Essay Organisational Behaviour and Motivation

“Political Activity is alive and well in organisations. Critically discuss this statement. What factors result in Organisational Politics and what is the role of such behaviour on other people at work?”

What is motivation? As manager’s, motivation is one of the most vital and crucial assets to possess in managing a business. This drive is a critical tool to use in the work place and determine the success or failure of an organization. Motivation is a driving force that initiates and directs behavior. In other words, motivation is an internal energy that drives an individual to do something in order to achieve a certain goal. Therefore, creating a motivating environment in the workplace will lead to happy employees. Creating a work environment like this, managers can expect low staff turnovers, improved productivity, happy customers, and better financial performance. Therefore, the input of motivation use towards employees determines the output efficiency of the company. However, everyone involved in an organization is motivated differently. Everybody has their own individual needs in regards to motivation. Depending on how motivated a person is, determines the effort that individual puts into the work and therefore, how productive they are.

Employees are motivated by both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. In order for the reward system to be effective, it must encompass both sources of motivation. Studies have found that among employees surveyed, money was not the most important motivator, and in some instances managers have found money to have a de-motivating or negative effect on employees.  This research paper addresses the definition of rewards in the work environment context, the importance of rewarding employees for their job performance, motivators to employee performance such as extrinsic and intrinsic rewards, Herzberg’s two-factor theory in relation to rewarding employees, Hackman and Oldman model of job enrichment that

This source cites may studies stating the monetary incentive have a negative impact on the stated goal. Kohn states that the best that can be expected is a temporary compliance to the desired outcome. Once the incentives were taken away the behavior returned to normal.

Organizational behaviour is field of study that investigates the impact that individuals, group, and structure have on behaviour within the organization. It is the study and application of knowledge about how people act within organizations. It covers three determinants of behaviours in organizations: individuals, groups, and structure.

The book talks about incentives and rewards programs. Some businesses use cash rewards given to employees for good work, sort of like commission. What businesses don't realize is that having employees motivate themselves to achieve incentives can only last a little while. Employees need more motivation. Motivation from employers doesn't have to be rewards or incentives, but a simple "Good job." Or "Keep up the good work." Can keep employees happy. Incentives are a good thing to have and use, but there has to be more to it.

Many Problems in Organizations are created because of Faulty Incentives and Flawed reward systems that are setup to accomplish one thing but actually does the opposite.

Motivation in the workplace is one of the major concerns that managers face when trying to encourage their employees to work harder and do what is expected of them on a day-to-day basis. According to Organizational Behavior by John R. Schermerhorn, James G. Hunt and Richard N. Osborn the definition of motivation is "the individual forces that account for the direction, level, and persistence of a person's effort expended at work." They go on to say that "motivation is a key concern in firms across the globe." Through the years there have been several theories as to what motivates employees to do their best at work. In order to better understand these theories we will apply them to a fictitious organization that has the following

Organisational Behaviour (OB) is the study of human behaviour in an organisation. It is a multidisciplinary field devoted to the understanding individual and group behaviour, interpersonal processes and organisational dynamics. OB is important to all management functions, roles and skills. Since organisations are built up levels - individual, group and an organizational system as a whole, it is important for managers to understand human behaviour in order to meet the organizations overall goals. I found several key learning areas that are meaningful, interesting and relevant to my work over the course of studying this unit. These key learning areas have not only expanded and improved my view of organisational behaviour but they also have

Scientific management uses incentives to motivate workers. This idea comes from Henry Gantt who introduced the bonus system, which motivated workers to complete their daily tasks by

Keeping employees motivated in addition to creating incentives and/or additional ways for employees to receive more compensation will create better performance overall within an organization. Contrary if company B gives their employees incentives to perform, without any motivational tactics they probably will not have as many top performances as company A, in addition the company may only seek short term rewards verses have long term success. Lack of motivation for employees within an organization, can cause long term damage for the company’s success. Different things motivate everyone; therefore there should be a system in place to keep employees motivated for the long term success of the company. In the MBM textbook under the concept of incentives, compensation, and motivation, there are a couple of different views of how it should be applied within an organization. We will discuss The Social Role of Profit, Personal Profit and Losses, and the way Market-Based Management view how incentives, compensation, and motivation should be applied and the things that effectively drive employees’ actions while at work.

For example Lazear (2000) empirically finds in a manufacturing environment that pay for performance increases productivity with 44%. On the other hand Bonner et al. (2000) find that only in about 50 percent of the experiments they examined, financial performance led to improvements in productivity. This thus means that the relationship between incentives and performance may be dependent on the situational circumstances and they do not work in every environment. Specifically in their review of experiments Bonner et al. (2000) find that when the complexity of the task increases (relative to the skill of the participants), the likelihood of observing a positive effect of incentives on performance decrease. Bailey and Fessler (2011) also find that monetary incentives are more effective when the task is less complex. On the other hand in a review of empirical studies on financial incentives and performance Jenkins et al. (1999) find that financial incentives are generally related to output quantity but not to quality. Furthermore, they find task type is independent of the relation between financial incentives and performance. If the performance on a complex task is more difficult to measure, the agent’s effort thus has less influence on the performance measure (more noise, less sensitivity) and the measure is less effective.

‘Motivation’ is derived from the Latin term ‘movere’ that means ‘to move’. Thus, motivation is a process that starts with a physiological or psychological deficiency or need that activates a behaviour or a drive that is aimed at a goal or incentive (Luthans). Broadly speaking, motivation is willingness to exert high levels of efforts towards organizational goals, conditioned by the efforts’ ability to satisfy some individual needs (Robbins). Need means some internal state that make certain outcomes appear attractive. An unsatisfied need creates tension that stimulates drives within the individual. These drives generate a search behaviour to find particular goals, that if attained,

Behavior based motivation such as Equity Theory, Expectancy Theory and Reinforcement Theories are built on the premise that employee behavior is directly linked to the consequences of their actions.

Motivation is the process of stimulating people to act in ways which serve the needs of the organization providing the stimulus. Simply put, motivation is discovering and applying whatever is needed to get the employee to carry out designated activities in specified ways. However, a clear distinction is made between attitude, which is a state of mind, and behavior, which is a state of action.