Motivation And Work Performance

Analysis

Discuss about the Motivation And Work Performance.

The success and failure of any organization depends on how customer centric is their business plan. Today, in this age of short product life cycle and when customers have good bargaining power over suppliers due to increased competition by globalization, the only way not only to survive but also to excel is bringing custom centricity in everything what organizations do, showing customers how passionate organizations are about the business helping customers, and showing them how organizations are different from the competitors and how the organizations care about their customers. All these things can really happen only when employees understand their responsibilities and work with high productivity levels.

There are various motivation theories that are being used by the organizations to keep employees motivated. The Maslow need hierarchy theory is used widely by organizations to keep employees motivated. One of the ways to gauge the motivation level of employees is the employee satisfaction survey. Employee satisfaction surveys offer organization with the information and methods to create optimistic employee associations and work atmosphere. Employee approaches, desire aspects, burnout propensities, loyalty, office environment and competitive intellect are important pointers for employee satisfaction. Effective companies emphasize on building and strengthening employee satisfaction so as to get the maximum output from their human capital. Suitably constructed employee satisfaction surveys deliver the understandings that are basic for creation and reinforcement of agreeable work atmospheres. The above mentioned survey questionnaire could be used to get the required data for analysis. This survey sheet can be passed on to the employees through their official email ids and the responses could be collected in a time bound manner. Thus the findings can be used to study the company’s employee satisfaction.

It is important that the motivation level of employees should also align with the innovation as innovation can help organizations to develop competitive advantage. There are some misinterpretations, especially when it takes to the innovation side. It is hard even to Managers to determine whether the employee is innovative and has competence or it is just innovative. There is a borderline in here that may not be forgotten. Anthony (2012) also quotes Fitzgerald trying to explain this difference:  “the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function”. This quote summarizes that although is important that the person holds with passion its innovation thought it is imperative that a critique though come together. Thus, this double thought determines that the competence follows innovation.

Motivation Theories

The motivation of employees also encouraged employees to develop the job specific competencies that the employees should develop. Since competencies are qualities one would hope are becoming of all level of workers within an organization, then social interaction and creativity are most definitely competencies. Wood and Payne (1998, cited in Pilbeam and Corbridge 2010, pp. 72-74) identified a number of competencies found in frameworks; among those were communication, building relationships, problem solving and analytical thinking. By my proposition, social interaction is accounted for by communication skills and building relationships, whilst creativity is accounted for by problem solving and analytical thinking. Sufficed to say social interaction and creativity are components of competencies. A means of assessing or measuring such competencies may be executed through continuous assessment in conjunction with other strategic initiatives aimed at establishing stable organizational orientation. Day (1994) describes such a practice as part of the organization-wide transformation becoming of market-driven organizations. Enhancing all organizational capabilities internal and external, calls for accurate assessment of current and future capabilities inclusive of ore competencies as the author further reveals.

On the one hand people believe that the competences that drive better work performance and value added to the organization. In other perspective, these competences are equally measured to how well a person can balance his work and social life. The social interaction is one’s own reflection and learning, therefore the same professional behavior and attitude one displays at work must match his/ her level of competence in his social life. In various cultures these could be left irrelevant to the work as some cultures may separate social life from work, while other societies have greater emphasis on integrating people’s social interaction and work performance. Creativity is indeed a value added to people’s ability to be innovative and have more capacity to implement their vision into reality. It would be correct to say that the motivation level of employees that have a good work-life balance is better than the motivation level of employees that does not have a good work-life balance.

It is important that the motivation level should be directed towards the competency development. The motivation can really improve the productivity level of employees when the employees can develop their competency by remaining motivated. Sveiby (1997), posits five mutually dependent individual elements of competence; explicit knowledge, skill, experience, value judgment, social network. Social interaction and creativity are both component skills which make up managerial competence, the former is people-oriented involving an individual’s relationships with others within the firm while the latter is intellectual, focusing on situation assessment and search for alternative ways to reach set goals. Scheer, et al (2012, citing Reich, 2008 & Kolb, 1984) suggest that learning is a process of individually self-organizing knowledge. The learning process is unpredictable, and knowledge is constantly altered through new insights, which are gained through individual experiences. This theory implies that though we can all learn the same processes and because of life’s experiences they will mean different things to different people, which should promote different approaches to role execution.

