INDIVIDUAL MOTIVATION AND CONTROL

Individual Motivation and Control



Individual Motivation and Control

Introduction

Motivation is an internal drive to satisfy one's unsatisfied needs (Higgins, 1994) and is commonly used in management of enterprises to make employees energetic for creating profits for the company. This paper focuses on critically analysing the issues related to work motivation and reward management based on my management experiences in this case. The analysis of issues is supported through drawing upon a wide range of theories and concepts related to work motivation.

Discussion

It has been seen that in this case, company spent a lot of money to motivate its employees to increase the employees' productivity. The motive behind this decision was to provide employees a better opportunity to improve their interpersonal relationships via communicating with others. According to Herzberg et. al, (1959), some factors like interpersonal relations, working conditions and salary are hygiene factors, and dissatisfaction could be prevented by improvements in hygiene factors. In Maslow's Hierarchy of Need Theory (1998), Love/Belonging Needs is the need that people in an organisation or team want the right of admittance, affection, or communication.

Company adopted the way of building a recreation room would like to satisfy the social needs of its people. However, there is no one in merchandise department who had ever been to that recreation room. The reason is that the merchandise department is the most important department of the company, and it is a high-pressure department, as the responsibility of this department directly link to the company's sale and image. The employees in merchandise department worked very hard, they worked for longer hours, being in a collectivist environment work for group goals (Hofstede, 2001). The only thing they want to do after their whole day busy works is having a decent rest. It is obvious that the way of building recreation room to motivate employees did not succeed as the real needs of the staff were not considered. This tells us that one of the key to motivate the staff is to find out their actual needs.

In terms of the needs of employees, the management and their staff work together every day. Whether they really understand what their employees' needs are or not? Although many managers are very confident about it, as a matter of fact, there exist a gap between the needs in managers' mind and needs of their employees. For instance, the senior-level management of merchandise department impressed ...