the more motivated the employee would be. Later studies suggested that organizations should make jobs more challenging and interesting. Both of these points of view fail to take into consideration individuals and the factors each person brings that might influence whether a job design is motivating to him or her personally.

Richard Hackman and Gary Oldham published the Hackman-Oldham Job Design Model as part of a 1980 study, and it suggested that managers should tailor the job to meet the employee’s individual needs. Where job design is concerned, Hackman and Oldham suggested that a job’s motivating potential can be influenced by skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback.  In the model,

• Skill variety refers to the number of skills used to do a job. A traditional assembly line job would have a low-skill variety, whereas a nurse would have a higher-skill variety.
• Task identity refers to the level at which employees feel like they “own” the outcome when completing the task. Going back to our first example, workers on an assembly line would have low task identity. Which parts from their lines ended up in which machines? They’re not likely to know, so they would have a low task identity. A nurse, however, can identify with how well a patient recovers, or see immediately that a choice he or she made saved the life of a patient. Thus, a nurse would have a high task identity.
• Task significance indicates the importance of that task to the organization. The job of a receptionist, for example, has lower task significance. A temporary employee can be brought in to answer phones and sort mail. But doctors would have high task significance—not anyone can do their job, and they have knowledge of their patients and their situations that others would not have.
• Autonomy is the degree to which an employee can make independent decisions and not have to check in with a supervisor. Again, clerical work would have low autonomy because the job is repetitious and workers make few decisions on their own. Doctors would have high autonomy, making decisions to medicate a patient a certain way or handle an emergency procedure on the operating table.
• Feedback is information about an employee’s performance. Most employees who perform a task want to know if they are doing it right, doing it well, and so on.

Hackman and Oldham noted that while the first three components of the job design (skill variety, task identity, and task significance) are very important, the last two, autonomy and feedback, are considered even more so. Thus managers should think a little harder about how to incorporate a little autonomy and feedback into the roles their team members fill.

Training and Work Conditions

Managers can increase motivation by providing adequate and ongoing training for their employees, letting employees learn new things about their current job and learn new skills that will help them move on to the next level of their careers. Knowledgeable employees feel good about themselves, and their co-workers feel good about working with them. Tasks get done quickly and the team is more productive.

Consider the work environment where there is no training:

• Amanda has newly been hired, and she can’t ramp up because her managers didn’t spend time bringing her up to speed on tasks. She feels inadequate and doesn’t understand her work. Her co-workers are frustrated because they continue to take on part of Amanda’s workload.
• Joaquim puts in long hours and a lot of effort but doesn’t get as much done as his co-workers because no one has brought him up to speed on new systems and processes. He’s reinventing the wheel, wasting a lot of his time and everyone else’s time. Co-workers, again, are frustrated because their team member isn’t pulling his weight.
• Taylor, a long-time team member, enjoyed their job when they started and mastered all the skills they needed to complete their tasks years ago. Now they’re bored and just going through the motions, and they are becoming less engaged because their employer doesn’t provide them with new opportunities to learn and move ahead via ongoing training.

The same idea holds true for working conditions. Working conditions should support—not hinder—the productivity of the organization’s employees. The employees should be safe in doing their work, but beyond that, they should have the appropriate equipment, tools, and working environment to do their jobs well.

Employee Recognition Programs

Employee recognition programs cover a wide variety of activities, ranging from private “thank yous” to publicized recognition ceremonies. It strengthens the link between performance and outcome on the expectancy framework. Recognition continues to be cited on surveys as one of the most powerful motivators for an employee.

Types of recognition might include:

• A personal thank you to an employee from a manager, verbally or in a note
• Public recognition of an employee, in a company communication or ceremony
• A team thank you via a lunch bought by the manager
• A program where customers recognize great service by front-line workers

In an environment where there are layoffs and increased workloads all across the country, recognition programs go a long way toward motivating employees and provide a relatively low-cost way to boost performance.

