Int. Business School Frankfurt

Motivation in the workplace

by 

Friederike Hertel

Organizational Behavior 
June 24, 2002

Thesis statement: Motivation is a complex and difficult topic and therefore management has to take into account historical theories. Furthermore management has to figure out what employees designate as attractive for defining an effective motivation-program for their company.

1. Motivation has to be based on theories 
1.1. Frederick W Taylor has to be taken into account 
1.2. George Elton Mayo has to be taken into account 
1.3. Abraham Maslow has to be taken into account 
1.4. Frederick I Herzberg has to be taken into account

2. Motivation depends on the preferences of the individual 
2.1. Extrinsic motivation 
2.2. Intrinsic Motivation 
2.3. Employees motivation has to be identified

3. Motivation has to be supported by management 
3.1. Suitable rewards have to be identified 
3.2. Effects and results have to be evaluated and feedback has to be given

4. Conclusion

"Motivation is the process of stimulation an individual to take action that will accomplish a desired goal." (Barron′s; 236) The word motivation comes from the Latin word ′movere′, which means to move or to urge. There are numerous definitions of motivation, which is logical, because there are many different personalities that are motivated through different factors, as well as there exist various motivation theories and programs. Motivation is getting more important every day since the competition in the workplace is increasing on a daily basis as well as the unemployment rate. Management has to find an effective way of motivate not only themselves, but more to motivate their employees, therefore management has to take into account theories and has to consider the differences in personality of its workforce, to imply a successful motivation program. 

The first theorist, which has to be taken into account, was Frederick W Taylor (1856 - 1915) who believed that only through maximal worker productivity economic prosperity could be achieved which in turn would be the product of making employees more efficient. Taylor is also known as the "Father of scientific management"; he called this approach the Scientific Management and his beliefs were that only a management scientist would be able to achieve this efficiency of the worker. Furthermore Taylor did not have trust in employees, in his opinion, workers start lacking efficiency as soon as there is not such a management scientist. His aim was to achieve maximum efficiency and to reach this goal he created a process called job fractionation. By observing different workers at different jobs he measured the amount of time a worker needed to finish a task and then looked at each job and its constituent tasks (=basic work units), he used these measurements to create time and motion studies. (15) After observing his studies he defined the most effective way of carrying out the tasks and then he put the single tasks together and prescribed the "one right way" (15) to handle a job. In addition he designed the "piece rate" (15) system, through which employees received their salary according to the amount of production and because of this system he increased worker efficiency considerably because it was incentiv. To sum up, the motivator Taylor used was money and he also concentrated on the work itself but did not care about the feelings of the employee. Taylor is only one of the theorists of the Classical School of Management, Adam Smith (Division of Labor) and Henry L Gantt (Gantt- Chart) are two more of this type of school and all of them focused upon the work.

By way of contrast is the Behavioral School of Management, which aforesaid that if one concentrates on the worker and tries to understand him, effective management will come by itself. George Elton Mayo participated in the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company located in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois in the years 1927 until 1932, called the “Hawthorne Experiments” (22) where the researchers at first put two groups of female workers in different rooms in which they used different intensities of lightning. The first group “control group” had a same intensity of light and the light in the other room was changed in a random period of time. The result was that there was no difference in the changing of the light and in the productivity of work, but in both groups the productivity increased. According to Barrons, there was no relationship between increasing productivity and level of lightning, because of that the scientists started interviewing the employees and found out that only because they paid attention to the workers as individuals and their feelings and listened to them, the productivity increased. Furthermore the test rooms the two groups were in were different to the usual working conditions, moreover the employees felt like they were somebody important because scientists showed interest in them. In addition, the relationship between the managers/supervisors and the workers was more relaxed in the testtime and the feeling of belonging in a group was also a reason for the improvement of productivity (23-24). Mayo’s approach is focused on the individual and not on the job itself and it shows an increasing productivity but the Classical School of Management has shown this as well.

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