Khaznadar 1

Nidal Khaznadar

Professor Donna Chrobot-Mason

Research in HR

7 April 2015

Motivation in the Workplace

In the company I am working for, employees may stay for years in the same position,

holding the same title and performing the same tasks. Employees do not feel motivated enough

to come to work; they feel that their jobs become boring and routine. This situation affects their

productivity, creativity and effective contribution to the company success.

Although my company provides employees with competitive compensation and benefits

packages, their satisfaction and motivation continued to decline along with higher turnover.

The top management with the help of Human Resources department worked hard to

motivate people; they raised salaries, paid bonuses, and distributed profits sharing, but all of that

could not solve the main problem which is the lack of interest in and enthusiasm about the work;

in other words, the lack of motivation.

Analyzing the problem

By analyzing the problem, we can say that there are five main reasons led to this

problem.

First: Focusing on the extrinsic compensation

Compensation represents both the intrinsic and extrinsic rewards employees receive for

performing their jobs.1 Intrinsic compensations reflect the employees’ psychological mind-sets

that result from performing their jobs, while the extrinsic motivation serves to satisfy indirect or

instrumental needs.2

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It clearly appears that my company is only focusing on the extrinsic compensation. They

concentrate on the good paycheck, bonuses, incentives, salary rises, as well as commissions and

profit sharing in order to motivate employees; they don’t pay much attention to the intrinsic

compensations.

Although the extrinsic compensations may motivate employees to do better, however, it

doesn’t last long. In other words, a reward is a positive reinforcement in the short-term, but

always decreases the future motivation.3

Second: Minimizing the job title’s impact

Many employees in my company hold the same title for a long time; this adversely

affects their motivation to work. People, in general, consider their job title as a reflection of their

value and achievements in the company they work for, and in the society the live in. However, it

seems that my company holds a strong belief that job titles are not as important as money when it

comes to motivate employees, and they will be more satisfied if they make more money.

Third: Lack of Engagement

The most effective leaders rally a broader group of people toward organization’s goals,

mission, and objectives, while in my company we can hardly notice that. Employees have no

idea about the company’s strategy; they don’t see their personal goals in the company’s growth.

Moreover, they don’t feel as a part of their department’s strategy.

Employees in my company are only told what to do and by when; they feel that they are

just numbers, and their contribution to the flower of the organization is not appreciated or ever

taken into consideration.

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Fourth: Lack of Job Enhancement

In addition to the fact that employees stay in the same position for a long time, they may

end up doing the same job and repeating the same tasks every day and every year. Employees

don’t feel that they are developing their skills and talents, and they don’t know what they are

going to do differently in the future; thus they started losing their enthusiasm and ambition.

Furthermore, managers tend to condone this point and only focus on the company’s goals.

Fifth: Poor leadership style:

It is clear that the leaders in my company do not possess the necessary leadership skills to

lead and inspire their people. They do not understand their employees’ needs and hesitate to

invest their time and efforts in developing this area. They only focus on one side of the equation,

which is money; pay more to get more.

Recommendations on how to solve the problem

In order to solve the problem, I suggest the following recommendations:

Focus on the intrinsic motivation

Higher incentives lead to worse performance unless we consider three factors,

Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose.4 There is no doubt that the benefits of [piece-rate system, or

pay-for-performance incentive devices] can be considerably compromised when the system

undermines the worker’s intrinsic motivation.5

In my company, focusing only on the extrinsic motivation would lead to the culture that

only money and rewards will motivate the good performance, and this culture is unhealthy. The

top management in the organization needs to start concentrating on intrinsic motivation; they

would use it as a tool to get the maximum out of their employees, as well as help them to reach

their career goals.

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The managers need to allow employees to take on tasks outside of their normal work

duties and delegate to them the responsibly and authority, also always recognize them as

valuable company resources. This would allow the employees to feel like they have filled a need

within the company and they would ultimately feel like they help the company to continue and

grow. When employees take on new tasks, they might want to show they are capable of taking

on new responsibilities.

