Motivating for Performance
By
Charles Lamson
The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.
---Ralph Waldo Emmerson
How can a manager motivate people to work hard and perform at their best levels?
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Motivating for Performance
Understanding why people do the things they do on the job is not an easy task for the manager. Predicting their response to management’s latest productivity program is harder yet. Fortunately, enough is known about motivation to give the thoughtful manager practical, effective techniques for increasing people’s effort and performance.
Motivation refers to forces that energize, direct, and sustain a person's efforts. All behavior, except involuntary reflexes like eye blinks, is motivated. A highly motivated person will work hard toward achieving performance goals. With adequate ability and understanding of the job, such a person will be highly productive.
To be effective motivators, managers must know what behaviors they want to motivate people to exhibit. Although productive people appear to do a seemingly limitless number of things, most of the important activities can be grouped into five general categories. The company must motivate people to (1) join the organization; (2) remain in the organization; and (3) come to work regularly. On these points, you should reject the common recent notion that loyalty is dead, and accept the challenge of creating an environment that will attract and energize people so they commit to the organization.
Of course, companies also want people to (4) perform---that is, once employees are at work, they should work hard to achieve high output productivity and high-quality. Finally, managers want employees to (5) exhibit good citizenship. Good citizens of the organization are committed, satisfied employees who perform above and beyond the call of duty by doing extra things that can help the company. The importance of citizenship behaviors may be less obvious than productivity, but these behaviors help the organization function smoothly. They also make managers lives easier.
Many ideas have been proposed to help managers motivate people to engage in these constructive behaviors. The most useful of these ideas are described in the following parts of this analysis. We start with the most fundamental processes that influence the motivation of all people. These processes---described by goal-setting, reinforcements, and expectancy theories---suggest basic and powerful actions for managers to take. Then we discuss the content of what people want and need from work, how individuals differ from one another, and how understanding people's needs leads to powerful prescriptions about designing motivating jobs and empowering people to perform at the highest possible levels. Finally, we discuss the most important beliefs and perceptions about fairness that people hold toward work, and the implications for managers.
Setting Goals
Providing work-related goals for people is an extremely effective way to stimulate motivation. In fact, it is perhaps the most important, valid, and useful single approach to motivating performance. Therefore, we discuss it first.
Goal setting theory states that people have conscious goals that energize them and direct their thoughts and behaviors toward a particular end. With the principle that goals matter in mind, managers set goals for employees. For example, a cable TV company might set goals for increasing the number of new subscribers, or the number of current subscribers who pay for premium channels, or the timeliness of responses to customer inquiries.
Goals that Motivate
What kinds of goals most effectively motivate people? How can managers set motivating goals for the people who report to them?
First, goals should be acceptable to employees. This means, among other things, that they should not conflict with people's personal values and that people have reasons to pursue the goals. Allowing people to participate in setting their work goals---as opposed to having the boss set goals for them---is often a great way to generate goals that people accept and pursue willingly.
Second, acceptable, maximally motivating goals are challenging but attainable. In other words they should be high enough to inspire better performance but not so high that people can never reach them.
Third, goals should be specific, quantifiable, and measurable.
Limitations of Goal Setting
Goal setting is an extraordinarily powerful management technique. But like anything else, even specific, challenging, attainable goals work better under some conditions than others. Individual performance goals can be dysfunctional if people work in a group and cooperation among team members is central to team performance. Individualized goals can create competition and reduce cooperation. If cooperation is important, performance goals should be established for the team.
It is important not to establish a single productivity goal if there are other important dimensions of performance. For instance, productivity goals will likely enhance productivity, but they may also cause employees to neglect other things like tackling new projects or developing creative solutions to job-related problems. The manager who wants to motivate creativity should establish creativity goals along with productivity goals.
*SOURCE: MANAGEMENT: THE NEW COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE, 6TH ED., 2004, THOMAS S. BATEMAN & SCOTT A. SNELLPGS. 396-399*
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