Human Motivation in the Work Organization

HUMAN MOTIVATION IN THE WORK ORGANIZATION: THEORIES AND IMPLICATIONS

Lamp Li

I. Productivity, Job Satisfaction, and Motivation In a modern society, one of the central problems is to provide jobs for all those who want and are able to work. But once people get jobs, it is for the management of any organization, business or governmental, to worry about employee motivation: because employee motivation or motivation of organizational members is one of the critical functions of a manager, and because there is a persistently increasing pressure for increased productivity in order to meet competition, to best utilize scarce resources, and to provide goods and services to more and more people at less and less cost. In fact, employee motivation has been very popular in management circles. Motivation, in its traditional sense among management writers,

productivity. Generally, we judge managers by two important of considerations of production and people, which in turn are based on the three factors motivation, participative management, and competence. Good managers are interpersonal

driven mainly by the need for self-actualization, and are deeply interested in both people and production. They are both high-task and high-relationship oriented. Average managers are concerned with ego status, and are high-task, low-relationship oriented. Poor managers are preoccupied by safety and ego-status needs, they are of low-task, lowrelationship kind of people. Their guides are personnel manual and SOPs, and their goal is simply self-preservation. Motivation is often mistakenly teamed with job satisfaction,1 resulting in misconceptions about the relationships between productivity, job satisfaction and motivation. Traditional views treat employee satisfaction

means a process of stimulating people to action to accomplish desired goals. It is a crucial factor in judging management style as well as in determining -253-

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