Foundations of employee motivation- summary of chapter 5 of Organizational Behavior by Mcshane, S. (8th edition)

Organizational Behavior
Chapter 5
Foundations of employee motivation

Motivation: the forces within a person that affect his or her direction, intensity and persistence of voluntary behavior.

Employee engagement

Employee engagement: individual emotional and cognitive motivation, particularly a focused, intense, persistent, and purposive effort toward work-related goals.
An emotional involvement in, commitment to, and satisfaction with the work.
Also high level of absorption in the work and self-efficacy.

Most employees aren’t very engaged.
Actively disengaged employees tend to be disruptive at work, not just disconnected from work.

Employee drives and needs

Drives: hardwired characteristics of the brain that correct deficiencies or maintain an internal equilibrium by producing emotions to energize individuals. (primary needs).
Innate and universal.
The starting point of motivation because they generate emotions.

Needs: goal-directed forces that people experience.
Motivational forces of emotions channeled toward particular goals to correct deficiencies or imbalances.
The emotions we eventually become conscious aware of.

Drives and emotions → needs → decisions and behavior

Individual differences in needs

Everyone has the same drives.
People develop different intensities of needs in a particular situation.

Self-concepts, social norms and past experience amplify or suppress emotions, thereby resulting in stronger or weaker needs.

• Need can be ‘learned’ to some extent.
• Regulate a person’s motivated decisions and behavior.

Maslow’s needs hierarchy theory

A motivation theory of needs arranged in a hierarchy, whereby people are motivated to fulfill a higher need as a lower one becomes gratified.
Five categories, which Maslow called primary needs.

• Self-actualization
• Esteem
• Belongingness
• Safety
• Physiological

And

• The desire to know
• The desire for aesthetic beauty

Two drives that did not fit within the hierarchy

Humans are motivated by several primary needs (drives) at the same time, but the strongest source of motivation is the lowest unsatisfied need.
But people have an ongoing need for self-actualization, it is never really fulfilled.
It is a growth need, it continues to develop even when temporarily satiated.

But
Maslow’s need hierarchy theory has been dismissed by most motivation experts.

• Not a order adequately to the hierarchy
• Need fulfillment seems to last for a briefer period of time
• People have different needs hierarchies

Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation

Intrinsic motivation: motivation controlled by the individual and experienced from the activity itself.
When people seek fulfillment from doing the activity itself.
Anchored in the innate drives for competence and autonomy.

Extrinsic motivation: when people are motivated to receive something that is beyond their personal control for instrumental reasons.
Direct effort toward a reward controlled by others that indirectly fulfills a need.
Also when employees create the own internal pressure to act in association with external factors.

Does extrinsic motivation undermine intrinsic motivation?

Extrinsic motivators help quantity
Intrinsic motivators help quality.

Extrinsic motivators do not undermine intrinsic motivation when they are unexpected, have low value relative to the intrinsic motivator, and when they are not contingent on specific behavior.

Learned needs theory

Need strength can be altered through social influences.
Through reinforcement, learning, and social conditions.

Three ‘learned’ needs:

• Need for achievement (nAch)
  A learned need in which people want to accomplish reasonably challenging goals and desire unambiguous feedback and recognition for their success.
  Money is a weak motivator, except when it provides feedback and recognition. (employees with low nAch perform better when money is used as an incentive).
• Need for Affiliation (nAff)
  A learned need in which people seek approval from others, conform to their wishes and expectations, and to avoid conflict and confrontation.
• Need for power (nPow)
  A learned need in which people want to control their environment, including people and material resources, to benefit either themselves (personalized power) or others (socialized power)

Changing (learning) need strength
Individual needs can be strengthened or weakened (learned).

Four-drive theory

Emotions are the source of human motivation and these emotions are generated through four innate and universal drives. The drives are independent of one another.
Three drives are proactive (the are regularly activated by our perceptions to seek fulfillment), and one drive is reactive (triggered by threat).
The drives are:

• Drive to acquire
  To seek out, take, control, and retain objects and personal experiences.
• Drive to bond
  Motivates people to cooperate
• Drive to comprehend
  People are inherently curious and need to make sense of their environment and themselves.
• Drive to defend
  To protect ourselves physically, psychologically, and socially.

How drives influence motivation and behavior

Stimuli received through our senses are quickly and non-consciously tagged with emotional markers.
The mental skill set develops behavioral intentions that are acceptable to society, consistent with our own moral compass, and have high probability of achieving the goal of fulfilling those felt needs.

Practical implications of four-drive theory

The main recommendation from four-drive theory is that jobs and workplaces should provide a balanced opportunity to fulfill the four drives.
Two recommendations:

• Best workplaces help employees fulfill all four drives.
• Fulfillment of the four drives must be kept in balance.

Because the four drives counterbalance each other.

Expectancy theory of behavior

Expectancy theory: a motivation theory based on the idea that work effort is directed towards behaviors that people believe will lead to desired outcomes.

An individual’s effort level depends on three factors:

• Effort-to-performance expectancy
  The individuals perception that his or her effort will result in a particular level of performance.
  In most cases, E-to-P expectancy falls somewhere between 1.00 and 0.
• Performance-to-outcome expectancy
  The perceived probability that a specific behavior or performance level will lead to a particular outcomes.
• Outcome valances
  The anticipated satisfaction or dissatisfaction that an individual feels toward an outcome.

