Does rewarding affect motivation in engineering and manufacturing organizations?

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

LITERATURE REVIEW1

Motivation1

Importance of Motivation2

Types of Motivation2

Rewards3

Incentives, Benefits and Employee Motivation4

Monetary rewards5

Informal rewards5

Fringe Benefits6

Profit Sharing7

Rewards and Motivation7

Theories on Rewarding8

Over-justification Effect9

Cognitive Evaluation Theory10

Competing Response Hypothesis11

Theories against Rewarding12

Reward System of Engineering and Manufacturing Organizations16

Summary17

REFERENCES18

LITERATURE REVIEW

In manufacturing and engineering organizations workers are required to be motivated, creative and productive. Usually managers try different techniques in order to motivate the creative mind and get the maximum of their subordinates.

Motivation

“Motivation is a decision-making process, through which the individual chooses the desired outcomes and sets in motion the behavior appropriate to them”. Ells has defined motives as a trigger of motivation; he believes that motives are "learned influences on human behavior that lead us to pursue particular goals because they are valued (Ells, 2011, pp. 881). Motivation can be considered as level of willingness of individual to get involved in a particular behavior or involvement and which was foreseen and targeted by motivator. Meanwhile, it has been noticed by many motivational researchers that motivation is somehow connected with individual needs and for understandable reason motivation at work is one of the main methods to extract desired corporate behavior (Ells, 2011, p. 881).

In most organizations, employees can be divided into several sectors. First, some of the employees bring the knowledge needed to the workplace before the job was started. This knowledge can separate the employees in many ways, including pay, benefits, and also how the company sees the employee's input. Second, the immigrant status of an employee focuses on whether the employee has cultural differences that a manager should be concerned with. Third, the generational differences that can affect an employee's motivation, such as the generation the employee grew up in (Caruth, 2008, pp.10).

Employees are motivated by many different things. These include but are not limited to pay, rewards, goals, self efficacy, and other intrinsic and extrinsic factors. By determining the motivation of employees, employers can then use this information to help the organization achieve its goals (Cameron and Pierce, 1966, pp. 39).

Importance of Motivation

The motivation is conceived, often as an impulse in the body, as an attraction that emanates from the object and acts on the individual. The psychologist regarded as the dynamic aspect of a subject's relationship with the world. The motivation concerns the active direction of behavior toward certain preferential categories of situations or objects (Ells, 2011, p. 881).

To be successful at work, individuals need to be productive. To be productive, environmental factors such proper equipment and abilities must be present, but employees must also possess some level of motivation to perform tasks correctly (Bell, 2010, p. 9). Motivation is the degree to which an individual wants and chooses to engage in certain specified behaviors. Both elements, the wanting and choosing, must be present for motivation to be enacted. For example, a person may want to start an exercise program or a vacation fund, but until he or she takes the initiative to exercise or save money, he or she is not truly ...