Week 1 - Motivation

Motivation is the driving force within individuals by which they attempt to achieve some goal in order to fulfil some need or expectation (Mullins L J, 2007). There are many ways in which employers can motivate their employees and enabling them to work to the best of their abilities by giving the employees a sense of satisfaction.

There are two main theories based on the idea of work motivation and these are Content Theories and Process Theories. A content theory emphasises on what motivates individuals whereas process theories emphasise on the actual process of motivation. A content theory that I feel is relevant to me is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Maslow published his theory of individual development and motivation in 1943. His basic proposition was that people are wanting beings and that they always want more. What they want always depends on what they already have. The theory developed by Maslow has 2 parts. The first is the classification of the individual’s needs and wants and the second is the consideration of how each individual need and wants relates to each other.
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The first need that needs to be met is the Physiological needs. This starts at the bottom of the hierarchy and include things such as the basic needs for survival such as satisfaction of hunger and thirst. Other things include the need for things such as oxygen, maintaining temperature regulation, sleep and sensory pleasures. Once these needs are met, only then can other motivating factors be used.

The second need is Safety needs. These include things such as safety and security such as working in a safe environment, protective clothing and working fire alarms. Other needs are things such as freedom from pain or threat of physical attack and protection from danger or deprivation. Safety also includes the security of protection against unemployment, loss of income and sickness and protection from any type of harm.

The third need that needs to be met is the Social/Love needs. These needs can only be met once the physiological needs and the safety needs are met. These are the needs where individuals will recognise that they want to belong in a group because of affection, acceptance and friendship needs in the workplace.

Esteem needs are the fourth type of needs that need to be met. These include things such as self-respect and esteem of others which brings in things like the desire for confidence, strength and independence. These are usually the most difficult to meet as once these are met, there is only one more level of motivational factors to be reached and that usually ends the motivation process.

The last level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is called Self-Actualisation. This is when an individual realises that their development has reached full potential and they can no longer do anything to become more motivated as they already at the highest point of being capable of what they can do.

I feel that this theory by Maslow is especially relevant to me in my job as well as in my studies because once I have reached one level of factors that are motivating, I am always striving to become successful and this requires more aspects of motivators which in turn help to reach to the point of self-actualisation. In my job, the basic needs are very well met and this leads to the next level of the hierarchy which includes things such as fire alarms and such. These needs are also met to the best of the company’s ability. As the hierarchy goes up, the aspects of my working conditions and factors such as recognition, acceptance and friendship within my workplace are also satisfying me so this leads to the next level of motivators. I would say that in my job I have reached the Esteem needs as they are the type of needs that are currently motivating me to work harder and become more successful so that I can reach Self-Actualisation.

The main motivation for me to start my course at university was the satisfaction of knowing that I will have a qualification as the end of this degree that will help me to become successful in life by helping me to find a good job and develop my career. My motivation could be related to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in the sense that throughout my time in university there will be aspects that motivate me to reach the point of Self-Actualisation which will in turn provide me with my degree.

One of the most difficult times for me where I felt de-motivated is when I was doing my GCSE exams. The main reason why I felt de-motivated was because I had many family problems at the time which seemed to be taking up all my time and I hardly thought about anything else. Due to this, I lost a lot of valuable revision time and this led me to think that there was not much point in me putting in extra hours as I thought because of all the time I had lost, I wouldn’t be doing so well in my exams. My de-motivation could be explained using the Process theories about motivation. The expectancy theory is particularly relevant to my de-motivation because the basis of this theory is that people are influenced by the expected results of their actions so therefore the relationship in between is motivation. For example, the expectancy theory believes that an employee can be motivated to perform better when there is a belief that this better performance will lead to a better appraisal. This is similar to how I began to feel motivated during my exams as I felt that the more effort I put into my revision, the better results I would get rather than being de-motivated and thinking that I hadn’t done enough revision and I wouldn’t do well in my exams.

Vroom developed the expectancy theory and specifically aimed it at work motivation. There are three key variables in Vroom’s theory and they are:

1) Valence – This is the attractiveness of, or preference for a particular outcome to the individual. It is explained to be the anticipated satisfaction from an outcome.

2) Instrumentality – The valence of outcomes helps to derive the distinction between the first-level outcomes and second-level outcomes. The first-level outcomes are performance related and the second-level of outcomes are need-related.

3) Expectancy – This is when people develop a perception of the degree of probability that the choice of a particular action will actually lead to the desired outcome.

In this theory, individual behaviour is mainly influenced by personal and environmental factors which lead individuals to make choices and decisions about their behaviour. These decisions will also be influenced by the individual’s needs and wants as well as what works for them and what doesn’t. This clearly relates to my previous de-motivation in the sense that it was my desire to pass my exams and do well in them that led me to change my decisions about whether or not to focus on revision even though I had already missed out on a lot of it.

Overall, there are many different ways in which different factors and theories can be used to motivate an individual. Most of this is done in the way that these factors have an effect on the individual which influences them to change their behaviour as they become more motivated and focus on becoming more successful.