Expectancy theory in practice

Increasing E-to-P expectancies

Influences by the individuals belief that he or she can successfully complete the task.

• Assuring employees that they have the necessary skills and knowledge, clear role perceptions, and necessary resources to reach the desired levels of performance.
  Matching employee abilities to job requirements and clearly communicating the tasks required for the job.

Behavior modeling and supportive feedback.

Increasing P-to-O expectancies

Measure employee performance accurately and distribute more valued rewards to those with higher job performance.
They need to know that connection occurs.

Increasing outcome valences

One size does not fit all when motivating and rewarding people.
Individualize rewards by allowing employees to choose the rewards of greatest value to them. If this isn’t possible, companies should ensure that everyone values the reward.

Expectancy theory mainly explains extrinsic motivation and ignores emotion.

Organizational behavior modification and social cognitive theory

Organizational behavior modification

Organizational behavior modification (OB Mod)
A theory that explains employee behavior in terms of the antecedent conditions and consequences of that behavior.

A-B-Cs of OB Mod

Antecedents → Behavior → consequences

Antecedents are events preceding the behavior, informing employees that a particular action will produce specific consequences. It does not cause behavior, it is a cue.
Consequences are events following a particular behavior that influence its future occurrence.

Contingencies and schedules of reinforcement

Four types of consequences, called the contingencies of reinforcement

• Positive reinforcement
  The introduction of a consequence increases or maintains the frequency of future probability of a specific behavior.
• Punishment
  When a consequence decreases the frequency of future probability of a specific behavior occurring.
• Extinction
  When the target behavior decreases because no consequence follows it.
• Negative reinforcement

OB Mod considers the frequency and timing of the reinforces (schedules of reinforcement)

• Continuous reinforcement
• Variable ratio schedule

Social cognitive theory

A theory that explains how learning and motivation occur by observing and modeling others as well as by anticipating the consequences of our behavior.

Learning behavior consequences

People learn the consequences of behavior by observing or hearing about what happened to other people.
People logically anticipate consequences in related situations.

Behavior modeling

People learn by imitating and practicing their behaviors.
Increases self-efficacy. Helps acquire tactic knowledge.

Self-regulation

Humans beings set goals and engage in other forms of intentional, purposive action.
People self-regulate by engaging in self-reinforcement.
Self-reinforcement: reinforcement that occurs when an employee has control over a reinforces but doesn’t ‘take’ it until completing a self-set goal.

Goal setting and feedback

Goal setting: the process of motivating employees and clarifying their role perceptions by establishing performance objectives.
Potentially improves employee performance in two ways:

• Amplifying the intensity and persistence of effort
• Giving employees clear role perceptions so their effort is channeled toward behaviors that will improve work performance.

Effective goals have several specific characteristics.
SMARTER

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-framed
• Exciting
• Reviewed

Characteristics of effective feedback

Feedback contributes to motivation and performance by clarifying role perceptions, improving skills and knowledge, and strengthening self-efficacy.
It should be specific and relevant.
Also timely and credible.

Feedback should be sufficiently frequent.
Depends on at least two things

• The employee’s knowledge and experience with the task
• How long it takes to complete the task.

Feedback through strengths-based coaching

Strengths-based coaching: a positive organizational behavior approach to coaching and feedback that focuses on building an leveraging the employee’s strengths rather than trying to correct his or her weaknesses.

Sources of feedback

Feedback can originate from nonsocial or social sources.

Organizational justice

Two forms of organizational justice.

• Distributive justice: perceived fairness in the individual’s ration of outcomes to contributions relative to a comparison other’s ratio of outcomes to contributions.
• Procedural justice: perceived fairness of the procedures used to decide the distribution of resources.

Equity theory

And equality principle operates when we believe that everyone in the group should receive the same outcomes.
The need principle is applied when we believe that those with the greatest need should receive more outcomes than others with less need.
The equity principle infers that people should be paid in proportion to their contribution.

A theory explaining how people develop perceptions of fairness in the distribution and exchange of resources.
Employees determine feelings of equity by comparing their own outcome-input ratio to the outcome-input ratio of some other person.

Inequity and employee motivation

When people believe that they are under- or overrewarded, they experience negative emotions (inequity tension).

Ways to try to reduce the inequity tension:

• Reduce our inputs so the outcome-input ratio is similar to the higher-paid coworker.
• Increase our outcomes
• Increase the comparison other’s inputs
• Reduce the comparison other’s outcomes
• Ask the company to reduce the coworker’s pay so it is the same as yours.
• Changing our beliefs about the situation
• Change the comparison other
• Leave the field

People who feel overreward inequity would reverse these actions.

Procedural justice

Ways to improve procedural justice:

• Giving employees ‘voice’ in the process
• When the decision maker is perceived as unbiased, relies on complete and accurate information, applies existing policies consistently, and has listened to all sides of the dispute.
• Give a full explanation of the decision and treat employees with respect throughout the complaint process.

Consequences of procedural injustice

Employees tend to experience anger toward the source of injustice, which generates various response behaviors, either withdrawal or aggression.