Define motivation. What are the views of motivation?
Motivation refers to the forces that drive humans to behave in a certain way. It may also be defined as the inner state of mind that arouses, energises channels and sustain behaviour.
Motivation is to lead people so that they want to do correct things and keep doing the right things which in a key activity of managers and supervisors.
There are three views of motivation which are:
- The Traditional model
This view is associated with Fredrick Winslow Taylor (the father of mass production). And his scientific approach.
- Here managers worked out the best man-machine combination that would yield efficient production and then worked out an appropriate incentive scheme for the workers
- In an industrial setting where there are repetitive tasks, emphasis on mass production yields efficiency
- The assumption was that man is motivated by economic gains (in the form of pay increases) to attain higher levels of production
- This view of man came to be known as ‘the rational economic man concept’
2.The Human Relation Model
This was brought into being by Elton Mayo and his Hawthorne experiments.
- The discovery was that boredom and stress relating to performing repetitive tasks cause lower performance levels.
- Managers had to make employees’ lives at work worthwhile by addressing their social Thus the concept here was one of the social view of subordinates or ‘the social man concept.’
- Emphasis was on giving subordinates some freedom to make job-related decisions.
- Informal workgroups were also studied by this group of researchers and the conclusion was that management should give informal groups a greater say in the organisational setting.
- Management, however, still maintained decision-making power and subordinates were expected to accept authority and implement managerial decisions
- Mayo and his colleagues also studied the effects of informal group-induced pressure on the performance on the individual, whereupon it was concluded that the group had, in some instances, more influence than the Managers should therefore use groups effectively.
3.The Behavioural Model
Both the Traditional and the Human relations models failed to aptly explain what motivates the human behaviour. They emphasised on one or two factors and did not give sufficient coverage of the other factors.
The behavioural school addressed these issues. The behavioural school of management’s thought was advocated by psychologists and other behavioural specialists.
These proponents believed that the human being had initiatives and enjoyed work itself without necessarily having to be pushed to perform.