The company would also enhance the intrinsic motivation by reminding employees of

their positive accomplishments through the company newsletter or Intranet. For employees

motivated by the feeling of accomplishment, sometimes a simple "thank you" can be a powerful

reward. If a person’s feeling of competence and self-determination is enhanced, his intrinsic

motivation will increase. If his feeling of competence and self-determination is diminished, his

intrinsic motivation will decrease.6

In the same way, I believe that one day of autonomy produces things that never emerge;

thus managers in my company can reward employees by letting them make choices on how they

want to complete their work, allowing the employees to set short-term and long-term goals for

themselves. The employees will be motivated by the decisions they made as they start to see how

they are meeting the overall goals they set. There is no better reason for being depressed than

never having the chance to pursue work and projects that are meaningful to you.7 As employees

complete these goals, it is a great idea for managers to celebrate their milestones.

Leadership style; everyone is motivated differently

Employees are not naïve anymore; people want to be led-not managed. For years research

has shown that peers are more accurate in identifying and ranking leaders than outside observers,

researchers, and experts.8

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Managers in my company, usually try to increase productivity by using strategies that

they themselves find motivational; but this is not leadership. Most employees may not be

motivated by the same drivers that motivate their managers.9

We are all motivated differently; even in childhood we each have our own unique

motivational code. We need to confess that everyone is motivated differently, each individual

has a unique and distinct motivational type, what motivates one person can de-motivate another

and no one motivational type is better than any other. And as we get older, or as the priorities of

our life change, our motivational types may also vary.

As Warren Buffett said “A leader is someone who can get things done through other

people”. The leaders in my company need to spend more time learning and mastering the

leadership skills and knowing the best way to motivate their employees. Also, they need to learn

how to inspire, delegate, communicate, build trust, and achieve both the employer and

employees’ goals. Motivated people get better implementation, but the reverse can be more

powerful. Helping people accomplish something that they have never accomplished before

causes motivation to increase deeply.10

From my point of view, trust is a fundamental element of relationship between our

leaders and employees, so our leaders need to focus more on trust to increase the employee’s

motivation, satisfaction and engagement. Trust is the glue that holds together all relationships. It

makes organization work. It’s the most significant predictor of individuals’ satisfaction with their

organizations.11 As Gallup’s latest research on trust in leadership suggests that this foundation is

closely linked to employee engagement in an organization.12

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Job enlargement & Job enrichment

It is predicted that job satisfaction and productivity will be highest when both job

enlargement and job enrichment are jointly applied to redesigning work systems.13

Job enlargement can add variety in the job, giving the employee more wider number of

tasks. It also helps the organization to utilize the human resources productively. The

management in my company can achieve Job enlargement by assigning employees additional

duties, responsibilities, and workload in the current job description, so that they don’t feel bored

at work by doing the same routine job.

For instance, the recruiter who works in the Recruitment department and her duty is only

to hire people for Finance, can also do the same job but for other departments like

Administration, Sales, or Marketing.

In the same way, Job enrichment means improvement, or an increase with the help of

upgrading and development. Job enrichment doesn’t necessarily increase the workload but it

creates new work opportunity and cause significant increases in employees job satisfaction, job

involvement, and internal motivation.

For instance, to achieve job enrichment for the recruiter in the previous example, she may

be given different challenging tasks that are not necessary related to her job description as a

recruiter. For instance, she may work on a specific project or assignment related to the

performance management, or related to the Branding department. In addition, working with a

team stimulates employees to work hard and add more responsibilities to achieve the team goals.

Team support systems encourage individuals to use the resources available to acquire new work

roles.14

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In short, we can say that Job enlargement expands horizontally when compared to job

enrichment, which expands vertically.

Job Rotation

Job rotation can be defined as “working at different tasks or in different positions for set

periods of time in a planned way using lateral transfers aiming to allow employees to gain a

range of knowledge, skills, and competencies, and as such is known to have an effect on

employee motivation.15

Job rotation changes routine, and leads to acquiring more knowledge and skills related to

the job; this in turn increases the opportunity of promotion. Through job rotation, the employee

has the opportunity to see how her effort and the effort of her department can affect other

departments and contribute to the growth of the company.

Job rotation allows employees to socialize more within their departments and with other

departments. Employees who are close to each other in social context will be able to resolve any

problems which may arise during technical process more easily. This makes it feasible for the

workplace to be more peaceful and work to be carried out with high motivation.16

As an example of the job rotation is when our recruiter moves from the Recruitment

section to work in the Compensation and Benefits section. Job rotation applications decrease

boredom, and moving from one department to another increases moral and causes motivation.17

Training and Development

Many employees, with the support of their employers, have created their own personal

development plan (PDP) in which the identification of their developmental needs forms an

integral part of the performance management system.18

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When the company pays more attention to the training and development element,

individual employees would benefit in two ways. First, if they understand how their tasks should

be carried out, they are more motivated to do them well and thereby experience satisfaction from

what they do. If they know they are good at what they do, they feel valued and respected.

