MOTIVATION & EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE

Motivation & Employee Performance

[Name of the Author]

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

Background

Studying employee job performance and understanding how to increase efficiency has long been a priority for industrial organization psychologists. Learning how to help employees operate more proficiently, from a scientific standpoint, became an important initial goal of industrial organizational psychologists. Scientific management has helped to study and test different work methods to identify the best, most efficient ways to complete a job (Mousa & Lemak, 2009: 198-215). An early example of studying employee work habits scientifically and implementing better practices can be seen in the historical work of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth on time and motion (Mousa & Lemak, 2009: 198-215). In the early part of the twentieth century, this husband and wife pair observed workers' movements to find out how long it would take the best worker to complete a job, while also watching the steps necessary to complete the job. Bricklayers serve as a relevant example. Frank Gilbreth noticed that bending down to retrieve each individual brick slowed down overall performance among these workers.

Barclay's Bank

For identifying the impact of motivation on the performance of employees, I have selected the Barclay's Bank for this thesis. Barclays Bank Plc. started its operations in the year 1896 in the United Kingdom (Orbis 2009). The legislative and regulatory requirements of the UK banking industry ever since its inception influenced the bank's global operations. Barclays Bank Plc. offers retail and investment banking services in addition to investment banking services. The organization recorded its annual revenues of £23,352 million for the financial year 2008 (Datamonitor 2009). 

The identified ethical business practices of the Barclays Bank Plc. are global investments of £52.2 million made in the communities where the bank operates, involving employees in raising funds in different countries for local charitable causes, employing diversified work force regardless of race, gender, nationalities etc., considerate business behavior towards the environment, tracking own carbon footprint to support low-carbon economy, practicing human rights, developing its supply chain partners (Barclays business review, 2012) along with defined policies for business integrity and fair competition.

Problem Statement

Presently, the relational strength and direction of job satisfaction, job motivation, and job performance remains unclear, although correlations between these variables have been established in the literature. The study will provide a better understanding of how these specific variables predict job performance in a bank setting population. This study will rely on well established psychological theories related to job motivation and job satisfaction with a specific goal of exploring what the predictor variables of job motivation and job satisfaction reveal about job performance in bank employees.

Historically, bank employees, as a group, demonstrated a substandard level of job motivation and job satisfaction (Durkin & Bennett, 1999: 124-137; Kelley 1990: 376-407). Current data shows that bank employees suffer from a high turnover rate (Nelson, 2007) and low salary compared to other professions ("Average Annual Wage," 2009). Job performance in any line of work is certainly influenced by numerous factors. Issues such as gender (Beck, Behr, ...