Page 233 - DMGT402_MANAGEMENT_PRACTICES_AND_ORGANIZATIONAL_BEHAVIOUR

Management Practices and Organisational Behaviour

Notes Mr. Arun who works late every evening, goes to the office on weekends and incessantly reads
the latest management journals is highly motivated to do well. Conversely, we might suspect
that Mr. Ivan who is working in the accounts department is usually the first one to go out of the
door at quitting time, rarely puts in extra hours and generally spends little time reading up on
new developments in the field, is not very motivated to excel.
What makes people work? Why do some people perform better than others? Why does the same
person act differently at different times? Perhaps one of the biggest questions confronting
organisations today is the "people" question. A manager must stimulate people to action to
accomplish the desired goals; he must fuse the varied individual human capacities and powers
of the many people employed into a smoothly working team with high productivity. How do
we get people to perform at a higher than "normal" percent of their physical and mental capacities
and also maintain satisfaction? This is the challenge of motivation.

11.1 What is Motivation?

Some of the widely quoted definitions are given below:

"Motivation is the result of processes, internal or external to the individual, that arouse enthusiasm and
persistence to pursue a certain course of action."
Gray Starke
"We define motivation as the willingness to exert high levels of effort toward organisational goals, conditioned
by the effort's ability to satisfy some individual needs."
Stephen P Robbins
" Motivation is a predisposition to act in a specific goal-directed way."
S. Zedeck and M. Blood
"(Motivation is) the immediate influences on the direction, vigour and persistence of action."

Atkinson J.W.
"(Motivation is) steering one's actions toward certain goals and committing a certain part of one's energies
to reach them."
S.W Gellerman

"(Motivation is) how behaviour gets started, is energized, is sustained, is directed, is stopped and what kind
of subjective reaction is present in the organism while all these are going on."
M.R. Jones
All these definitions contain three common aspects of the motivation process:

1. What energizes human behaviour?
2. What directs or channels such behaviour?
3. How is this behaviour maintained or sustained?
Motivation has certain underlying properties:

1. It is an individual phenomenon: Each individual is unique, and this fact must be recognized
in motivation research.
2. Motivation is intentional: When an employee does something, it is because he or she has
chosen to do it.

228 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY