By Managers tend to view motivation as an activity aimed at shaping employee behavior patterns that best contribute to the achievement of corporate goals. Specialists in the field of personnel motivation do not use the word “motivation” to refer to activities, but rather use terms such as “motivation system” and “motivational management”.
For motivation, as a characteristic of an individual or an employee, the following definitions are often given:
- Motivation is a set of factors that motivate human behavior.
- Motivation is an internal energy that includes a person’s activity in life and at work.
- Motivation is the enthusiasm and desire to work, achieve goals, and is as valuable a resource as office space or payroll.
- Motivation is an emotional state that motivates a person to act in a certain direction. Motive (from the old – French motivus) literally “incitement to action.”
Thus, motivation is something that cannot be brought in from outside. This, which is “inside” a person, is part of his personality. It is impossible to motivate a person in a directive, violent way. The system of motivation and motivational management address the internal motives of a person and activate them.
Motivation is what explains why people or animals initiate, continue or terminate a certain behavior at a particular time. Motivational states are commonly understood as forces acting within the agent that create a disposition to engage in goal-directed behavior. It is often held that different mental states compete with each other and that only the strongest state determines behavior. This means that we can be motivated to do something without actually doing it. The paradigmatic mental state providing motivation is desire. But various other states, such as beliefs about what one ought to do or intentions, may also provide motivation.
Various competing theories have been proposed concerning the content of motivational states. They are known as content theories and aim to describe what goals usually or always motivate people. Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the ERG theory, for example, posit that humans have certain needs, which are responsible for motivation. Some of these needs, like for food and water, are more basic than other needs, such as for respect from others. On this view, the higher needs can only provide motivation once the lower needs have been fulfilled. Behaviorist theories try to explain behavior solely in terms of the relation between the situation and external, observable behavior without explicit reference to conscious mental states.
Motivation may be either intrinsic, if the activity is desired because it is inherently interesting or enjoyable, or extrinsic, if the agent’s goal is an external reward distinct from the activity itself. It has been argued that intrinsic motivation has more beneficial outcomes than extrinsic motivation. Motivational states can also be categorized according to whether the agent is fully aware of why he acts the way he does or not, referred to as conscious and unconscious motivation. Motivation is closely related to practical rationality. A central idea in this field is that we should be motivated to perform an action if we believe that we should perform it. Failing to fulfill this requirement results in cases of irrationality, known as akrasia or weakness of the will, in which there is a discrepancy between our beliefs about what we should do and our actions.
Research on motivation has been employed in various fields. In the field of business, a central question concerns work motivation, for example, what measures an employer can use to ensure that his employees are motivated. Motivation is also of particular interest to educational psychologists because of its crucial role in student learning. Specific interest has been given to the effects of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in this field.
This is not an external influence on a person, but more a study of his aspirations, desires, needs, goals, values that determine his behavior. The motivation system serves to satisfy needs, aspirations, values, etc. in a variety of ways, thereby creating the company’s most valuable resource, which is called a motivated employee.
A motivated employee is one whose eyes are “burning”, who goes to work “as if on a holiday”, internally needs the work process, is attached to it and gets real pleasure. A motivated employee is able to increase the productivity not only of his own work, but also of his less motivated colleagues.
findings
And so what do we have?
Motivation is an internal state of a person, so the influence from the outside such as “carrot and stick” has a very limited effect on the results.
Managers are entirely responsible for the motivation of employees (“The fish rots from the head”). Thus, one of the most important tasks of managers is to create a motivational environment.
A person’s motivation reflects both the individual characteristics of the individual and the characteristics of the society he represents. Due to historical reasons and characteristics of the transition period in modern society, labor resources tend to choose work according to the amount of earnings.
In order to ensure the maximum return on labor resources, that is, to create a motivated employee, you need to turn to his internal motives, which originate in individual needs, aspirations and values.
The motivation system should study the individual needs, aspirations and values of the employee and create conditions for their satisfaction at work.
