Management

Management

Reinforcement be used to Generate Change in Behavior

A theory of behavior, in a personnel context, higher performance is achieved by nudging people in a particular direction — through a process of behavioural reinforcement. For example, an employee works on a project and receives praise for the budget statement (positive reinforcement) but is admonished for the lack of strategic thinking (negative reinforcement). Over time, the employee learns to build on her budgetary skills and to change her approach to strategic thinking. In practice, positive reinforcement (with rewards) tends to be more effective in shaping behavior than negative reinforcement motivation. Reinforcement theory also has been used to explain how marketing communications influence people in a target audience (Browder, 1985).

Supervisor's Best Provide Useful Performance Feedback

A bounty of research now exists on the nature of expertise and expert performance. These researchers and others have arrived at different assumptions about expert cognition and have, thus, relied on divergent paradigms and methods to assess performance. Following de Groot's original work in chess, proponents of the early expertise approach designed classic structured and unstructured recall experiments to capture the memory feats of expert chess players. This work was motivated by the assumption that experts could circumvent short-term memory (STM) limitations by storing chunks in STM.

However, subsequent research questioned the STM storage assumption, revealing that experts stored domain-specific information in accessible form in long-term memory (LTM). Moreover, superior memory recall is likely to be an incidental by-product of their memory organization as opposed to a representative performance metric. De Groot noted that other activities that better simulated the task requirements (e.g., selection of next best move) were actually better predictors of performance than memory recall (Butler, 1995).

As an alternative to the original expertise approach, and to counter the assumption that the knowledge elicited from so-called experts could account for expert-novice performance differences, Ericsson and Smith advocated the “expert-performance approach” in which researchers first identify tasks that truly capture expertise. Representative tasks can then be recreated in the laboratory where reliably superior performance can be assessed, experimental control maintained, and underlying mechanisms identified via the use of process-tracing methods. Although the expert-performance approach has been adopted in domains such as sport, music, games, and medicine, few researchers have fully embraced it or used simulation as a means of recreating the task. What follows is an overview of relevant expertise research using simulated task environments in sports, aviation, and surgery. Therefore we can say that supervisor is the best evaluator of the individual performance (Glover, 2000).

Role of Money in Motivation

The effort and drive to satisfy an individual need, e.g. a person might work, and work harder, because of a need for money and status. Motivation is conceptualized as a process: starting with an unsatisfied individual need, giving rise to tension, this stimulates drives and search behavior, finally resulting in the satisfaction of the need and a reduction of tension. Early theories of motivation focused very much on needs. Four of these are particularly well known and have intuitive appeal: ...