Case study 5.1 predicting harry's work effort

chapter5

Foundations of Employee Motivation

learning objectives

After studying this chapter, you should be able to:

5-1 Define employee engagement.

5-2 Explain how drives and emotions influence employee motivation.

5-3 Summarize Maslow’s needs hierarchy, and discuss the employee motivation implications of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, learned needs theory, and four-drive theory.

5-4 Discuss the expectancy theory model, including its practical implications.

5-5 Outline organizational behavior modification (OB Mod) and social cognitive theory, and explain their relevance to employee motivation.

5-6 Describe the characteristics of effective goal setting and feedback.

5-7 Summarize equity theory and describe ways to improve procedural justice.

Frucor Beverages is the market leader of energy drinks in New Zealand and Australia. It is also one of the most energized companies in the region. “Our people are highly engaged, but they are also hungry for more success, and to be better,” says Mark Callaghan, CEO of the company’s New Zealand operations where most production occurs.

Frucor’s 1,000 employees say the company provides plenty of learning and autonomy, which motivates them to develop their potential. “The environment is great to develop skills you would normally obtain by working at a number of different companies,” says Ted Audain, a Frucor plant maintenance engineer and parts purchaser. “We are committed to providing our people with the freedom to create, push the boundaries, and ‘to go for it’” says Callaghan. “From a business perspective, factors such as improved productivity, low consumer complaints, low absenteeism, and return on investment to our shareholders are by-products of an everyday fun and self-actualizing environment.”

Job-relevant, challenging goals linked to the company’s overall objectives is another source of employee motivation at Frucor. “It’s about having a clear strategy, objectives and goals with each person’s objectives related to the company’s goals, which are clearly articulated,” says Callaghan. Frucor balances thosePage 121 challenges by ensuring that employees are valued and appreciated for their contribution. “When you value your staff as people, they value you,” Callaghan explains. “Everyone takes responsibility for valuing each other—we get higher engagement from staff.”

Overall, Frucor sets a high bar for employee performance, but also offers plenty of training, recognition, and support to achieve those goals. “We back people to take a risk in a highly supportive environment,” Callaghan explains. “I like to think we’re like a Viking but with a mother’s heart.”1

Frucor Beverages has a highly engaged workforce through goal setting, meaningful work, enriched jobs, and recognition of their value to the organization. These practices generate high levels of employee motivation. Motivation refers to the forces within a person that affect the direction, intensity, and persistence of voluntary behavior.2 Motivated employees are willing to exert a particular level of effort (intensity), for a certain amount of time (persistence), toward a particular goal (direction). Motivation is one of the four essential drivers of individual behavior and performance (see Chapter 2).

The theme of this chapter is employee motivation. We begin by discussing employee engagement, an increasingly popular concept associated with motivation. Next, we explain how drives and emotions are the prime movers of employee motivation, and review associated needs-based theories. Our attention then turns to expectancy theory, a popular cognitive decision model of employee motivation. Organizational behavior modification and social cognitive theory are then introduced and linked to expectancy theory. The latter sections of this chapter outline the key components of goal setting and feedback, and organizational justice.

© Frucor

Frucor beverages has a highly engaged workforce through goal setting, meaningful work, enriched jobs, and recognition of their value to the organization.

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global connections 5.1

DHL Express Employees Get Engaged

Employee engagement is a key driver of business success at DHL Express, the global courier division of Germany’s Deutsche Post. “We definitely see the value in having emotionally engaged and motivated employees,” says Hennie Heymans, managing director of DHL Express Sub-Saharan Africa. “Engaged employees mean better revenue, profit, customer engagement, and safety.”

