Employee Motivation Theories

Employee Motivation Theories

As a manager, to promote the overall performance of your organization, you need to focus on the human factor of your business; in other words, to push your employees' performance to its highest level. 

But how can a smart manager achieve this???

Lots and lots of studies concerning human behavior in organizations tend to help managers understand and manage human behavior in the workplace. In the following lines, we will highlight some of the most influential early theories and research studies in this regard.

Frederic Taylor's scientific Management

Frederic W. Taylor, the mechanical engineer, he was called the father of scientific management, had his own approach to improve the firm's performance that is based on economic incentives and on the idea that there is no one best way to perform any job. He believed that we can improve a firm's productivity by studying the individual jobs in the mill, and by redesigning the equipment and methods of work used by workers.

By organizing each job using a stopwatch, we can break down every task into separate segments, then we prepare an instruction sheet to tell us the amount achieved of each job and how much time it should take, then we can figure out what are the tools we need to perform this, that was Taylor's plan to increase productivity which resulted in developing four basic principles of scientific management:

1-    Create a scientific approach for each segment of the job

2-   Select, train, teach and develop workers in a scientific manner

3-   Encourage cooperation between workers and managers

4-   Distribute the responsibility between managers and workers based on how much suitable they're to the job

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

Maslow handled the motivation theory based on human needs, he believed that each one of us has a hierarchy of needs, consisting of psychological, safety, social, esteem and self actualization needs; the following figure can represent the hierarchy in an organized manner:

Based on the above shown hierarchy, the most basic human needs are psychological needs, such as the need for nutrition, home, clothing…etc. These psychological needs have greater power in motivating individuals to look for a job, a job with sufficient income to cover the mentioned above needs. Once these needs are satisfied we turn to the next level of needs until we reach the highest level, the self actualization needs.

X and Y theory of McGregor

Influenced by Maslow's work, Douglas McGregor focused on two contrasted sets of assumptions relative to human nature in his study of motivation; he called it X and Y theory.

** The theory X is based on pessimistic view of human nature, it proposes certain pessimistic assumptions:

1-    The average person dislikes work and will avoid it if possible

2-   As people do not like work, we must put them under control, direction, and punishment to push them to perform greater effort

3-   The average person prefers to be oriented and reduce his exposure to responsibility

These three assumptions imply that managers must push workers to perform harder while controlling their on-the-job behavior.

** On the other hand, the theory Y of management is based on optimistic assumptions relevant to human behavior:

1-     Work is as natural as play or rest. People need to be self-directed and they will seek to achieve the organizational goals they believe in

2-   We can motivate workers by positive incentive to push them to achieve these goals

3-    Most workers have a high level of creativity and are willing to solve problems

There are other early theories focusing on employee motivation, such as theory Z of William Ouchi, Herzberg's Motivator-Hygiene theory, and the Hawthorne studies as well.

Other contemporary theories can be pointed out, such as Expectancy theory, Equity theory and Goal-Setting theory, that worth to be highlighted in other similar articles.