Lecture on Morale and Motivation

MORALE AND MOTIVATION AT WORK

CHAPTER OUTLINE:

Morale And Job Satisfaction

Basic Factors Influencing Employee Morale

Performance Based Rewards

Factors Influencing Motivation

Suggestions for Motivating Employees

Things to Consider in Motivation

Two Approaches to Work Motivation

Rewards and Performance at Group Level

Morale and Job Satisfaction

Monitoring job satisfaction is important both to the supervisor and the HRD. The effects of many human resource strategies are examined with respect to their impact on job satisfaction. Morale is the mental attitude which makes the individual performs his work either willingly and enthusiastically or poorly and reluctantly.

Employee morale is an attitude, a state of mind, cannot be seen but is manifested by the employee’s manner and reactions to his job, his work condition, the company policies and program, his colleagues, his immediate boss, his pay, and the like. Morale is present in varying degrees and is generally viewed as an important indications of how well things are going.

Individuals differ in how they respond to the conditions of work. While some employees may be highly satisfied with a particular job, other employees may find the same conditions extremely dissatisfying . An important issue surrounding every human resource activity is how it will influence the level of morale  of employees.

Will morale increase or decrease as a result of a different recruiting strategy, a better benefit package, a new training program, or some other changes in human resource practices?

Low morale contributes to labor problems, attempts to organize labor unions, excessive turnover, labor grievances, and organizational climate.

Grievances, absenteeism, and turnover are frequently used as indirect measures of employee morale.

Basic Factors Influencing Employee Morale

1. Non – work related factors – age, sex, and work value – influenced the attitude of an employee about things around him.

2. Management practices or the qualitative aspects of the job – supervisors who are fair, considerate, and competent generally create positive feelings of satisfaction with supervision.

3. Outside factors – the frustration and difficulties people face in their personal lives have contributed to the general decline in job satisfaction throughout the work force.

4. State of Communication – practicing upward, downward, and lateral communication encourage employees to participate and get involved thereby promoting  teamwork and harmony among all the employees.

Motivation for Performance

Motivation is defined as the willingness to exert high levels of effort to reach organizational goals, conditioned by the effort’s ability to satisfy some individual needs. It is the feeling that prompts people to do what they need to do. The effort element is a measure of intensity or drive.

The task of management is to arouse and maintain the interests of its employees to work willingly and enthusiastically to achieve the company’s goals.

Performance – based Rewards

Specifically, organizations want employees to perform at relatively high levels and need to make it worth their efforts to do so. When rewards are associated with higher levels of performance, employees will presumably be motivated to work harder to achieve those awards.

Factors Influencing Motivation

Individual Differences – One employee may be motivated by money and go for a high – paying job while another may be motivated by security and accept a lower paying job that involves few risk of unemployment.

Job Characteristics – the aspects of the position that determine its limitations and challenge. These include: variety of skills required to do the job, degree to which the employee can do the entire task from start to finish, significance attributed to the job, autonomy, and the type and extent of performance feedback that an employee receives.

Organizational Practices – policies defining benefits and rewards can attract new employees and keep existing employees happy.

Suggestions for Motivating Employees

Recognize individual differences. Accept the different needs, attitudes, personality and other factors which affects employee’s level of motivation.

Match people to job. The jobs that are most attractive and motivating to employees  are the jobs with higher growth needs.

Use goals. Manager should ensure that employees have hard specific goals and feedback on how well they’re doing in pursuit of those goals.

Ensure that goals are perceived as attainable. Employee’s effort will be reduced if goals are not attainable.

Individualize rewards. Because employees have different needs, what acts as a reinforcer for one may not be for another.

Link rewards to performance. Key rewards such as pay increase and promotions should be given to serve as incentive to the employees to attain their specific goals.

Check the system for equity. This simply means that experience, ability, effort, and other obvious inputs should explain differences in pay, responsibility, and other outcomes.

Don’t ignore money. Allocation of performance – based wage increase, piecework bonuses, and other pay incentives is important in determining employee motivation.

Things to Consider in Motivation

1.Most managers think money is the top motivator but it is not. More than anything else, employees want to be valued for a job well done by those they hold in high esteem although one cannot ignore money.

