Employee
motivation can be classified as intrinsic or internal motivation and extrinsic
or external motivation (Staw, 1976). According
to Amabile (1993) individuals
are intrinsically motivated when they seek enjoyment, interest, satisfaction of
curiosity, self-expression, or personal challenge in the work. Individual
pleasure or interest in the work drives the intrinsic motivation and
intrinsically motivated employees do not carry out their tasks for the sake of
external rewards and these employees’ main concern is the feeling of inner pleasure. Intrinsic
motivation drives the employees to perform the organizational tasks without
anticipating any external incentive. I work for a leading diversified
conglomerate in Sri Lanka and the senior managers who have been there
for more than 15 years in the company appears to be intrinsically motivated due
to the feeling of belongingness to the company due to the long service.
Whereas, individuals are extrinsically motivated when they are engaged
in the work in order to obtain some reward through goal accomplishment.
Extrinsic motivation is the opposite of intrinsic motivation and it is regarding
performing tasks in anticipation of external rewards or benefits. The source of
extrinsic motivation is from an individual physical environment and higher
salaries, incentives and job promotions are some of the external rewards which
leads to extrinsic motivation (Amabile, 1993). According to Deci (1972)
extrinsic motivational factors are money and verbal rewards which are mediated
outside of a person. For
example, the organization which I work, a leading diversified conglomerate in
Sri Lanka is trying to extrinsically motivate the sales force of the
company by way of offering external rewards such as incentives, allowances,
salary hikes and job promotions.
However,
Amabile (1993) argues that employees can either be intrinsically or
extrinsically motivated or even both. According to Story et al. (2009)
individuals who are high in intrinsic motivation mostly appear to be preferred
challenging cognitive tasks who are capable of self-regulating their behaviors
and there won’t be a significant impact on the performance by offering rewards,
settling external goals.
References
Amabile, T.M. (1993) Motivational
synergy: toward new conceptualizations of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in
the workplace. Human resource management
review, 3 (3) 185-201.
Deci, E.L. (1972) The effects of
contingent and non-contingent rewards and controls on intrinsic motivation. Organizational behavior and human
performance, Volume 8 pp 217-229.
Staw, B.M. (1976) Intrinsic and Extrinsic motivation.
Morristown: General Learning Press.
Story, P.A. Hart, J.W. Stasson, M.F.
and Mahoney, J.M. (2009) Using a two-factor theory of achievement motivation to
examine performance-based outcomes and self-regulatory processes. Personality and individual differences,
46 391-395.
I highly agree with your statement regarding that the motivation is directly linked with the performance of the organization. Yes it’s true, the more you motivated and work will result a better output for the organization. I like to link the motivation with the performance appraisal as well. The reason is that, a positive performance appraisal report will also be a higher motivation factor for the employees. According to Akinbowale et al (2013), they further express that the performance appraisal creates a motivational factor within the employee to develop themselves and to improve their performances.
ReplyDeleteYes Vayanga.It’s true that performance appraisal is also very important as far as the employee motivation is concerned. The way managers perceive of what motivates their subordinates greatly influences their evaluations of employee performance. It appears that the performance appraisal is influenced not only by the objective performance exhibited by the employees, but also by what supervisors perceive about the motivations of the employees (Devoe and Iyengar,2004).
ReplyDeleteHi Dinuka I agree with your findings. The motivation plays a key role in terms of get the work done effectively. Accordingly The precise origin of performance appraisal is not known but the practice dates back to the third century when the emperors of the Wei Dynasty (221-265AD) rated the performance of the official family members (Banners & Cooke, 1984, Coens & Jenkins, 2000)
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