Chapter 5: Employee Motivation: Foundations and Practices(latest update)

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Chapter 5: Employee Motivation: Foundations and Practices October 10th, 2010 • Motivation refers to the forces within a person that affect the direction, intensity, and persistence of voluntary be... havior o Is one of the 4 essential drivers of individual behavior and performance • Employee Needs and Drives o Needs are deficiencies that energize or trigger behaviors to satisfy those needs  A satisfied need doesn’t motivate o Drives are instinctive or innate tendencies to seek certain goals or maintain internal stability  Needs are typically produced by drives, but strengthened through learning (reinforcement) and social forces o Maslow’s needs hierarchy theory is a motivation theory of needs arranged in a hierarchy, whereby people are motivated to fulfill a higher need as a lower one becomes gratified (has little or no scientific support).  The hierarchy of 5 basic categories: • Physiological needs (food, air, water, shelter) is at the bottom • Safety (a secure and stable environment and the absence of pain, threat, or illness) • Belongingness • Esteem (self-esteem through personal achievement and social esteem through recognition and respect from others) • Self-actualization the need for self-fulfillment in reaching one’s potential  We are motivated simultaneously be several needs, but the strongest source is the lowest unsatisfied need at the time • The bottom 4 groups are deficiency needs because they become activated when unfulfilled • Self-actualization is a growth need because it continues to develop even when unfulfilled  Reasons why Maslow’s model and other needs hierarchy theories don’t work: • They don’t capture the entire variety of needs that people experience • Gratification of one need level doesn’t necessarily lead to increased motivation to satisfy the next higher need level • It assumes that need priorities shift over months or years, whereas the importance of a particular need likely changes more quickly with the situation • People don’t seem to fit into one universal needs hierarchy o Needs hierarchies are unique, not universal, because a person’s needs are strongly influenced by his or her values o Four-Drive theory is both holistic (it pulls together the various drives and needs) and humanistic (it considers human thought and social influences rather than just instinct.  According to four-drive theory, everyone has the: • Drive to acquire: the drive to seek, take, control, and retain objects and personal experiences o Is the foundation of competition and the basis of our need for esteem • Drive to bond: the drive to form social relationships and develop mutual caring commitments with others o Motivates people to cooperate • Drive to learn: the drive to satisfy our curiosity, to know and understand ourselves and the environment around us • Drive to defend: includes defending our relationships, our acquisitions, and our belief systems o The drive to defend is always reactive – is triggered by threat o The other 3 are always proactive – we actively seek to improve our acquisitions, relationships, and knowledge  All four drives are innate, universal, and independent of each other o Recall: every meaningful bit of information we receive is quickly and unconsciously tagged with emotional markers that swirl around our conscious process of logically analyzing that information - Our motivation to act is therefore a result of rational thinking influenced by these emotional markers  The four drives determine which emotional markers, if any, are attached to the perceived information  Four-drive theory further explains that the process is conscious (humanistic) rather than instinctive, because these drives produce independent and often competing signals that require our attention  Our conscious analysis of competing demands from the four drives generates needs that energize us to act in ways acceptable to society and our own moral compass o The main implication of four-drive theory is that companies need to ensure that individual jobs and workplaces provide a balanced opportunity to [Show More]

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