Q.1. Write an essay for employee motivation.
Ans. Once an organization has selected and trained its employees, it is important that employees be both motivated by and satisfied with their jobs. Industrial psychologists generally define work motivation as the internal force that drives a worker to action as well as the external factors that encourage that action. Ability and skill determine whether a worker can do the job, but motivation determines whether the worker will do it properly. Although actually testing the relationship between motivation and performance is difficult, psychologists generally agree that increased worker motivation results in increased job performance.
Researchers have found three individual difference traits that are most related to work motivation: self-esteem, an intrinsic motivation tendency, and need for achievement.
Self-Esteem: -
Self-esteem is the extent to which a person views himself as valuable and worthy. In the 1970s, Korman theorized that employees high in self-esteem will be more motivated and will perform better than employees low in self-esteem. According to Korman’s Consistency theory, there is a positive correlation between self-esteem and performance. That is, employees who feel good about themselves are motivated to perform better at work than employees who do not feel that they are valuable and worthy people. Consistency theory takes the relationship between self-esteem and motivation one step further by stating that employees with high self-esteem actually desire to perform at high levels and employees with low self-esteem desire to perform at low levels. In other words, employees try to perform at levels consistent with their self-esteem level. This desire to perform at levels consistent with self-esteem is compounded by the fact that employees with low self-esteem tend to underestimate their actual ability and performance. Thus, low-self-esteem employees will desire to perform at lower levels than their actual abilities would allow.
There are three types of self-esteem. Chronic Self-esteem is a person’s overall feeling about himself. Situational self-esteem (also called self-efficacy) is a person’s feeling about himself in a particular situation such as operating a machine or talking to other people. Socially influenced self-esteem is how a person feels about himself on the basis of the expectations of others. All three types of self-esteem are important to job performance. For example, an employee might be low in chronic self-esteem but very high in situational self-esteem. That is, a computer, an employee might believe he is a terrible person whom nobody likes (low chronic self-esteem) but feel that he can program a computer better than anyone (high situational self-esteem).
If consistency theory is true, we should find that employees with high self-esteem are more motivated, perform better, and rate their own performance as being higher than employees with low self-esteem. Research supports these predictions: IIaridi, Leone, Kasser, and ryan (1993) found significant correlations between self-esteem and motivation, and meta-analysis by Judge and Bono (2001) found a significant relationship between self-esteem and job performance (r = .26).
On the basis of consistency theory, we should be able to improve performance by increasing an employee’s self-esteem, and the results of a meta-analysis of 43 studies indicates that interventions designed to increase self-esteem or self-efficacy can greatly increase performance. Organizations can theoretically do this in three ways: self-esteem workshops, experience with success, and supervisor behavior.
Self-Esteem Workshops: -
To increase self-esteem, employees can attend workshop or sensitivity groups in which they are given insights into their strengths. It is thought that these insights raise self-esteem by showing employees that they have several strengths and are good people. For example, in a self-esteem training program called The Enchanted Self. Employees try to increase their self-esteem by learning how to think positively, discovering their positive qualities that may have gone unnoticed, and sharing their positive qualities with others.
Outdoor experiential training is another approach to increasing self-esteem. In training programs such as Outward Bound or the “ropes course,” participants learn that they are emotionally and physically strong enough to be successful and to meet challenges.
Experience with Success: -
With the experience-with-success approach, an employee is given a task so easy that he will almost certainly succeed. It is thought that this success increases self-esteem, which should increase performance, which further increases self-esteem, which further increases performance, and so on. This method is based loosely on the principle of the self-fulfilling prophecy, which states that an individual will perform as well or as poorly as he expects to perform. In other words, if an individual believes he is intelligent, he should do well on tests. If he thinks he is dumb, he should do poorly. So if an employee believes he will always fail, the only way to break the vicious cycle is to ensure that he performs well on a task. This relationship between self-expectations and performance is called the Galeate effect.
Supervisor Behavior: -
Another approach to increasing employee self-esteem is to train supervisors to communicate a feeling of confidence in an employee. The idea here is that if an employee feels that a manager has confidence in him, his self-esteem will increases, as will his performance. Such a process is known as the Pygmalion effect and has been demonstrated in situations as varied as elementary school classrooms, the workplace, courtrooms, and the military ). The Pygmalion effect has been portrayed in several motion pictures, such as My Fair Lady and Trading Places. In contrast, the Golem effect occurs when negative expectations of an individual cause a decrease in that individual’s actual performance.
