Understanding and applying motivation theories for achieving Essay

Understanding and applying motivation theories for achieving organization goals - Essay Example An organization comprises of human resources who have distinct feelings and emotions. These emotions and feelings play important role in determining the output and efficiency of work of the human factor while at job.In this paper we apply one or more of motivational theories to suggest improvement which the manager can apply in given work place scenario to improve employee response and motivation resulting in better output and achievement of organizational goals.Motivation theories provide ready and general constructs to analyze the behavior of human resources at work place. This analysis can distinctly exhibit the possible solutions to motivational problems at work place. Management of any organization has to work adequately to enthuse the human resources in order to ensure that they do work in consonance with organizational goals and objectives.Routine-requiring the 5 employees to attend to customer queries on mortgages, insurance and bank accounts themselves. This work is fairly s tructured task. The bank has standard question templates on terminals. Employees are required to query the customer and fill in the required data in these templates. Based on this data the answer to customer question(s) appears on terminal screen. This is then passed on to the customer to ensure satisfactory service. Such tasks form up to 90% of the total work load of these 5 employees.Non routine -These are customer queries which cannot be satisfied by the terminal based templates. They require additional knowledge about the banking products and often present such decision situations where creativity and correlation skills are required. It is an internal practice that such queries may be forwarded to the manager to deal. Normally such queries form about 10% of the total queries received by these 5 employees. 12 13 Problem has arisen as the manager has started receiving such forwarded queries much in excess of the 10% trend and she subsequently discovered that quite a few of them were in fact routine queries which could have been attended to by the 5 member line staff. 14 15 It is apparent that some line member is trying to pass on his/her work to the 'new unwary manager'. This is not only intruding upon the time and job responsibilities of the manager but also resulting in customer dissatisfaction as not only customer has to wait more to get routine answers but also several non routine queries wait longer as manager is busy in answering routine queries. There apparently is a major motivational problem amongst line staff which needs immediate resolution otherwise the situation may snowball with a multiplier effect. 16 Resolution 17 Manager has to realize that motivation comes from within. It is an inner drive that causes a person to do something or act in a certain way. It is a complex inspirational energy which is highly desirable in the workplace, equally desired by both managers and workers alike. However this inspirational energy is missing in portion or full in present situation. Motivated employees will put in extra effort when needed, without being asked. Instead here employees are trying to pass on the effort required of them to management layer. In order to resolve this manager can use any of the 8 popular motivation theories. These theories are Management by Objectives, Maslow's hierarchy, Quality Circles, Herzberg's Two-factor Theory, McGregor's Theory X and Y, "In Search of Excellence", theory of Peters and Waterman, Managerial Grid, and Likert