Work Motivation & Employee Performance

Work Motivation

Introduction

Motivation is a psychological feature that uplifts a person’s extent of commitment. It takes account of the aspects like reason, conduit, and sustainable performance in a fastidious committed direction. Motivating is course of action of the management to influencing peoples performance pedestal on this knowledge and experience. In this paper it will consider whether incentives and reward schemes is the best way to increase work motivation for an organization and in order to discuss the topic first it should consider why motivation is necessary to success of the company.

Pieris argued that it is the main factor to performance development and undoubtedly, it can be said that now-a-days, money motivated the world and no amount of human-relations can compensate for a lack of monetary-rewards as well as while the reward is right, excellent human-relations provide the additional enthusiasm to the team. Hersey, P. and Blanchard, K. also argued that the incentive plans ought to be designed not only to reward good-performance but also to reduce negative-side affects for instance conflicts & grievances.

Pieris also mentioned that managers & management researchers have long assumed that organizational objectives are unachievable without the enduring-commitment of members of the organization. Motivation is a human psychological characteristic that contributes to a person degree of commitment and it includes the aspects that cause, channel, and sustain human behavior in a particular committed direction. The path goal approach is based on the expectancy model of motivation, which suggests that an individual motivation depends on his or her expectation of reward and the valence, or attractiveness of the reward.

Bloisi, W., Cook CW & Hunsaker P., illustrates that financial-incentive programs amplify work performance above 20% and the more successful programs produce enlarges in the 40% range. Clark mentioned that incentive is one of the effective ways to motivate the employees and to enhance motivation for labor is to provide financial incentives for example cash and other tangible incentives can be extremely influential, furthermore, this are comparatively inexpensive ways to increase the value people place on work objectives. But the question arise whether offering employees pay or gifts tied to outstanding performance really motivates employees beyond their past performance.

Though it can be argued that incentives schemes is one of the best way to motivate employees but ultimately it is a very controversial issue because most of the time financial-incentives and motivation are diametrically contrasting to each-other. It has both posditive and negative impact on the organization for example In order for financial-incentive-schemes to be effective they should be based on targets.

The following figure shows that in the year of 1960 the Philips-organization, exhausted of the management concerned in payment-by-results, developed a system of person fixed-bonuses in its PPP¹. Mainly, employees contracted with the corporation to work at a certain-rate on average for an equivalent fixed-bonus as well as employees who failure to paid attention on the agreement were notified that to maintain their people bonuses they have to develop. Workers should work their way up to upper stage of bonus by constricting to work at correspondingly upper output-levels as employees became more skilled.

Employee Recognition Programs

Newstrom, J. W., Davis, K. (2002) pointed out that the employee recognition programs can enhance communications as well as employee-relations and rewarding employees who make important contributions to the organization’s success. Recognition programs often use suggestion systems and recognition awards. The rewards given to individuals or teams may be monetary or non- monetary. This program rewards employees for their ideas and contribution; moreover, the HR department can help here by developing and maintaining formal employee recognition programs such as suggestion systems and recognition awards.

Suggestion Systems

The suggestion system has designed in order to solicit, assess and implement suggestions from employees and then reward the employees for worthwhile ideas, although the reward is often monetary, it does not have to be. It might instead the public recognition, extra vacation time, a special parking spot, or some other benefit. Suggestion systems have been successfully implemented in such diverse organisation’s as hospital, universities, the UK or US Postal Service and other branches of the government and public sector companies for example DWPN, BP Amoco, Eastman Kodak, and Black & Decker.

Newstrom, J. W., Davis, K. argued that manager should adhere to three guidelines when designing a suggestion system. They should

• Use a suggestion evaluation committee to evaluate each suggestion fairly and provide an explanation to employees why their suggestions had not been used,
• It should immediately implement accepted suggestions and give credit to the suggestion’s originator. The company newsletter can be used publicly recognize employees whose suggestions have resulted in improvement,
• Make the value of reward proportional to the suggestions benefit to the company.

Recognition Awards

Recognition awards give public credit to the people to teams who make outstanding contributions to the organization. These people or teams may become role models for others by communicating what behaviors and accomplishments the company values. IBM employees who make major contributions are recognized in a host of different ways, ranging from a simple thank you letter from a division manager to a cash award of $150,000. A recognition award should be a celebration of the team or individual’s success that encourages all organization members to work toward the organization’s goals. Recognition awards that focus attention on team or individuals accomplishment include:

• A company paid picnic to which all team members that their families are invited.
• T-shirts, coffee mugs, or base-ball caps with a team insignia encouraging team commitment.
• A company paid night on the town such as dinner or tickets to a concert for the employee and his or her spouse.
• A plaque engraved with the names of individuals or teams that have made outstanding contributions.
• A donation in the name of an employee to the charity of his or her choice.

Guidelines for Public-Recognition Rewards

Blyton, P. & Turnbull, P., (2004) argued that the public recognition rewards can have a high upside impact on employee and team levels of motivation if they are administered well. Most, employees find it very rewarding to be recognized and honoured in front of their peers. However, a public reward that is poorly administered due to favoritism or being perceived as popularity context can demotivate employees and embarrass the recipient of the reward. Here are some key points to keep in mind when administering public recognition rewards to employees.

Performance Management

Introduction

Performance management is the way out to align organisational goals with individual’s objectives ensuring individuals interpretation to achieving the objectives by allowing reward for individual performance touching the objectives (Anthony, Prrewe, and Kacmar, 257). Performance management is not a new concept: bring individual into line of activities and objectives with organizational goals, provide the individual with the tools and work environment necessary to achieve those objectives, and evaluate and reward individuals based on their results. (Huczynski and Buckanan, 119)

There are various dimension of employee performance to satisfying the individuals with their jobs to generate high employee performance.

Performance management is identical with employee performance management². At the same time it also identified as workforce performance management³. Employee performance management is a compartment of wider discipline of CPM ⁴ or BPM⁵. Both are designed to endow with a comprehensive instrument of key indicators to measure how the business is going on.

Background

Supervision of high employee’s performance involved numerous actions, not just simply reviewing what an employee has done. This scheme must accomplish quite a lot of purposes. Developing and conducting performance appraisals is closely interrelated with a number of human resource management those should be considered. The performance appraisals should be pedestal on a systematic job analysis. The domino effect of a job analysis could be applied to turn out a job description that illustrates the exertion to be performed as well as job specifications, which outlines the requirements essential to carry out the job.

Process

Employee performance provides the employees with a prospect to talk about developmental goals and mutually generate a plan to accomplish those goals. (Luis et al 320) Employee performance development plans should be in black and white permitting the employees to competently grow up even as they also contributing to the organisation following the departmental goals as well as divisional goals which ultimately drives to the organisational goals. This has been demonstrated with the employee performance pyramid.

The Appraisal System

The employees should be weighed up on a number of specific dimensions of job performance rather than on a single measure. In UK Employee’s Rights Act 1993 has been making certain the performance appraisal where no specific job dimensions of performance was reviewed. Raters were asked over to construct evaluations of employees by contrasting them to one another based on a single (Robbins, and Judge, 142). The court has been identified noteworthy racial differences on the decisive factors without objective queries.⁶

Assessing Performance

The actual performance assessment would be determined based on the employee’s strengths and weaknesses. An intention of the performance appraisal is to improve employee performance where the performance weaknesses also be taken into account. At the same time it is significant to strengthen behavior that is estimated to be strong.

If multiple raters are used, assessing performances also includes compiling all ratings into summary form. If the raters agree as to the employee’s performance, high inter-rater reliability exists and summarizing the ratings is not problematic However, it there is a substantial amount of disagreement as to the employee’s performance, inter-rater reliably low. The supervisor must use this information as more of a heuristic device or guide for the final evaluation.

Appraising and Improving Performance

A procedure to evaluate job performance is the concept of performance appraisal. Under a global competitive circumstances performance appraisal is for evaluating performance and accountability of the employees. Selection, recruitment, placement, orientation, training etc such actions would be succeed when gathered information are properly used in performance appraisal by HR (Human Resource) department.

Significance: Following factors are considered as significance of performance appraisal-

• Career planning.
• Training and development.
• Enlarge payment.
• Promotion.
• Make accountability of the employee performance.
• Orientation and placement.
• HR information development.

