Chapter 7: Motivation Concepts

Key Elements of Motivation

• Motivation accounts for an individual's intensity, direction, and persistence of effort toward attaining a goal
• Intensity describes how hard a person tries
• Direction means that effort is channeled toward organizational goals
• Persistence measures how long a person can maintain effort

Classic Motivation Theories

• Employee motivation theories formulated in the 1950s, form the foundation of motivation study
• The terminology of classic motivation theories is still used by many managers
• As evidence-based OB practitioners, their use should be carefully considered when compared with contemporary theories
• Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs theorizes that within every human being there is a hierarchy of five needs to meet:
  • Physiological encompassing hunger, thirst, shelter
  • Safety entailing security and protection from physical and emotional harm
  • Social-belongingness encompassing affection, love, acceptance, and friendship
  • Esteem involving internal factors such as self-respect, autonomy, and achievement and external factors such as status, recognition, and attention
  • Self-actualization describing the drive to become what we can become, including growth, achieving our potential, and self-fulfillment
• In the hierarchy of needs theory, once each need is satisfied, the next becomes dominant
• The two-factor theory relates intrinsic factors to job satisfaction and associates extrinsic factors with dissatisfaction
• Intrinsic factors such as advancement, recognition, responsibility, and achievement, relate to job satisfaction
• Extrinsic factors, such as supervision, pay, company policies, and work conditions, relate to job dissatisfaction
• In McClelland's theory of needs, achievement, power, and affiliation are the three important components that help explain motivation
• Need for achievement (nAch) is the drive to excel or achieve to a set of standards
• Need for power (nPow) describes the need to make others behave in a way they would not have otherwise
• Need for affiliation (nAff) is the desire to establish friendly and close interpersonal relationships

Contemporary Theories of Motivation

• Focus on fundamental motives and individual differences in motivation states common to all people
• The context category involves sources of motivation that stem from the contexts people find themselves in
• Primarily concerned with fundamental motives and individual differences in motivation states common to all people
• The process category involves the direct motivation theories that focus on the process of choosing and striving toward goals
• Self-determination theory (SDT) proposes that an employee's well-being and performance are influenced by the nature of their motivation for certain job activities
• Motivation can be either autonomous (e.g., freely chosen) or controlled (e.g., resulting from others' pressure or direction)
• Cognitive evaluation theory (CET), a sub-theory, suggests that extrinsic rewards reduce intrinsic interest in a task
• Self-concordance theory considers how strongly people's reasons for pursuing goals are consistent with their interests and core values
• Need for autonomy describes the necessity to feel in control and autonomous at work
• Need for competence details having to feel like you are good at what you do and proud of it
• Regulatory focus theory says people regulate their thoughts and behaviors differently during goal pursuit
• Promotion focus involves striving for advancement and accomplishment and approaching conditions that move them toward desired goals
• Prevention focus describes striving to fulfill duties and obligations and avoiding conditions that pull them away from desired goals
• Job engagement describes the investment of an employee's physical, cognitive, and emotional energies into job performance

Motivation Theories: Context-Based

• Focus on the role of the context or environment on motivation
• Reinforcement theory argues that reinforcement conditions behavior
• Behaviorism portrays behavior as caused by the context or environment
• What control behavior are reinforcers which are any consequences that increase the probability that the behavior will be repeated when they immediately follow responses
• Operant conditioning suggests that people learn to behave in a certain way to either get something they want or avoid something they don't want
• Social learning theory says that we can learn through observation and direct experience

Motivation Theories: Process-Based

• Include motivation ideas that focus on the choosing process and what it takes to strive toward goals
• Expectancy theory argues that the strength of our tendency to act a certain way depends on the strength of our expectation of a given outcome and its attractiveness
• Goal-setting theory states that intentions to work toward a goal are considered a major source of work motivation and lead to higher performance
• Self-efficacy refers to an individual's belief of being capable of performing a task
• The Pygmalion effect describes a form of self-fulfilling prophecy in which believing something can make it true

Organizational Justice

• Equity theory states that individuals compare their job inputs and outcomes with those of others and then respond to eliminate any inequities
• Focuses on how people adhere to or violate rules and principles in the workplace
• Organizational justice describes an overall perception of fairness in the workplace, composed of distributive, procedural, informational, and interpersonal justice
• Distributive justice describes perceived fairness of the amount and allocation of rewards among individuals
• Procedural justice details the perceived fairness of the process used to determine the distribution of rewards
• Informational justice describes the degree to which employees are provided truthful explanations for decisions
• Interpersonal justice involves the degree to which employees are treated with dignity and respect