Week 9: Motivation and Empowerment

Question 1

Motivation

Answer 1

• Motivation to work refers to forces within an individual that account for the level, direction and persistence of effort expended at work:
  
  • Level: refers to amount of effort a person puts forth
  • Direction: refers to what the person chooses when presented with possible alternatives
  • Persistence: refers to how long a person sticks with a given action

Motivation is part of the individual performance equation

Question 2

Contemporary Issues Affecting Motivation

Answer 2

• Labour skills shortages and ageing workforce
  
  • Skills shortages an issue in some areas despite GFC (global financial crisis)
    
    • May end up looking at demographics previously underutilised (people with disabilities, indigenous people, older people, women working part-time and international workers)
  • Ageing workforce – potential experience deficit
• Workforce mobility
  
  • Willingness to move from job to job
  • Young people travel and work overseas
• Work motivation challenge
  
  • Create a positive climate in which workers are motivated to achieve

Question 3

Motivation is applied in workplaces through the use of various strategies such as:

Answer 3

• The provision of workplace reward
• Job designing
• Flexible work places

Question 4

Understanding the work effort-motivation cycle

Question 5

The degree of effort expended to achieve good outcome depends on:

Answer 5

• The individuals willingness to perform and their commitment to these outcomes in terms of the value attached to a particular outcome
• The individuals competency or capacity to perform the tasks
• The individuals personal assessment of probability of attaining a specific outcome
• The opportunity to perform

Question 6

Types of Motivation Theories

Content Theories

Answer 6

Content Theories: Offer ways to profile or analyse individuals to identify the needs that motivate their behaviours

• ‘What’
• Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
• Alderfer’s ERG Theory
• McClelland’s Acquired Needs Theory
• Herzberg’s Two Factor Theory

Question 7

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Answer 7

• Identifies higher order needs: which are esteem and self actualization needs in Maslow’s hierarchy
• Identifies lower order needs: physiological, safety and social needs in Maslow’s hierarchy

• In general, a person’s frame of reference will determine the order of importance of their needs and societal culture influences that frame of reference*
• Theory doesnt account for individual differences*

Question 8

Alderfer’s ERG Theory

Answer 8

• An extension of Maslow’s theory that proposes three needs:
  
  • Existence Needs: desire for physiological and material wellbeing
  • Relatedness Needs: desire for satisfying interpersonal relationships
  • Growth Needs: desire for continued psychological growth and development
• Doesn’t assume lower-level needs must be met before higher-level needs become activated
• More than one need may be activated at the same time (unlike Maslow’s)
• Frustration-regression principle
  
  • An already satisfied lower-level need may become reactivated when a higher-level need is frustrated

• Early studies have found that those from higher educated parents have higher growth needs and that women are higher in relatedness needs and have lower existence needs than men (more studies need to be done to for greater validity)*
• For now, the ERG theory is a more flexible approach to understanding human needs compared to Maslow’s strict hierarchy*
• Alderfer’s theory emphasises that performance constraints outside the control of the individual, or innate disposition (such as lack of competence or low intrinsic work motivation) may cause a decline in effort or negative behaviour*
• The main problem with the needs hierarchy models are that everyone is different and may put value and emphasis on different things*

Question 9

McClelland’s Acquired Needs Theory

Answer 9

Centres around three themes important for understanding human behaviour:

1. The need for achievement (nAch): that is, the desire to undertake something better or more efficiently, to solve problems or to master complex tasks
2. The need for affiliation (nAff): the desire to establish and maintain friendly and warm relationships with others
3. The need for power (nPower): the desire to control others, to influence their behaviour or to be responsible for others

McClelland’s research maintains that the need to achieve is a behaviour that an individual can acquire through appropriate training in adulthood (contrary to Erickson and many developmental theorists)

Question 10

Herzberg’s Two Factor Theory

Answer 10

Motivator-hygiene theory: distinguishes between sources of work dissatisfaction (hygiene factors) and satisfaction (motivators); it is also known as the two-factor theory

• Motivators (Satisfiers)
  
  • ​Job content related (what people do in their work)
    
    • Things such as achievement, recognition and responsibility which need to be given as opportunities in order to satisfy workers
• Hygiene factors (Dissatisfiers)
  
  • ​Job context related (related to a person’s work setting)
    
    • Improving working conditions involves improving hygiene factor and prevents people from being dissatisfied with their work (although it will not make them satisfied)

According to this theory, an individual employee can be simultaneously satisfied and dissatisfied because each of these two factors has a different set of drivers and is recorded on a separate scale, such as:

Question 11

Herzberg’s Two Factor Theory

Answer 11

Question 12

Criticisms of Herzberg’s theory:

Answer 12

• It is method-bound: that is, supportable only by applying Herzberg’s original method
• The original sample of scientists and engineers probably aren’t representative of the working population
• The theory does not account for individual differences (e.g. the similar impact of pay regardless of gender, age and other important differences)
• The theory does not clearly define the relationship between satisfaction and motivation

Herzberg’s theory can be useful for identifying why a focus on job environment factors often do not motivate and highlights the value of job design and motivation