As one of Africa’s top-rated employers, DHL Express builds an engaged workforce through continuous development, such as online learning available to all staff and the Made in Africa initiative to train and mentor future leaders. “Employees should be encouraged to grow—both personally and professionally—and should be continuously motivated to broaden their horizons and fulfill their potential,” says Lebo Tseladimitlwa, vice president of human resources at DHL Express Sub-Saharan Africa. The company also has employee recognition awards, competitive pay, and a Certified International Specialist (CIS) program, in which all DHL employees learn how the company operates and the importance of everyone’s role in the business. “CIS is not a traditional training platform,” says DHL Express Global CEO Ken Allen. “It was designed first and foremost as an engagement tool.”3

Peter Gudella/Shutterstock

Employee Engagement

5-1

When executives at Frucor Beverages and other companies discuss employee motivation these days, they are just as likely to use the phrase employee engagement . Although its definition is still being debated,4 we define employee engagement as an individual’s emotional and cognitive (logical) motivation, particularly a focused, intense, persistent, and purposive effort toward work-related goals. It is an emotional involvement in, commitment to, and satisfaction with the work. Employee engagement also includes a high level of absorption in the work—the experience of focusing intensely on the task with limited awareness of events beyond that work. Finally, employee engagement is often described in terms of self-efficacy—the belief that you have the ability, role clarity, and resources to get the job done (see Chapter 3).

Employee engagement is on the minds of many business leaders because of evidence that it predicts employee and work unit performance. For example, Standard Chartered Bank found that branches with higher employee engagement provide significantly higher-quality customer service, have 46 percent lower employee turnover, and produce 16 percent higher profit margin growth than branches with lower employee engagement. Another company recently reported that highly engaged teams have much more loyal customers (35 percent above average) compared to moderately engaged teams (6 percent above average loyalty). It isn’t always clear from these studies whether employee engagement makes companies more successful, or whether the company’s success makes employees more engaged. However, longitudinal evidence suggests that employee engagement causes the company outcomes more than vice versa.5

The challenge facing organizational leaders is that most employees aren’t very engaged.6 The numbers vary across studies, but recent results from a widely recognized survey estimate that only 32 percent of employees in the United States are engaged, 51 percent are not engaged, and 17 percent are actively disengaged. Actively disengaged employees tend to be disruptive at work, not just disconnected from work.7 These numbers are better than in most countries; only 13 percent of employees globally are engaged. Employees in several Asian countries (notably Japan, China, and South Korea) and a few European countries (notably Italy, Netherlands, and France) have the lowest levels of employee engagement, whereas the highest scores are usually found in the United States, Brazil, and India.

This leads to the question: What are the drivers of employee engagement? Goal setting, employee involvement, organizational justice, organizational comprehension (knowing what’s going on in the company), employee development opportunities, sufficient resources, and an appealing company vision are some of the more commonly mentioned influences.8 In other words, building an engaged workforce calls on most topics in this book, such as the MARS model (Chapter 2), building affective commitment (Chapter 4), motivation practices (Chapter 5), organizational-level communication (Chapter 9), and leadership (Chapter 12).

Employee Drives and Needs

5-2

To build a more engaged and motivated workforce, we first need to understand where motivation begins, that is, the motivational “forces” or “prime movers” of employee behavior.9 Our starting point is drives (also called primary needs), which we define as hardwired characteristics of the brain that attempt to keep us in balance by correcting deficiencies. Recent neuroscience (brain) research has highlighted the central role of emotions in this process. Specifically, drives produce emotions that energize us to act on our environment.10 There is no agreed-upon list of human drives, but research has consistently identified several, such as the drive for social interaction, for competence, to comprehend our surroundings, and to defend ourselves against physiological and psychological harm.11

Drives are innate and universal, which means that everyone has them and they exist from birth. Drives are the starting point of motivation because they generate emotions, which put people in a state of readiness to act on their environment. Cognition (logical thinking) plays an important role in motivation, but emotions are the real sources of energy in human behavior.12 In fact, both words (emotion and motivation) originate from the same Latin word, movere, which means “to move.”

Exhibit 5.1 illustrates how drives and emotions translate into felt needs and behavior. Drives, and the emotions generated by these drives, form human needs. We define needs as goal-directed forces that people experience. They are the motivational forces of emotions channeled toward particular goals to correct deficiencies or imbalances. As one leading neuroscientist explains: “drives express themselves directly in background emotions and we eventually become aware of their existence by means of background feelings.”13 In other words, needs are the emotions we eventually become consciously aware of.

