Motivation and Communication Flashcards
Define motivation
Motivation refers to the influential impulse which encourages a person to sustain a commitment to a particular course of action. The impulses may emanate from within the person or be a result of external influential factors.
Motivation can be viewed as an incentive to act in a particular manner.
Define communication
Communication is the transference of knowledge or information from sender to receiver.
Types of communications
One way: information communicated to a target audience with no need of expectation of a response.
Two ways: information passes back and forth between different senders and receivers in the form of discussions, teamwork etc.
Upward: information channels that give access to different layers of management including top executive level.
Downward: information from management downwards towards groups of workers.
Laterally: information that passes between different departments or functions within the organization.
Define empowerment
The delegation of a level of authority that extends the scope of workers to act autonomously from line management.
Disadvantage of empowerment
Risk of compromise to information security
Lack of commercial expertise to follow
through on ideas
Risk of unions exploiting the type of
relationship with workers
Difficult to balance control and monitoring
with delegating power
Difficult to control ego-enhancing effect of
empowerment
Employees may receive feedback
negatively
Advantages of empowerment
Job satisfaction and better motivation and
worker morale
Enhanced creativity and innovation
Increased efficiency and productivity
Less need for supervision
improved quality of outputs
Greater entrepreneurial spirit and risk taking
Motivation oriented rewards
Performance-related pay: this reward system requires agreement between the employer and employee regarding what constitutes an acceptable output.
Peer recognition: some professions attract people who seek more than monetary reward for their contributions.
Promotion and status: a promotion system where superior performance is formally recognised by assigning more responsibility and status to employees.
Greater freedom: to demonstrate an enhanced level of trust by offering greater freedom to employees.
Decision making power: is linked to promotion and status in organisations.
Professional development: helps workers to improve their skills and expertise and to contribute more to the aims of organisations.
Explain Expectancy theory
Nadler & Lawer (1983): Identify values and beliefs that motivate action. Causes of the behaviour of people in organisation:
Behaviour is determined by the combination of forces in the individual and in the environment.
Each individual has a unique set of needs deriving from past experiences which will have coloured the way he or she perceives the world and the expectations he or she has of the organisation. These expectations and values will influence the individual’s response to the workplace
The work environment itself will influence the individual such as in terms of supervision or pay.
Conclusion: dissimilar people will behave differently in similar environments, and similar people will behave differently in dissimilar environments.
Explain Herzberg: Hygiene factors and motivators
Frederick Herzberg theorized that employee satisfaction depends on two sets of issues: “hygiene” issues and motivators. Once the hygiene issues (i.e. good working conditions, salary, supervision, etc) have been addressed, he said, the motivators create satisfaction among employees
Job enrichment: the design or redesign of jobs to make them more satisfying for employees.
Forms of “enrichment” may include:
An increase in responsibility
A decrease in supervision; freedom to schedule one’s time and work activities
Increased direct feedback of performance
Opportunities for developing and expanding skills
Explain Theory Y assumptions:
Employees can perceive their job as relaxing and normal. They exercise their physical and mental efforts in an inherent manner in their jobs.
Employees may not require only threat, external control and coercion to work, but they can use self-direction and self-control if they are dedicated and sincere to achieve the organizational objectives.
If the job is rewarding and satisfying, then it will result in employees’ loyalty and commitment to organization.
An average employee can learn to admit and recognize the responsibility. In fact, he can even learn to obtain responsibility.
The employees have skills and capabilities. Their logical capabilities should be fully utilized. In other words, the creativity, resourcefulness and innovative potentiality of the employees can be utilized to solve organizational problems.
Explain Theory X assumptions
The average human being has an inherent dislike of work and will avoid it if he can
Humans have a characteristic dislike of work meaning that most people must be coerced, controlled, directed, and threatened with punishment to get them to put forth adequate effort towards the achievement of organisational objectives
The average human being prefers to be directed, wishes to avoid responsibility, has relatively little ambition, wants security above all.
Explain Maslow’s Hierarchy of need
Is based on the motivational concept of “drive”. Maslow stated that human beings possessed five categories of needs, arranged in a specific hierarchical order, so that, once one need had been satisfied it no longer acts as a motivator. The five categories are psychological (survival), security (safety), belongingness (part of a society), esteem (value) and self-actualisation (ambitions and goals).
Explain Instrumental approach
Economic return was seen as the only incentive or motivation that was required in the factory system that characterised the industrial landscape of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Main protagonist of the instrumental approach: Taylor, Weber, Ford
Work environment characterised by fear/reward dichotomy
