The Only Thing That Affects Employee Motivation is the Level of Pay

Student’s Last Name 1
Management principles
By (Name)
Course
Professor
University
Date

Student’s Last Name 2
The only thing that affects employee motivation is the level of pay
Introduction
The motivation of employee can be defined as the commitment, energy, and creativity
that a worker portrays in his job. Employee motivation is a concern of the management to ensure
the employee is focused on their job at all time. Employee satisfaction is considered as one of the
key drivers for the continuous improvement of the total quality control. The two main mentioned
motivators towards employee job satisfaction are money or level of pay and job satisfaction.
Some proponents say that better pay makes the employee be productive while others retaliate
that happy employees are more productive. However, the level of pay alone cannot motivate
employees. Apart from compensation, employees need other factors to achieve job satisfaction.
Additionally, workers want their efforts acknowledged as contributing to the achievement of the
objectives of the organization. Interestingly, if an organization pays its workforce more than the
average salary in the region, it would still be able to sustain the motivation of the employees on a
long-term level.
Monetary compensation is a key incentive to work motivation because it helps the
employees to meet their needs and wants. Employees also use money as a scorecard to ascertain
the value the organization is placing on them. According to the equity theory by John Adams,
workers measures equity between the input they give to the job and the outcomes they receive
from the same job (Shahzadi, et al., 2014, pp.160). This is then compared to the perceived inputs
and outputs of their colleagues in the organization structure. According to the theory, employees
perceive they are well treated if the ratio between their inputs and outcomes correlate with those
of their colleagues. The reinforcement and expectancy theory also supports the motivation effect

Student’s Last Name 3
of the level of pay. Reinforcement theory explain that pay relies on performance and encourages
the workers to put more effort on their job. On the other hand, expectancy theory states that
compensation will motivate an employee to the extent that he views it as satisfying his personal
goal and to the extent that it is dependent on performance criteria. According to a study carried
out by psychologist Edwin Locke, he compared four factors of motivating employees (Gupta and
Shaw, 2014, pp.3). These methods include money, goal setting, participation and decision
making. Locke established that money improved performance by 30 percent while goal setting
by 16 percent (Dar, Bashir, Ghazanfar and Abrar, 2014, pp.229). Participation in decision
making improved performance by 17 percent, same as redesigning job models. From Locke
studies, he established that when level of pay is used as a work motivator, it improved the
performance of the employees.
It is apparent that money is one of the motivators of employee performance. However,
money can motivate some employees under some condition and it is not the same for all
employees. The following are some of the conditions that must be met for money to act as a
motivator. First, the employee must perceive money as a reward for performance. Additionally,
the management must be in the position to offer money as a performance incentive. The third
step is that money must be important to the employee. Finally, the worker must perceive the
marginal increase in money as significant for the performance (Eisele, Grohnert, Beausaert and
Segers, 2013, pp.538). It is very rare for all the above conditions to occur simultaneously.
Additionally, not all employees are motivated by the level of pay. Some of the employees are
more motivated by intrinsic factors and are very much unlikely to be influenced by money. For
example, using the Maslow hierarchy of needs model, money may likely be a strong
performance motivator for those employees who want to achieve basic needs such as food and