Organizations

Organizations

The pursuit of sustainable development and the requirement to make our societies, economies, and systems of consumption and production more environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable will be the dominant challenge for management throughout the 21st century. Concern about the social and environmental impacts of business activity can be traced back throughout history. The use of regulation to limit the social and environmental impacts of business and to punish transgressors can be traced back more than 3,000 years to ancient Mesopotamia. More recently, a key business theme during the 20th century was the growing expectation that businesses should go beyond regulatory compliance in conducting their affairs to demonstrate corporate social responsibility.

Individuals And Groups At Work

There is consensus in the scientific literature that developments in motivation theory need to focus on its applicability to teams as well as to individuals. At the same time, relatively little is known about motivation in work groups. The traditional approach to this problem has been to focus on the interdependence between individual needs and collective outcomes. For example, managers are advised to create situations in which the achievement of individual goals (e.g., getting a pay raise) ultimately depends on the attainment of collective goals (e.g., increasing organizational profits). The assumption underlying this reasoning is that individual need fulfillment or goal achievement is the fundamental motivational building block. That is, researchers (and managers) assume that the only way to motivate workers to exert themselves on behalf of the collective is to make them see either (a) that they need other members of their team in order to achieve their personal goals, or (b) that the fulfillment of their personal needs depends on the success of the organization.

It is certainly true that the capacity of a work group or organization to provide rewards or other desired outcomes can constitute a powerful motivating force for individual workers. Material gain is often an attractive carrot. Never-theless, a broader and richer understanding of the motivational processes that operate in work groups can be gained when we take account of the possibility that groups in and of themselves can represent internalized values and important concerns. After all, community responsibilities, a sense of belonging, and shared ideals are all acknowledged as powerful motivating factors in and of themselves.

In this respect, a core limitation of classic theories of work motivation that focus on the individual as the primary source of self-conception, is that all expectations, goals, and outcomes that relate to the work group or organization are considered to be extrinsic to the self. However, when we acknowledge that there are circumstances under which people come to adopt a primary definition of the self in collective terms, this opens up the possibility that group-based expectations, goals, or outcomes can also function as intrinsic sources of motivation. Here, self-conception in collective terms can (a) energize people to exert themselves on behalf of the group, (b) facilitate the direction of efforts toward collective (instead of individual) outcomes, and (c) help workers sustain their loyalty to the ...