2.Things that are the most motivating to employees tend to be relatively easy to do and cost the least. Personally recognizing employees’ accomplishments can be easy to do. (a personal thank you, public praise)

3.The greatest impact is using formal awards comes from their symbolic value. The recognition value, that is, the intangible, symbolic, and emotional value, of any award is by far the most motivating aspect for employees.

4.Recognizing performance will result in more of that behavior and that is also when it means the most to employees.

5.Managers do not tend to focus on employee motivation until it is lost. Managers are often busy focusing on what is urgent and forget about regularly motivating and recognizing employees. Regenerating poor morale is much more difficult than doing little things along the way to keep it high.

Two Approaches to Work Motivation

CONTENT APPROACH

Hierarchy of Needs Theory by Abraham Maslow – the best known theory of motivation. Maslow hypothesized that people have a complex set of five categories of needs which he arranged in order of primacy. He suggested that, as a person satisfies each level of needs, motivation shifts to satisfying the next higher level of needs.

Physiological Needs – food, clothing, shelter, and other physical requirements. This simply means that the primary motivation of a hungry person is to obtain food rather than gain recognition of achievements.

Security or safety needs – protection from physical and emotional harm. Workers express this desires in the form of having a stable job, with medical, unemployment, and retirement benefits.

Affiliation or Social Needs – the desire for affection, belongingness, acceptance, love, and friendship. Employees with high affiliation needs enjoy working closely with others.

Esteem needs – the desire for self respect, a sense of personal achievement, status, recognition, and attention from others. To satisfy these needs, people seek opportunities for achievement, prestige, promotion, and status to show their competence and worth.

Self – actualization needs – the desire for personal growth to achieve one’s potential and self – fulfillment. Traits commonly exhibited include initiative, spontaneity, and problem – solving ability.

This theory can be applied in organizations by taking note of the fact that unless an organization helps employees satisfy the two lower level needs, addressing the three higher level needs would not influence on-the-job behavior. Therefore, managers must continually re-evaluate what motivates their subordinates and how to motivate them.

Clay Alderfer ERG Model

Instead of five categories of needs, this model specifies a hierarchy of three needs categories

Existence Needs – desires for materials and physical well being (lowest level need)

Relatedness Needs – desires to establish and maintain interpersonal relationships with other people.

Growth Needs – desires to be creative, to make useful and productive contributions, and to have opportunities for personal development.

This theory can be applied by managers by knowing that when employees are frustrated in fulfilling their needs, managers should try to determine the cause of the frustration and if possible, work to remove blockages to need satisfaction. If blockages cannot be removed, managers should try to redirect the employees’ behavior toward satisfying a lower level need.

David McClelland’s Three Needs Theory

This theory proposed that there are three major motives or needs in work situations:

Need for Achievement – drive to excel, to achieve in relation to a set of standards or in competitive situations, to strive to succeed.

Need for Power – drive to influence and control others and the social environment.

Need for Affiliation – drive for friendly and close interpersonal relationships with others.

This theory can be applied in organizations by making an assessment of what drives the employee to work. Those who are achievement – oriented can succeed in an increasingly competitive business world while those who are affiliation motivated can easily work together in teams; self – managed teams, who must work together daily to produce a product.

Frederick Herzberg’s Motivation Hygiene Theory

This theory suggests that distinct kind of experience produce job satisfaction (motivators) and job dissatisfactions (hygiene factors)

Motivator Factors – the factors associated with positive feelings about the job and job characteristics such as challenge of the work itself, responsibility, recognition, achievement, advancement, and growth when present should create high levels of motivation.

Hygiene Factors – are the factors that eliminate dissatisfaction. There refer to characteristics of the work environment outside the work such as working condition, company policies, supervision, co-workers, salary, and job security, that when adequate, maintain a reasonable level of satisfaction but do not necessarily increase it.

This theory can be applied by not only focusing or relying on hygiene factors to motivate employees but on what Herzberg  calls the real motivators to solve human resource problems such as grievances, low productivity, and the like. This theory shows how important it is that managers understand differences between human beings when designing motivational approaches.

