Understanding Why People Work: Motivational Theories and Coping Strategies

This report explores the various factors that motivate employees to work, including salary, promotion, and work environment. It also discusses positive and negative factors experienced by employees, such as health issues and lack of challenge in their work, and provides coping strategies to deal with negative factors. The report includes motivational theories, such as Maslow's need hierarchy theory, and strategies to cope with negative factors.

BSc (Hons) Business Management with
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World of Work
Understanding why people work
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Contents

Introduction 1
What does Motivation Mean? 1
The various factors which motivate employees to work
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The positive factors employees experience as a result of their
job roles 5
The negative factors employees experience as a result of their
job roles 6
Strategies to cope with negative factors employees
experience as a result of their job roles 7
Conclusion 7
References 8

Introduction
An individual work for earning money. They need money for fulfilling their
requirements such as food, rent and enjoying with family and friends. Money is not
the only reason to work. Working also provide some extra benefits apart from money
such as working provides independence and control over life. When an individual
work, it enhances their skills, learning new things, and they met with new people at
their job. People work to be contribute in their society. This report includes
motivational theories, how to deal with different people in working environment.
Moreover, it encompasses that how employees can be motivated and how
employees should deal with negative results they experiencing from their job.
What does Motivation Mean?
Motivation is the process that motivates an individual towards achieving their
aim, goal and objectives (Abualoush et. al., 2018). In other words, motivation refers
guiding and maintain a goal oriented behavior.
According to Stephen P. Robbins “Motivation is the willingness to exert high levels of
efforts towards organization goals, conditioned by the effort ability to satisfy some
individual need (Berdicchia, Bracci, and Masino, 2021).
1. Maslow's need hierarchy theory
Maslow's need hierarchy theory is a study of human psychology. This theory
states that human is fully motivated to fulfill their needs in a hierarchical order
(Hartmann et. al.,). This hierarchy begins with basic needs and ended on self-
actualization needs. Psychological or basic needs – Psychological needs are biological need of a
human for survival such as food, air, water, shelter, cloth and sleep (Hattie,
Hodis, and Kang, 2020). These given needs are the basic needs for survival
of a human being and after fulfillment to these needs an individual think to
move on advanced needs. Safety needs – Safety needs are monetary security, personal security, and
health and well-being. Personal security refers to such as security from thefts
and anti - social elements.
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 Love and belongingness needs – Belongingness needs refers to human
emotional needs for interpersonal relationships, bonding with social groups,
friendships, relationship with chosen life partner. Esteem needs – Esteem needs are related to person self-respect, social
respect, status and a social standard.
 Self-actualization needs – The final need in Maslow's need hierarchy theory is
self-actualization needs. This need includes individual's hobbies, what they
love such as cooking, gardening etc. At this level people want to be the best
possibly they can be.
Extrinsic motivation refers to a behavior that is driven through external
rewards such as monetary incentives, social recognition, awards etc.
Intrinsic motivation refers to doing an activity for own internal satisfaction not
to satisfy external factors (Rheinberg, 2020).
The various factors which motivate employees to work
Salary: A salary is a fixed payment paid to an employee for its work
which specified in employee contract. Salary is commonly paid in intervals such as
annual salary paid in monthly payments (Navy, 2020). Salary is decided through
comparison between market pay rate of people working in similar industry or doing
same work. Salary is also affected by availability of people for doing the desired
work. Employees often impressed with monetary incentives because through money
an individual can fulfill its need and wants. Through buying desired goods and
enjoyment.
Promotion: Promotion refers to moving on higher position from existing
designation. It is the advancement of positions in an enterprise. Employees get
motivated when they receive promotions because when employees get chance to
grow they continuously stick with a company on long term basis. It aids in personnel
engagement, boost morale, reduce absenteeism and ultimately leads to high
productivity (Noltemeyer et. al.,2021). Promotion of an employee means trust and
recognition ability and skill of employee to conduct a high position.
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Work Environment: Work environment plays a crucial role in motivating
employees. If an organization has positive work environment it means colleagues
and superiors are cooperative, trust between superior and subordinate, hygiene etc.
all given factors work as positive influences for employees. But if an organization has
poor working environment than employees feel stressed and panic and they unable
to work with their full potential and it leads to low employee and organizational
growth.
The positive factors employees experience as a result of
their job roles
 Transparent and open communication: A transparent and open
communication addresses the employees need to feel that what they have to
say has value in organization. Work become successful when employees
came to know that their contribution affects the organization (Schunk and
DiBenedetto, 2020). It is necessary for staff to discuss organization
