Balancing Employee Motivation and Performance
For many decades management and leadership professionals face the challenge of striking an effective balance between employee motivation and innovative efforts to drive employee performance. Managers approach this dilemma from different angles ranging from trial and error to implementing sophisticated motivation theories with the hope of improving employee performance in the workplace. In one sense, employee motivation is observed from the manager’s viewpoint as simply figuring out how to cause employees to demonstrate efforts that accomplish objectives set forth by management. In another sense, employees often view motivation from a different perspective that is highly concerned with why and how an employee would decide to demonstrate work needed to accomplish objectives established by management. At the most basic level, employee motivation is one of the more complicated matters managers face in the workplace…so complicated that quick fix efforts to stimulate employee motivation typically lead to missing the mark of influencing employee motivation.
What is the key to cracking the code to balancing employee motivation and performance? ?Fundamental to this question is the pressing need to understand the nature of employee motivation. Motivation in this context is why and how employees choose to demonstrate work efforts to accomplish objectives. It involves putting forth persistence to accomplish tasks. This means, employee motivation is primarily fueled by an employee’s decision to persistently work to complete objectives. The manager when operating effectively in their role can influence an employee’s decision to demonstrate motivation in the workplace. ?
To strike an effective balance between employee motivation and performance managers should pay careful attention to this fact: employees will not do something for nothing. In other words, where there is no perceived reward or benefit the employee will not do the work needed to accomplish objectives. Employees often seek to match their work toward accomplishing objectives to the perceived reward associated with completing tasks to satisfy objectives. Managers then, confront the necessary work of weighing the costs and benefits of employee work to accomplish objectives; identifying if and how much the employee values the costs and benefits associated with the work efforts; and determining if the employee has what it takes to actually perform at the level required to meet objectives. Where any one or more of these components are missing evidence-based research suggests it is not reasonable to expect employees demonstrate work efforts to complete objectives put in place by management. Balancing employee motivation and performance calls for managers to adopt employee-centered approaches to solving for costs and benefits linked to employee decisions to demonstrate persistence to actually perform tasks to complete objectives enacted by management.