Competency Development

The motivation level of employees could also depend on various external factors like the cultural and social factors. In this current state, businesses may not need to depend or look at culture as the major factor in relation to their proceedings or performance. That is to say international businesses may not base on culture in order to start business. This is because people have different cultures reason being that they come from different societies. For example in the Muslim community, it would be very hard to sell pork as a way of raising income. However because of modernization, one would carry out the business because the major goal of the business formation is profit maximization but not cultural formation.

Robert M. Williamson (2006) wrote an article regarding around motivation and performance. Author argued that the leaders and managers should develop methods and ways to measure the motivation level of employees. The organization and leaders can actually improve the motivation level of employees when they can measure these motivation levels. His discussion supports the idea that measurements are important but also with challenges. Specifically, there are a lot measurement opportunities but these measurements seldom hit its target. These measurements just come and go and sometimes managers get lose track of what are those that really needs to be measured.  Referring to Albert Einstein’s sign in his office wall – “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts”. A view is that measurements and metric are not the only source of improvements.  Another thing to bear in mind is this, “when something is measured but it isn’t important, it probably won’t get done”. This means that measurements sometimes do the task of assessing something that is not significant for the company. It is just so done because it is being required but do not impact the company’s creation of value. Still an important concept is – measure the wrong things and the organizations will likely get the wrong behaviors. This is true enough to management that is measuring another thing for the wrong performance indicator. Thus, instead of bringing performance improvement, it will lead to creation of unnecessary issues. In summary, organizations need to embrace improvement of performance using appropriate measurements that can cater to all types of competencies or work indicators. Organizations should use the findings to aid in decisions of what needs to be sustained or modified. Hence, measure all that counts for the success of the organization and do not linger on those, which do not create any impact for performance improvement.

Conclusion

It would be correct to say that motivation is the key driver of individual growth and development. The large and small organizations have realized that employees are the assets of the organization and the success of the organizations would depend on the way employees are working. Therefore, the organizations cannot neglect the importance of motivated workforce. The motivation acts as the catalyst for employees to work with higher productivity. It is believed that employees feel passionate and committed if they are motivated. Therefore, it is important that the organizations must create a platform where employees’ motivation can be improved. It would be correct to say that it is not easy to improve the motivation level of employees. Therefore, the leaders are always in search of the employees that are self-motivated. There could be both direct and indirect methods to increase the motivation level of employees. The direct methods are associated with employees’ perception and employee attitude and the organization must create a culture to improve the motivation through direct methods.  The direct methods would include employee compensation, salary, and rewards. The indirect methods of employee motivation would include secondary or support factors like work conditions, tangible things within the organization, the infrastructure and facilities, etc. The self-motivation is a key for employees to work with 100% productivity levels. A true leader is one who can have an impact on the individual so that employees can work with dedication and commitment. As a conclusion, it is rightly said that if employees feel their jobs are interesting, challenging and important, they will be motivated, and that high motivation will lead to improved work performance, job satisfaction and reduced absenteeism and labor turnover.

References

Cosier, R. & Schwenk, C. (1990) ‘Agreement and Thinking Alike: Ingredients for Poor Decisions’, The Executive, 1, p. 69

Day, GS 1994, “The capabilities of market-driven organizations”, Journal Of Marketing, 58(4), p. 37

Pilbeam, S. & Corbridge, M. (2010) People Resourcing And Talent Planning: HRM in Practice. 4th Ed. Financial Times Prentice Hall

Scott, A.  (2012) “Don’t Confuse Passion with Competence” Hardvard Business Review https://hbr.org/2012/02/dont-confuse-passion-with-comp/ (Accessed 09 August 2016)

Sveiby,K .E.(1997). The new organizational wealth: Managing & nmeasuring knowledge-based assets. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Williamson, R.M. (2006) What gets measured gets done: are you measuring what really matters? Available at:https://www.swspitcrew.com/articles/What%20Gets%20Measured%201106.pdf  (Accessed: 25 January 2015).