PROCESS APPROACH

Victor Vroom’s Expectancy Theory

This is based on the assumption that people choose among alternative behaviors because they anticipate that a particular behaviors will lead to one or more desired outcomes and that other behaviors will lead to undesirable outcomes.  This include three variable or relationship:

Expectancy or effort – performance linkage – probability perceived by the individual that exerting a given amount of effort would lead to a certain level of performance

Instrumentality or performance reward linkage – the degree to which the individual believes that performing at a particular level is instrumental in leading to the attainment of a desired outcome

Valence or attractiveness of reward – the importance that the individual places on the potential outcome or reward that can be achieved on the job.

This theory can be applied in organizations by determining the rewards that each employee value, clear identification of the desired level of performance, and making sure that it is attainable. Rewards should be linked to performance, and making sure that rewards are adequate.

John Stacey Adams Equity Theory

This theory is based on the assumption that a major factor in job satisfaction is the individual’s evaluation of the equity or fairness of the reward received.

Equity is defined as a ratio between the individual’s job inputs (such as effort or skill) and job rewards (such as pay and promotion). This means that individuals are motivated when they experience satisfaction with what they receive from an effort in proportion to the effort they apply and then comparing their rewards to the rewards others are receiving.

This theory can be applied by taking note the fact that inequities usually occur with respect to promotions, salary increases, perquisites and other human resource actions in organizations. Thus, managers must strive to treat all organization’s members fairly by effectively communicating with them.

B.F. Skinner’s Reinforcement Theory

This theory is based on the “law and effect”, the idea that behavior with positive consequences tends to be repeated, while behavior with negative consequences tends not to be repeated. This may expressed as follows:

Stimulus (Situation)    >>>> 

Response (Behavior)   >>>>  

Consequences (Rewards or Punishment)    >>>>  

Future Response                                                  

To illustrate, if one receives a reward (i.e. bonus, compliment, or a promotion) for superior performance, one is likely to continue performing well in anticipation of future rewards while if the consequences are unpleasant (i.e. management’s disapproval or demotion), one tends to modify the behavior.

This theory can be applied by using positive reinforcement to influence work behavior. This can be done through the use of the following guidelines:

1.Do not reward all individual equally.

2.Telling employees what they can do to receive reinforcement

3.Telling what they are doing wrong

4.Not punishing employees in front of others

5.Being fair to all

Edwin Locke’s Goal Setting Theory

This assumes that specific goals increase performance, and when difficult goals, when accepted, result in higher performance than easy goals. Individuals are motivated when they behave in ways that move them to certain clear goals that they accept and can reasonably expect to attain.

Christopher Early and Christine Shalley describe the goal setting process in terms of four phases of a person’s reasoning:

1.Establishment of standards to be attained

2.Evaluation of whether the standards can be achieved

3.Evaluation whether the standards match personal goals

4.The standards are accepted, the goal is thereby set, and behavior proceeds towards the goal

This theory can be applied by establishing goals that are specific and challenging, and by letting employees participate in setting goals. Employees need accurate feedback on their performance to help them adjust their work methods when necessary and to encourage them to persists in working toward goals.

Rewards and Performance a Group Level

Most people suggest that performance in an organization is determined by three things:ability to perform, the environmental context of performance, and themotivation to perform.

Ability to perform is handled primarily through the organization’s selection and training mechanisms. That is, the organization should ensure that it hires only people who have the ability to perform at the expected level.

Question for Discussion (Answer at least 1 question)

Please write your answer on the comment section.

1. Is the success of superior/colleagues a motivator or de-motivator? Discuss

2. Do you find that motivated people are more successful than unmotivated people?Defend your answer.

3. What role do teachers play in motivating students? What role do students play in motivating teachers?

Related: Explain that knowing oneself can make a person accept his/her strengths and limitations and dealing with others better

About the Author:

Rebecca Mauhay Nunesca is a Professional Industrial Engineer, and an ASEAN Engineer currently connected at Batangas State University as Faculty Staff in the IE department. She is presently enrolled at Rizal Technological University taking MS Engineering Education, major in Industrial Engineering.

References:

Corpuz, Cristina Rafol, Ph.D. Human Resource Management (Revised Edition) Philippine Copyright, 2006 by Rex Book Store, Inc.

Medina, Roberto G., Engineering Management First Edition, Copyriight 1999, Rex Book Store Inc., Manila.

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