EXHIBIT 5.1 Drives, Needs, and Behavior

Consider the following example: You arrive at work to discover a stranger sitting at your desk. Seeing this situation produces emotions (worry, curiosity) that motivate you to act. These emotions are generatedPage 124 from drives, such as the drive to defend and drive to comprehend. When strong enough, these emotions motivate you to do something about this situation, such as finding out who that person is and possibly seeking reassurance from coworkers that your job is still safe. In this case, you have a need to make sense of what is going on, to feel secure, and possibly to correct a sense of personal violation. Notice that your emotional reactions to seeing the stranger sitting at your desk represent the forces that move you, and that your logical thinking plays an active role in channeling those emotions toward specific goals.

INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN NEEDS

Everyone has the same drives; they are hardwired in us through evolution. However, people develop different intensities of needs in a particular situation. Exhibit 5.1 explains why this difference occurs. The left side of the model shows that the individual’s self-concept (as well as personality and values), social norms, and past experience amplify or suppress emotions, thereby resulting in stronger or weaker needs.14 People who define themselves as very sociable typically experience a stronger need for social interaction if alone for a while, whereas people who view themselves as less sociable would experience a less intense need to be with others over that time. These individual differences also explain why needs can be “learned” to some extent. Socialization and reinforcement may increase or decrease a person’s need for social interaction, achievement, and so on. We will discuss learned needs later in this section of the chapter.

Individual differences—including self-concept, social norms, and past experience—influence the motivation process in a second way. They regulate a person’s motivated decisions and behavior, as the right side of Exhibit 5.1 illustrates. Consider the earlier example of the stranger sitting at your desk. You probably wouldn’t walk up to the person and demand that he or she leave; such blunt behavior is contrary to social norms in most cultures. Employees who view themselves as forthright might approach the stranger directly, whereas those who have a different personality and self-view are more likely to first gather information from coworkers before approaching the intruder. In short, your drives (drive to comprehend, to defend, to socialize with others, etc.) and resulting emotions energize you to act, and your self-concept, social norms, and past experience direct that energy toward goal-directed behavior.

Exhibit 5.1 provides a useful template for understanding how drives and emotions are the prime sources of employee motivation and how individual characteristics (self-concept, experience, values) influence goal-directed behavior. You will see pieces of this theory when we discuss four-drive theory, expectancy theory, equity theory, and other concepts in this chapter. The remainder of this section describes theories that try to explain the dynamics of drives and needs.

MASLOW’S NEEDS HIERARCHY THEORY

5-3

The most widely known theory of human motivation is Maslow’s needs hierarchy theory , which was developed by psychologist Abraham Maslow in the 1940s (see Exhibit 5.2). This model condenses the long list of previously studied drives into five basic categories (which Maslow called primary needs). Maslow organized these categories into a hierarchy that, from lowest to highest, are15 physiological (need for food, air, water, shelter, etc.), safety (need for security and stability), belongingness/love (need for interaction with and affection from others), esteem (need for self-esteem and social esteem/status), and self-actualization (need for self-fulfillment, realization of one’s potential). Along with these five categories, Maslow identified the desire to know and the desire for aesthetic beauty as two innate drives that do not fit within the hierarchy.

EXHIBIT 5.2 Maslow’s Needs Hierarchy Source: Based on information in A.H. Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” Psychological Review 50 (1943): 370–96.

Maslow proposed that human beings are motivated by several primary needs (drives) at the same time, but the strongest source of motivation is the lowest unsatisfied need. As the person satisfies a lower-level need, the next higher need in the hierarchy becomes the strongest motivator and remainsPage 125 so even if never satisfied. The exception to this need fulfillment process is self-actualization. People have an ongoing need for self-actualization; it is never really fulfilled. Thus, while the bottom four groups are deficiency needs because they become activated when unfulfilled, self-actualization is known as a growth need because it continues to develop even when temporarily satiated.

In spite of its popularity, Maslow’s needs hierarchy theory has been dismissed by most motivation experts.16 Other needs hierarchy models have also failed to adequately depict human motivation. Maslow assumed that need fulfillment occurs in the order of the hierarchy, yet some people fulfill their esteem needs before their safety needs, for example. He also assumed that a person’s needs are fulfilled for a long time, whereas need fulfillment actually seems to last for a briefer period of time.