Training makes people competent, gives them confidence and feelings of security, and they feel

that their presence in the organization is worthwhile.

Second, people who seek a career and plan their own future development will regard

training sessions as important opportunities to extend their repertoire of knowledge and

competence. This enhances their employability and their promotion prospects, and thus their

motivation.

Title Change

The last recommendation to my company in order to motivate employees is to pay more

attention to the job title. Each one of us can feel the positive impact of the title on our motivation

and productivity. The management needs to work on changing titles for the good performers in

order to motivate them to achieve more.

We can understand that companies would be hesitant to offer higher titles fearing higher

expenses; however, companies can promote employees to the next title or level without even

offering them salary increase. This would motivate employees and keep the expense under the

budget.

John Krumboltz, professor of education and psychology at Stanford University and co-

author of the book Luck is No Accident talked in one of his television shows about an employee

who hated his job because of his title; his title was a “Refrigerator Salesman”, but when the

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company changed his title to “Cold Storage Consultant” he became more motivated and he

declared that he started loving his job.19

In conclusion, employees are the most important yet complicated source for any

company. If the company is able to motivate employees, inspire them, and make them feel

excited to come to work every day, the company would be the big winner, as employees would

work harder, and become more productive. However, if the company ignores the employees’

need for motivation and engagement, the employees would be less happy, and less productive,

and this would threaten the company reputation, revenue, and even its existence in the market.

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Works Cited

(1) Joseph J. Martocchio. (2013). Strategic Compensation. A Human Resources Management

Approach. Pearson. Page 4.

(2) Bruno S. Frey & Margit Osterloh. (2002). Successful Management by Motivation. Balancing

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Incentives. Springer. Page 8.

(3) Roland Bénabou & Jean Tirole. (2003). Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation. Journal, Review of

Economic Studies. Page 503.

(4) TED talk, Dan Pink. (2010). The Puzzle of Motivation.

(5) Roland Bénabou & Jean Tirole. (2003). Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation. Journal, Review of

Economic Studies. Page 490.

(6) Roland Bénabou & Jean Tirole. (2003). Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation. Journal, Review of

Economic Studies. Page 504.

(7) Rayan Babineaux, Ph.D, and John Krumboltz, Ph.D. (2013). Fail Fast, Fail Often. Penguin.

Page 13

(8) Stephen Spinelli, Jr. Robert Adams. (2012). New Venture Creation. McGraw. Page 279

(9) Tamara Lowe. (2009). Get Motivated. Doubleday. New York. Pages 8-20

(10) Fullan, Michael, (2011). Intrinsic Motivation. Leadership Excellence. Pages 6-7

(11) William S. Kane. (2008). The Truth About Thriving in Change. Pearson Education, Inc. Page 142

(12) Tom Rath & Barry Conchie. (2008). Strengths Based Leadership. Great leaders, teams, and why

people follow. Gallup, Inc. Page 83

(13) Chung, K. A. & Ross, M. F. (1977). Differences in motivational properties between job

enlargement and job enrichment. Page 114

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(14) Mary Cianni and Donna Wnuck. (1997). Individual Growth and Team Enhancement. Moving

toward a New Model of Career Development. The Academy of Management Executive. page

107

(15) Kurtulus Kaymaza. (2010). The Effects of Job Rotation. Practices on Motivation: A Research on

Managers in the Automotive Organizations. Business and Economics Research Journal. Page 71

(16) Morris, J. R. (1956). Job Rotation. The Journal of Business. Page 268

(17) Kurtulus Kaymaza. (2010). The Effects of Job Rotation. Practices on Motivation: A Research on

Managers in the Automotive Organizations. Business and Economics Research Journal. Page 82

(18) Donald Currie. (2007). Introduction to Human Resources Management. A guide to personnel in

practice. CIPD. page 144

(19) John Krumboltz Ph.D. (2009). Luck Is No Accident. YouTube.