philosophy, mission and values etc. to ensure that everyone knows that for
what they are working.
 Work-life balance: Balance should be maintained between work and
personal life. In essence having the knowledge of balance will encourage job
satisfaction among employees because they feel that their other areas of life
are also important.
 Training and development: Adoption of changes is not so crucial in this era.
Employees learn many new things and it enhance their hard skills and soft
skills. A training session for employees is the road map for achieving
organizational goals.
 Recognition for hard-work: Rewards and recognition are necessary for
encouraging certain behavior in employees. When employees get recognized
and rewarded for their best work in organization it will positively influence staff
members for achieving organizational goal and objectives.
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The negative factors employees experience as a result of
their job roles
 Health: Excessive work load on employees give them health issues such as
depression, stress, anxiety etc. Employees who work for long working hours
sitting on a chair they suffer from hypertension, postural deformities, joint
pain, tiredness etc. A heavy work load also affects mood and behavior, poor
mental focus, low motivation and distraction on understanding task.
 Lack of challenge in their work: Employees daily to same work they have
same routine life through which they feel bored and not work with their full
potential which lead to low organizational growth. Employees feel that their
skills are underused and it make people feel less secure in their jobs.
 Insufficient recognition: After anonymous efforts some leaders not
recognize efforts of their team members and it negatively impacted
employees which reduces their will to work and they feel depressed and they
think that their skills and knowledge are of no use.
 Concern about management: Concern about management ability to lead the
company forward successfully. Employees are the essence of every
organization and they are the only one who implement organization policies
and goals practically. Sometimes employees took their work very seriously
due to pressure of their leaders and it effects their mental health as well as
also reduces their physical efficiency to do work.
Strategies to cope with negative factors employees
experience as a result of their job roles
 Take necessary steps to reduce health issues – Health issues are the
major part of concern. Organization should not put extra work load on its
employees and provide required intervals between working hours, arrange
time to time gaming activities which reduces stress of employees and it
improves their working efficiency.
 Provide some challenging task to its employees – Employees gets tired
from daily same routine work and tasks. Organization should provide some
challenging task to employees which provides enthusiasm to employees to do
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work and it will increase their interest in their work and they do work with their
full potential.
 Employees recognition – Social appraisal boost up the morale of
employees. Social appraisal can be done in several ways such as by
providing monetary incentives and non – monetary incentives. Monetary
incentives is beneficial for lower level employees and non – monetary
incentives appraised by high level employees. Monetary incentives are
financial incentives used by employers to motivate lower level employee's
such as cash rewards and etc. Non-monetary incentives are non – financial
benefits provided by an employer to an employee for appraising its
performance.
Conclusion
After analyzing above situation it can be concluded that motivation is an integral part
of employees. Without motivation and motivators an employee may not work with its
full potential. Motivation has several types such as intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.
An employee might be fully motivated through proper application of several
motivational theories. Every employee has different motivator through which they get
motivation such as lower level employees get motivation from monetary incentives
and high level employees get motivation from non-monetary incentives. Work
environment plays a vital role in affecting staff performance. A positive work
environment positively influences an employee’s performance and a bad working
environment negatively impact an employee’s performance. In essence motivation is
necessary for every human task.
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REFERENCES
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employees’ empowerment as an intermediary variable between
knowledge management and information systems on employees’
performance. VINE Journal of Information and Knowledge Management
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Berdicchia, D., Bracci, E. and Masino, G., 2021. Disentangling the effect of
perceived performance management system accuracy on intrinsic and
extrinsic motivation. Meditari Accountancy Research.
Hartmann S, Weiss M, Newman A, Hoegl M. Resilience in the workplace: A
multilevel review and synthesis. Applied Psychology. 2020 Jul;69(3):913-
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Hattie, J., Hodis, F.A. and Kang, S.H., 2020. Theories of motivation: Integration and
ways forward. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 61, p.101865.
Navy, S.L., 2020. Theory of human motivation—Abraham Maslow. In Science
Education in Theory and Practice (pp. 17-28). Springer, Cham.
Noltemeyer, A., James, A.G., Bush, K., Bergen, D., Barrios, V. and Patton, J., 2021.
The relationship between deficiency needs and growth needs: The
continuing investigation of Maslow’s theory. Child & Youth
Services, 42(1), pp.24-42.
Rheinberg, F., 2020. Intrinsic motivation and flow. Motivation Science, 6(3), p.199.
Schunk, D.H. and DiBenedetto, M.K., 2020. Motivation and social cognitive
theory. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 60, p.101832.
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