Employee Motivation Flashcards
Industrial psychologists generally define work _____ as the internal force that drives a worker to action as well as the external factors that encourage that action.
Ability and skill determine whether a worker can do the job, but _____ determines whether the worker will do it properly.
motivation
Researchers have found three individual difference traits that are most related to work motivation: _____, an intrinsic motivation tendency, and need for achievement.
self-esteem
According to _____ theory, there is a positive correlation between self-esteem and performance. That is, employees who feel good about themselves are motivated to perform better at work than employees who do not feel that they are valuable and worthy people.
Korman’s consistency
The theory becomes somewhat complicated in that there are three types of _____.
- Chronic self-esteem is a person’s overall feeling about himself.
- Situational self-esteem
- Socially influenced self-esteem
self-esteem
(also called self-efficacy) is a person’s feeling about himself in a particular situation such as operating a machine or talking to other people.
Situational self-esteem
is how a person feels about himself on the basis of the expectations of others.
Socially influenced self-esteem
On the basis of _____ theory, we should be able to improve performance by increasing an employee’s self-esteem. Organizations can theoretically do this in three ways: self-esteem workshops, experience with success, and supervisor behavior.
consistency
Self-Esteem Workshops
For example, in a self-esteem training program called The _____ Self, employees try to increase their self-esteem by learning how to think positively, discovering their positive qualities that may have gone unnoticed, and sharing their positive qualities with others.
Enchanted
Self-Esteem Workshops
For example, in a self-esteem training program called The _____ Self, employees try to increase their self-esteem by learning how to think positively, discovering their positive qualities that may have gone unnoticed, and sharing their positive qualities with others.
Enchanted
Experience with Success
With the experience-with-success approach, an employee is given a task so easy that he will almost certainly succeed. It is thought that this success increases self-esteem, which should increase performance, which further increases selfesteem, which further increases performance, and so on.
This method is based loosely on the principle of the _____ prophecy, which states that an individual will perform as well or as poorly as he expects to perform. In other words, if an individual believes he is intelligent, he should do well on tests. If he thinks he is dumb, he should do poorly.
self-fulfilling
So if an employee believes he will always fail, the only way to break the vicious cycle is to ensure that he performs well on a task. This relationship between self-expectations and performance is called the _____ effect.
Galatea
Supervisor Behavior
Another approach to increasing employee self-esteem is to train supervisors to communicate a feeling of confidence in an employee. The idea here is that if an employee feels that a manager has confidence in him, his self-esteem will increase, as will his performance. Such a process is known as the _____ effect and has been demonstrated in situations as varied as elementary school classrooms, the workplace, courtrooms, and the military.
Pygmalion
In contrast, the _____ effect occurs when negative expectations of an individual cause a decrease in that individual’s actual performance
Golem
Individual orientations toward intrinsic and extrinsic motivation can be measured by the _____. The _____ yields scores on two dimensions of intrinsic motivation (enjoyment, challenge) and two dimensions of extrinsic motivation (compensation, outward orientation).
Work Preference Inventory (WPI)
A theory developed by _____ suggests that employees differ in the extent to which they are motivated by the need for achievement, affiliation, and power.
Employees who have a strong need for achievement are motivated by jobs that are challenging and over which they have some control, whereas employees who have minimal achievement needs are more satisfied when jobs involve little challenge and have a high probability of success.
In contrast, employees who have a strong need for affiliation are motivated by jobs in which they can work with and help other people.
Finally, employees who have a strong need for power are motivated by a desire to influence others rather than simply to be successful.
McClelland
A discrepancy between what an employee expected a job to be like and the reality of the job can affect motivation and satisfaction is called _____.
Job Expectations
As you can guess from these examples, it is important that applicants be given a _____. Though being honest about the negative aspects of a job may reduce the applicant pool, it decreases the chances of hiring a person who will later lose motivation or become dissatisfied.
realistic job preview (RJP)
According to job characteristics theory, employees desire jobs that are meaningful, provide them with the opportunity to be personally responsible for the outcome of their work (autonomy), and provide them with feedback of the results of their efforts. If there is a discrepancy between the extent to which a job provides these three outcomes and an employee’s need for these outcomes, the employee will be less motivated.
Job Characteristics
Three theories focus on employees’ needs and values: _____
Maslow’s needs hierarchy, ERG theory, and two-factor theory.
_____ believed that employees would be motivated by and satisfied with their jobs at any given
point in time if certain needs were met.
Maslow
Because of the technical problems with Maslow’s hierarchy, Aldefer developed a needs theory that has only three levels. The three levels are existence, relatedness, and growth—hence the name ERG theory.
Other than the number of levels, the major difference between Maslow’s theory and ERG theory is that Aldefer suggested that a person can _____. By allowing for such movement, Aldefer has removed one of the biggest problems with Maslow’s theory.
skip levels
_____ believed that job-related factors could be divided into two categories—hygiene factors and motivators—thus the name two-factor theory.
Hygiene factors are those job-related elements that result from but do not involve the job itself. For example, pay and benefits are consequences of work but do not involve the work itself. Similarly, making new friends may result from going to work, but it is also not directly involved with the tasks and duties of the job.
Motivators are job elements that do concern actual tasks and duties. Examples of motivators would be the level of responsibility, the amount of job control, and the interest that the work holds for the employee.
Herzberg
For goal setting to be most successful, the goals themselves should possess certain qualities represented by the acronym SMART: _____.
specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
Though this feedback often comes from others, the idea behind _____ theory is that employees monitor their own progress toward attaining goals and then make the necessary adjustments; that is, they _____.
self-regulation
An interesting method of providing incentives that meet the individual needs of each employee stems from the Premack Principle, which states that reinforcement is relative and that a supervisor can reinforce an employee with something that on the surface does not appear to be a reinforcer.
The best way to explain this principle is to construct a reinforcement hierarchy on which an employee lists his preferences for a variety of reinforcers.
Premack Principle
Informal recognition programs, called _____, can prove to be tremendous sources of employee motivation. _____ consists of personal attention, signs of approval (e.g., smiles, head nods), and expressions of appreciation
social recognition
An influential theory of worker motivation that integrates many of the factors discussed previously in this chapter is _____ theory, which was first proposed by Vroom and then modified by others, including Porter and Lawler.
expectancy
_____: The perceived relationship between the amount of effort an employee puts in and the resulting outcome
Expectancy (E)
Instrumentality (I): The extent to which the outcome of a worker’s performance, if noticed, results in a particular consequence_____
Instrumentality (I)
_____: The extent to which an employee values a particular consequence.
For _____, if an employee is rewarded, the reward must be something he values. If good
performance is rewarded by an award, then the employee will be motivated only if he
values awards.
Valence (V)
_____ theory is based on the premise that our levels of motivation and job satisfaction are related to how fairly we believe we are treated in comparison with others.
Equity
