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.
