MOTIVATING EMPLOYEES FOR PERFORMANCE

Motivating Employees for Performance

Motivating Employees for Performance

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" employee.

Each year, large companies spend billions of dollars on motivation courses. The courses involve training in motivation, meetings to boost motivation, incentives to strengthen motivation, meetings to analyze problems in the workplace motivation, tools to measure motivation mission statements, etc (Accel, 2004). These training sessions also include how to cope with problems in recruitment, productivity and retention, problems of commitment to teams and corporate agendas. Motivation is extremely important to success and to reach personal and business goals that one has set.

In order to motivate employees, they must know what is expected of them. Employees must have a clear understanding of challenges and realistic goals that they must meet. Employees that are encouraged to healthy competition ensure that the criteria for successes are clear and do not encourage resentment or low morale (Webb, 2001). Tough approaches, like firing staff that are not working to their full potential, can motivate other employees to do work ...