Blogs that drive the performance of people
Educating employers on motivational theory
After five years of recession and almost zero growth, staff have little confidence or reason for optimism. Tight financial policies, with minimal staff numbers, long hours and virtually no pay rises are now the norm. Nobody yet believes they can see ‘the light at the end of the tunnel’, so why should staff continue to [...]
Employee Engagement is an important term for anyone involved in the development and implementation of motivation programmes. This blog looks at what is meant by Employee Engagement, why it is important to companies today and how motivation programmes can be used as part of a strategy to impact Employee Engagement positively.
The academic work of the early and mid 20th century, which was originally undertaken to explain everyday human behaviour, was enthusiastically adopted by the business community, particularly in the US, resulting in a rapid development of ‘incentive schemes’ which could be used by businesses, initially to increase their sales or distribution.
Herzberg was the first to show that satisfaction and dissatisfaction at work nearly always arose from different factors, and were not simply opposing reactions to the same factors, as had always previously been (and still now by the unenlightened) believed. He showed that certain factors truly motivate (‘motivators’), whereas others tended to lead to dissatisfaction (‘hygiene factors’). These hygiene factors [...]
Psychologist Abraham Maslow first introduced his concept of a hierarchy of needs in his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation” and his subsequent book Motivation and Personality. This hierarchy suggests that people are motivated to fulfill basic needs before moving on to other, more advanced needs.
Motivation has many meanings. To the police it points to the reason why a criminal does a certain crime. To a psychologist motivation means the ‘arousal, direction and persistence of behaviour’ (Franken, 1988). To an organisation it includes techniques designed to get the best performance out of employees, to help them reach their potential at work. To those [...]
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