Purpose or objectives: Purpose or objectives of performance appraisal are as follow-

1. Improve performance,
2. Adjusting compensation,
3. Took decision in placement,
4. Process deficiency staffing,
5. Accusation of the information,
6. Eliminate job design error,
7. Establish equal employment opportunity,
8. Magnify challenges,
9. Feedback to HR (Human Resource).

Process: Following figure represents performance appraisal process

A short description of this process is as bellow

1. Employee performance: In order to give feedback to the employer and the HR department employee performance should evaluated associated to criteria of the standard.
2. Performance appraisal: It’s a tool that bridges an affiliation between manager and their subordinate and also beneficial in equal employment opportunity ruling.
3. Employee feedback: Employee feedback involves in improving human behavior, develop record of the HR information system and use this information compensation commencing job design ragingly.
4. Employment records: Evaluate actual performance is the self monitoring pitch of HR department though typically their task is performance appraisal system design and govern.

Methods

Methods of performance appraisal are

• Rating scale: In order to individual performance evaluate rating scale use a tabular form as follow-

• Check list: Following table of the check list evaluate performance and traits of the employee-

• Forced choice method: A combination of pair positive or negative is under this method. More clarification, here present following table-

• Critical incident method: A important tool that identify standard of supervisors in following way-

• Accomplished method: Here activities of professionals are form in a standard in involving- leadership space, publication, rules etc.
• Behaviorally anchored method: Using rating scale method this formula identify job related behavior the indicate performance standard.
• Field review method: A tool for presenting skill of supervisors.
• Method of performance test observation: Pay-for-knowledge or skill through compensation, reward is decided by the company using this test.
• Methods for comparative evaluation approaches: Make comparison among workers this technique is widely used in organization.

Conclusion

Rewards are much more effective for motivation though there is some controversy with of incentives to bring employee’s effectiveness development. Employee’s performance management as well as sequential presentation of employee recruitment sets a well designed outcome their performance appraisal.

The centre of this paper has take account of- the talent pool expansion, recruiting and careers, employee selection, training and development, appraising and improving performance. It also argued that to assemble these factors here also perform selection and recruitment properties, source, process, strategy, interview, test program guideline, modes of career transition, training and development course of action, standard scale of performance appraisal using different scheme, compensation structure, current issues, tools of compensation etc. has sketched. Thus the paper also boosts knowledge of effective development and makes awareness of corporate bodies.

Bibliography

1. Anthony, W. P. Prrewe, P. L., and Kacmar, K. M. (2002), Strategic Human Resource Management, 4^th ed., The Dryden Press, London. Web.
2. Blyton, P. & Turnbull, P., The Dynamics of Employee Relations, 3rd edition, Macmillan Plagrave. (2004).
3. Colquitt, Jason A., Jeffery A Lepine, Michael J Weeson, Organizational Behavior Improving Performance and Commitment in the Workplace, Mcgraw Hill. 2008.
4. Clark Richard E., Fostering the Work Motivation of Individuals and Teams. Web
5. Huczynski,Andrzej, David A. Buchanan, Organizational Behaviour, 6^th edition, Longman Higher Education, 2007.
6. Managers-Net, Incentives – Financial reward schemes. Web.
7. Newstrom, J. W., Davis, K., Organisational Behavior, 11th Edition, Tata-McGraw Hill Publishing Company Limited, London. Web.
8. Specialty Engraving, How to Increase Employee Motivation throughout Your Organization. Web.
9. Luis R. Gomez-Mejia, David B. Balkin, Robert L. Cardy, (2006), Managing Human Resources, 4^th edition, Prentice Hall: Londom. pp-362-390.
10. Newstrom, J. W., Davis, K. (2002), Organisational Behavior, 11th Edition, Tata-McGraw Hill Publishing Company Limited, New Delhi. pp. 163-175.
11. Robbins, S. P., Judge, T. A. (2007), Organisational Behavior, 12th Edition, Prentice-Hall of India Private Limited, New Delhi. pp. 178-181, 289-296.
12. Rory, B., (2003), Project Management: Planning and Control Techniques, 4th edition, ISBN: 9812-53-121-1, pp.251-279.

Footnotes

1. Premium Payment Plan.
2. EPM.
3. WPM.
4. Corporate performance management.
5. Business performance management.
6. (Robbins, and Judge, 142 ).