Question 13

Types of Motivation Theories

Process Theories

Answer 13

Process Theories

• ‘Why and how’
• Seek to understand the thought processes that take place in the minds of people and that act to motivate behaviour
• Adams’ equity theory
• Vroom’s expectancy theory

Question 14

Adams’ Equity Theory

Restoring Equity

3 equity preferences

Answer 14

​Equity theory: Motivation is affected when social comparison in the workplace leaves people feeling that work outcomes are unfair or inequitable, due to social comparisons in the workplace:

• Felt negative inequity: exists when the individuals feel they have received relatively less than others have in proportion to work inputs
• Felt positive inequity: exists when individuals feel they have received relatively more than others have
• When people perceive inequity in their work they experience cognitive dissonance and will be aroused to remove the discomfort and to restore a sense of felt equity to the situation
• Managing the equity dynamic to avoid negative consequences when allocating rewards

Restoring equity

• Both positive and negative inequity are motivating states which causes an individual to likely engage in one or more of the following behaviours to restore a sense of equity:

1. Change work inputs (e.g. reduce performance efforts)
2. Change the outcomes (rewards) received (e.g. ask for a raise)
3. Leave the situation (e.g. quit)
4. Change the comparison points (e.g. compare self with a different co-worker)
5. Psychologically distort the comparisons (e.g. rationalise that the inequity is only temporary and will be resolved in the future)
6. Act to change the inputs or outputs of the comparison person (e.g. get a co-worker to accept more work)

• Research shows that people feel less comfortable when they are under-rewarded (negative equity) than when they are over-rewarded (positive equity)*
• Three categories for describing individual’s equity preferences:

1. Benevolents: have the greatest tolerance for under-rewarded situations
2. Entitleds: feel most comfortable in situations where they receive the proportionally more than their work-mates
3. Sensitives: act in accordance to Adam’s equity theory and prefer their outcomes input ratio to be equal to that of a comparison other

Question 15

Vroom’s Expectancy Theory

Answer 15

• Individuals are viewed as making conscious decisions to allocate their behaviour towards work efforts and to serve self-interests
• Three key terms in the theory:
  
  • Expectancy: is the probability that the individual assigns to the work effort being followed by a given level of achieved task performance (impossible=0, certain possibility=1)
  • Instrumentality: the probability that the individual assigns to a given level of achieved task performance leading to various work outcomes that are rewarding for them (also varies from 0-1 as before)
  • Valence: the value that the individual attaches to various work reward outcomes (from very undesirable outcome -1, to very desirable outcome +1)
• Expectancy theory argues that work motivation is determined by individual beliefs about effort-performance relationships and the desirability of various work outcomes from different performance levels

Multiplier effects and multiple outcomes

• Motivation (M), expectancy (E), instrumentality (I) and valence (V) are related to each other in the following equation:

M = E x I x V

• Employee motivation is influenced by all three components:
  
  • Effort → task performance: individual’s perception that his/her effort will result in a particular performance level; ranges from ‘no chance’ to ‘certainty’
  • Performance → outcome: perceived probability that specific behaviour or performance level will lead to specific outcomes
  • Outcome valences: anticipated (dis)satisfaction toward each outcome considered; range from positive to negative and influenced by our personal values
• Managerial implications: see pic
• A manager should strive to create a work setting in which the individual will perceive that their own effort will lead to work outcomes that are valued by the organisation and rewarded fairly with things desired by the individual*
• While awaiting the results of more sophisticated research, experts seem to agree that expectancy theory is a useful insight into work motivation*
• Equity and expectancy theories thought to have special strengths*

Question 16

Extrinsic rewards

Intrinsic rewards

Answer 16

Extrinsic rewards: positively values work outcomes that the individual receives from some other person in the work setting (i.e. pay)

Intrinsic rewards: positively valued work outcomes that the individual receives directly as a result of task performance (i.e. a feeling of achievement)

A congruent temperament model, which combines other perspectives on motivation, suggests that motivation is enhanced when the leader can understand the employee, and respond appropriately with behaviours that are congruent with the follower’s temperament and perspective

Question 17

Other Concepts of Motivation: Self-Concept

Answer 17

Self-concept: Perception individuals have of themselves as physical, social, and spiritual/moral beings

• Derived from many influences, including family, social identify, reference groups, education, experience
• Underlying force that motivates behaviour, that gives it direction and energy, and sustains it
• Three Cs of self-concept:
  
  • Complexity: people have multiple self-concepts
  • Consistency: similar personality and values across multiple selves
  • Clarity: clearly and confidently described, internally consistent, stable across time

Question 18

Other Concepts of Motivation: Empowerment and Motivation

Answer 18

• Empowerment
  
  • Process by which managers delegate power to employees to motivate greater responsibility in balancing the achievement of both personal and organisational goals
• Self-efficacy
  
  • A person’s belief that they can perform adequately in a situation
• Modelling the empowerment process: see pic

Question 19

MARS Model of Individual Behaviour

Answer 19