Motivation Concepts

Motivation Concepts

  Good managers are always searching for the powerful managing tool that they can implement in the work environment to get efficient and satisfied results from their employees. 

Motivation is a fundamental powerful tool that can be used in the managing processes and without motivation having a satisfied and efficient work environment is not guaranteed.

Let's start by answering the question that firstly went to your mind.

What is Motivation? 

Motivation is the set of forces that cause people to choose certain behaviors from among the many alternatives open to them. 

Why do we need to Understand and implement organizational motivation in our workplace? 

Simply we need to implement motivation concepts in our work environment for the following reasons. 

- Achieving Organizational Goals:

Achieving business goals require a healthy workplace with a certain satisfaction level from your employees the most important resource at any business, Employees who feel that they are valued for their contributions desire to continue contributing and striving for success and this is the key for achieving organizational goals. 

- Healthy Workplace 

Motivation is a fundamental key to have an equal and healthy work environment. Employees in your work environment need always a reminder or alert to remind them why they are doing this work and what goals they are trying to achieve.

The Optimal work environment is where the employees are motivated and satisfied with what they are doing and clearly, it has to match their own personal goals. 

Having a healthy, equal and progressive work environment can happen by adopting different types of motivation that keeps your employees on the same page. 

when we are saying different types of motivation here it is just to clarify that not all of your employees have to be the same vision or goals to achieve, in other words, what might motivate an employee it might not motivate the other one according to the different characteristics that you have to satisfy.

Let's imagine that you had a situation when your work environment is not at it's best and you decided to make a 5% salary raise to a specific department, you waited two weeks to observe the results. and it is not getting any better than it was. 

Now you're amazed should I reduce the salaries or what should you as a manager to do in such a situation !. 

Unfortunately, the work environment becomes worse for two main reasons :

Firstly, You ruffly decided that the dis-satisfaction your employees are experiencing back to a salary dis-satisfaction, so basically, you assumed that you only have one kind of motivation which is the salary raise. (of course) money matters but in special cases.

Basically, you didn't do enough research to get the real reason why your employees are not doing their best or why they are dissatisfied.  

As a Manager, HR or anyone who is in charge to handle the human needs in the company. you have to make certain research to get the real need or the real reason behind this dissatisfaction that your work environment is experiencing. 

There are too many tools and methodologies to acknowledge that.

For instance,

- The one to one meeting that you, the HR or the department manager have to conduct with the employee at least once in a quarter. to ask the employees specific questions to get their needs and to listen to their ideas.

- Satisfaction survey that has specific questions you should ask your employees to get a clear answer about all the satisfaction aspects. 

Once you get to know the needs of your employees then you will be able to choose the motivation type that fit the most. 

Now the question remains what types of motivations managers can use?

There are 5 common types of motivation most of the managers in companies are using, For Instance;

1- Intrinsic Motivation and Extrinsic Motivation: 

Intrinsic motivation states that people are getting motivated by internal rewards like appreciation. On the other hand, Extrinsic motivation states that people in your company are getting motivated by external factors like bouns or salary raises. 

2- Achievement Motivation:

This type of motivation states that people are getting motivated by achieving a task or goal no matter what is the end reward, for example, Entrepreneurs who are willing to work years on their ideas without getting paid in the first steps of their startups, they're only working on a specific goal to achieve. 

3- Incentive Motivation: 

Incentive motivation is the complete opposite of the achievement motivation which is states that people in your company are getting motivated by the ending reward that they will get at the end of achieving a specific goal or task. 

so basically we can say that if an employee is seeking promotion to be more fulfilled in work so that employee driven by achievement motivation. Conversely, if that employee is seeking for the promotion for the salary raise then that employee is driven by incentive motivation. 

4- Fear Motivation:

In that type of motivation, managers are using consequences to drive their employees into action, known as a negative motivator.

For example; when you are facing a serious situation with an inefficient employee, in this case as a manager or the someone who is in charge to handle, you have to choose between two scenarios; the first one is to threate this employee that you will fire him if he did not work effectively in the team, and the other scenario is you have to fire him immediately without giving him any chances to make it out. 

so you have to choose between giving a second chance by adopting a fear motivation methodology, or you can choose not to do any motivation and fire whoever is not fitting directly. 

Well, it is a debatable point if it is okay to use such type of motivation in your managing process, but we can say that this type of motivation might work effectively under certian conditions as we mentioned before.

5- Affiliation and Social Motivation: 

Affiliation motivation addresses that people are getting motivated by having the feeling of belonging or acceptance to a specific community that has a common vision. 

So, it is a connection and community seeking, where people spend their time searching for the best-fit teamwork, friends or partners where they can feel it is their place. 

Motivation Concept application example; Google is renowned for providing a workplace environment in sync with staff happiness and performance. 

They pull out all the stops, including free chef-cooked meals, complimentary laundry, and childcare services at their campus. 

Google goes even further to show they value their employee's opinions by allowing them to participate in the hiring process. Additionally, Google and its online rival Facebook offer free food along with an atmosphere of creativity and playfulness. Facebook also believes in discussing its values in meetings and in its employee communications.

Fun Fact: Google has a job satisfaction rate of 84 percent while Facebook has a whopping 93 percent of content employees! These are some really huge numbers for such massive companies achieved solely by building an engaging environment. They top the charts of “Top 50 companies to work in” as told in Business Insider.

To Conclude, Motivation can be a double-edged sword, you can easily implement any motivation type you want in your workplace and get your better and efficient workplace where most of your employees are satisfied and willing to give their best in work.

It is also can be a serious problem in the work environment if we tried to use the incorrect type of motivation it is also can be useless implemented without doing the researchers to get the real needs.

SO, we need to implement the correct type of motivation in our work environment in it is time to get to the desired results.