Job Redesign Programs

Clever redesign of jobs to accommodate employees’ needs for additional flexibility can serve to motivate them. Managers looking to reshape jobs in order to make them more motivating might look toward a few redesign and scheduling options.

• Job rotation. Employees who have very repetitive jobs can find new motivation in a job rotation program. An assembly line might employ this technique, where a worker might be focused on constructing a portion of an exhaust system for a period of time, and then move over to an area that is devoted to putting together transmissions. This approach navigates the pitfalls of boredom, but it can increase training costs and temporarily reduce productivity as people ramp up their new responsibilities.
• Job enrichment. This refers to the vertical expansion of one’s job to include additional responsibilities that allow employees to control the planning, execution, and evaluation aspects of their work. Employees can see a task through from start to finish in many cases, allowing for a holistic view of the task and ownership of the outcome. For instance, a group that formerly only handled the development of art for marketing materials might be retrained to meet with clients, get a better understanding of their needs, and then work with a printer to produce the final product. This process generally yields a reduction in turnover and an increase in job satisfaction for employees, but evidence of increased productivity is often inconclusive.
• Flexible Hours. Flexible hours allow employees a degree of autonomy when it comes to the hours of their workday. Morning people can be up-and-at-‘em at 6 AM, and night owls can show up later and work later. Flexible hours often reduce absenteeism, increase productivity, and reduce overtime expenses. However, this approach is not applicable to every job.
• Job Sharing. This program allows for two or more individuals to share a 40-hour work week. Job sharing allows an organization to draw on the talents of more than one person to complete a job and allows them to avoid layoffs due to overstaffing. Conversely, a manager has to find compatible pairs of employees, which is not always such an easy task.
• Telecommuting. When an individual can work from home, he or she can have more flexible hours, less downtime in a car, the ability to wear whatever he or she wants, and fewer interruptions. Organizations that employ telecommuting can realize higher productivity, enjoy a larger labor pool from which to select employees and experience less office space costs. But telecommuters can’t experience the benefits of an office situation, and managers can tend to undervalue the contributions of workers they don’t see regularly.

Job redesign and scheduling can be linked to several motivational theories. Herzberg’s two-factor theory supports the idea of job enrichment in its proposal that increasing the intrinsic factors of a job will increase an employee’s satisfaction with a job. Flexibility is an important link in linking rewards to personal goals in the expectancy theory.

Money as a Motivator

Rewarding people with money is one of the oldest applied performance practices. At its most basic level, money and other financial rewards represent a form of exchange; employees provide labour, skills, and knowledge in return for money and benefits from the organization. Money, however, is much more than a form of compensation. It relates to an individual’s needs, emotions, and self-concept. Money can be a symbol of achievement and status, a motivator, a source of enhanced or reduced anxiety, and an influence on our propensity to make ethical or risky decisions.

The motivational effect of money is much great than previously believed, and its effect is due more to its symbolic value than to what it can buy.

People who earn higher pay tend to have higher job performance because the higher pay cheques enhance their self-concept evaluation.

Financial rewards come in many forms, which can be organized into four specific objectives:

1. Membership and seniority –  based on membership within the organization (full-time employee status) and number of years with the organization. While this type of financial reward system potentially reduces turnover and attracts job applicants, it does not directly motivate job performance.
2. Job Status – job status-based rewards try to improve feelings of fairness by distributing more pay to people in higher-valued jobs. While these rewards motivate employees to compete for promotions, they also have the potential to encourage a bureaucratic organization.
3. Competencies – competency-based pay structures identify clusters of skills, knowledge, and experience specific to each broad job group as well as clusters relevant across all job groups. Employees progress through the pay range within their job group as they demonstrate higher levels of those capabilities. While this type of reward system motivates employees to learn new skills and gain additional knowledge, they are often over-designed, making it difficult to communicate these pay systems to employees.
4. Performance – performance-based pay structures focus on task performance, rewarding individuals based on competition of assigned tasks. They can also vary based on individual, team, and organization performance-based reward systems. While individual-based structures may clearly link performance to reward, team and organizational structures are less clear, which could negatively impact motivation.