Motivation

• Delayering: Removing tiers of management, usually in the middle, can save money on salaries and improve communication.
• Employee of the month may have repercussions in terms of resentment by those who are overlooked.
• A manager could change their attitude towards the employees and consult them more.
• Employees who remain after delayering may become fearful for their own jobs and therefore demoralised.
• Employees may be demotivated as chances of promotion are reduced.
• Some employees may now be over-burdened with work and are therefore less efficient.
• Cost implications of delayering include redundancies and training costs for remaining employees to cope with extra responsibilities.
• Fredrick Taylor believed that people only work for money and that they should be told exactly how to do their jobs.
• Taylor broke down the production process into a series of small tasks that could be carried out by relatively unskilled employees.
• Taylor believed in close supervision of the workforce to ensure that they continued to make the maximum effort possible, motivated by pay.
• Taylor believed in paying people according to how much they produced – piecework.
• Scientific management in practice includes features such as employees being paid for carrying out specific tasks, being paid for levels of output produced, a tall hierarchy within organisations, with little scope for upward communication, adopting the best (most efficient) method of working by all employees, and close supervision of employees and monitoring of performance.
• Mayo’s Hawthorne Experiments involved separating six volunteer female employees from their workmates and trying various different working methods on the group, such as different bonus methods, different lighting and different rest periods.
• Non-financial methods of motivation, such as job enrichment, job enlargement, job rotation, and job design, are used by employers to apply the ideas behind the theories of the likes of Mayo, Maslow and Herzberg.
• Disadvantages of financial methods of motivation include causing resentment when bonuses are linked to teams, de-motivating employees if they feel they are carrying some of their colleagues, and jealousy when some employees are de-motivated by the financial success of colleagues.
• Advantages of financial methods of motivation include employees liking to earn more money, which may improve their standard of living, and schemes motivating employees to reach a certain target.
• Expectancy is an individual’s belief in the likelihood of being able to achieve the target that has been set for them.
• Financial methods of motivation involve monetary rewards such as pay increases, bonus schemes, piece rates, profit sharing/share ownership, and fringe benefits.
• Vroom believed that an individual’s motivation was a combination of these three forces: V,I and E.
• Instrumentality is the belief that a particular action is likely to lead to a particular result, motivating an individual to work hard to achieve a particular target if they believe it will lead to a positively valent result.
• Mayo found that productivity increased with every change, even when the changes made the conditions worse.
• Herzberg identified two major sets of influences at work: Hygiene factors are all around the job, but are not part of the job, and Motivators relate to the job itself and can be used to positively motivate employees.
• Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs theory was that employees have a series of needs they seek to fulfil at work.
• Empowerment or delegating specific tasks that a manager would normally do themselves can have long-term benefits as they can have important jobs covered when the manager is absent.
• Training is the provision of a formal training scheme that is important for business motivation.
• Job enrichment gives the employee a greater challenge and helps them to develop new skills which could lead to promotion, but this does require a manager to delegate, which some may find difficult.
• Quality circles are groups of employees that meet on a regular basis to discuss problems in the manufacturing or service-provision process and offer solutions.
• Flexible working allows employees to have elements of their schedule that are under their control.
• Empowerment can be risky as junior employees are given responsibility without the experience that might be necessary to go with it.
• Communication is a key part of motivation and can take place in a number of ways, such as quality circles, works councils, cell working.
• Job enlargement prevents boredom and encourages employees’ satisfaction as they are completing an entire process, but some managers argue that allowing employees to complete whole tasks will reduce efficiency.
• Job rotation involves giving employees different jobs to do from time to time to reduce their boredom and give them greater experience, but this can take a lot of time to train the employees and they will take time to settle in.
• Setting up a reward system for performance might have cost implications and could cause unwanted rivalry.
• Empowerment involves giving employees the power to control their own jobs, make decisions and implement their own ideas.
• Business motivation can include a series of actions designed to give employees greater control over their working lives, such as delayering, which can lead to costly redundancies and damaged morale.
• Vroom's Expectancy Theory assumes that people act in their own best interests according to their beliefs about the outcomes of their own behaviour.
• Extrinsic rewards are rewards that come from outside the individual, for example material rewards such as pay increases and bonuses.
• Vroom's theory relates to an individual person's beliefs rather than to any objective reality and comprises of three components: Valence, Expectancy, and Instrumentality.
• Valence in Vroom's theory refers to an individual's belief that they will receive a worthwhile reward as a result of undertaking a task.
• Self-Actualisation Needs, which contribute to personal growth, are satisfied by providing employees with the opportunity to take on challenging and stimulating responsibilities.