LEADERSHIP

Leadership

Leadership

Introduction

'' A leader's success is largely determined by the ability to motivate others.'' Managing employees is known to be one of the biggest problems businesses have to face. This is mainly because employers often don't know how to handle employees. Employee motivation is the psychological feature that arouses an employee to behave in a certain manner for accomplishing certain organizational goals. Individuals differ in motivation along three parameters - self-esteem, need for achievement, and intrinsic motivation. There has been a growing emphasis on employee's needs rather than just organizational needs, as well as recognition of the strategic value of employees being developed to their greatest potential. Organizations have become increasingly aware that the effective development of their employees' skills and knowledge has benefits for the whole organization. A performance appraisal can be a crucial factor in the setting of career goals and the perception of job satisfaction, often leading to increased motivation and productivity. This paper examines employee motivation at the workplace.

Motivation is based on emotions. It is the search for positive emotional experiences and the avoidance of negative emotional experiences. Motivation is involved in the performance of all learned responses (Accel, 2004). It is a behavior that will not occur unless it is triggered. In general, psychologists question whether motivation is a primary or secondary influence on behavior (Accel, 2004). For example, is the behavior stemmed from personality, emotion perception, and memory or is motivation stemmed from concepts that are unique?

People can be born with self-motivation. If they aren't born with it they can be motivated since motivation is a skill than can be learned. This is extremely important for any business to survive and succeed. There are two factors which operate to determine if an employee will be a "problem" employee or if they will be a "motivated" employee. The first factor has to do with meeting needs and achieving goals. An example of this would be getting a new car or building a pool behind your home etc. (Keirsey and Bates 1978). The other factor has to do with how meaningful the work is and whether the person feels they can be appreciated for what they do (Keirsey and Bates 1978).

Everyone has certain needs and goals. To obtain the goals and meet the needs that a person wants, they will have to agree to do work and provide services in exchange for what they want. One key to making these agreements satisfactory is how fair they are being treated. People want to ensure that they will be consistently treated fairly. Perceived factors of being treated fairly from an employee perspective are salary, benefits, bonus, incentives if any, etc. Salary and benefits are not seen as motivators but as entitlement for the work that is being done. If the agreement is seen as being unfair, the person will be dissatisfied which will result in poor morale. But if the agreement is seen as being fair it will play a role in whether the person is a "motivated" ...