Understanding why people work

This report explores the reasons why people work, including the basic need for livelihood and other motivations. It discusses the concept of motivation and its impact on employees' efficiency. The report also covers positive and negative factors that affect individuals in their job roles, along with strategies to cope with negative factors. The importance of job satisfaction and strategies to create a positive work environment are highlighted.

Understanding why people
work

Table of Contents
Understanding why people work ....................................................................................................1
What does Motivation Mean? .........................................................................................................3
The various factors which motivate employees to work.................................................................4
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........................................5
Strategies to cope with negative factors employees experience as a result of their job roles..........5
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................6
References ..............................................................................................................................6
Books and journal ......................................................................................................................6

Introduction
The basic motive behind working of an individual is to earn their livelihood. Without working
they are not able to earn money and fulfil their three basic needs which are food, house and
shelter. Apart from the above mentioned reason there can be other reasons too for which
individual prefer to work. All those reasons will be covered in this in this report file. This report
will also cover understanding of motivation and how it work for employees in organisation for
increasing their efficiency. Various negative and positive factor that effect individuals in the
organisation will also be included in this report. As there will negative factors effecting
individuals that is why this report will include carious strategies that can help in coping up with
these negative factors affecting individuals.
What does Motivation Mean?
Motivation is very important for maintaining goal and objective behaviour of individual. It refers
to taking different initiative, actions and giving incentive to individuals because of which an
individual can stick to their goals and objective and thus able to achieve and attain them timely
and efficiently (Pritchard, 2016). To understand the motivation required for individuals Maslow
hierarchy is very recognisable as it will consider all the psychological aspects that affect
individuals motivation. Maslow hierarchy of individual is elaborated below.
Theory of Maslow's hierarchy
Theory of Maslow's hierarchy was presented by American philosopher and psychologist
Abraham H. Maslow. He was best know for his Psychological theory of self actualisation. As per
Abraham Maslow human motivation is grounded on five core needs and fulfilling all those needs
boost human motivation exceptionally well. These five needs are physiological needs, safety,
love and belongingness, self esteem, self fulfilment/self actualisation (Garland, 2018). As per
Maslow these needs form a pyramid type shape and one cannot move to higher level needs
before fulfilling there basic needs. Following are the components of Maslow's hierarchy theory:
 Physiological needs:- Physiological needs is a very basic human needs of any individual
which include air, water, food, shelter etc. Thus fulfilling all these basic needs are very
important for motivating employees and inducing them for working with productivity.
 Safety and security:- Safety needs of individual basically involves providing safety to
employees in terms of job security and medical security.

 Social:- Human being is very socially active and providing employees socially interactive
environment will definitely boost their productivity.
 Self esteem:- Self esteem or self responsibility is very important for any individual to get
success in life as without feeling self worth or without knowing self worth individual
cannot put his best foot forward and that may put hindrance in its productivity.
 Self Actualisation:- This need grabs top most position in Maslow's hierarchy because it
is the last thing individual look after to reach at his full productivity or full capacity.
Intrinsic and Extrinsic motivation
Intrinsic motivation are those motivation that are driven from the internal factors of individual.
There can be various factors that motivate or effect individuals motivation level directly and
indirectly which includes satisfaction from the work, competitiveness in the job role, thrill and
fun in the activities and relatedness to the work (Srivastava and Banerjee, 2016). All these above
mentioned factors affect employees motivation level and thus are termed as intrinsic factors of
motivation.
Extrinsic motivation are those motivations that come from external factors. Individual get
motivated when they know that they will get reward for the work completed or when they know
that they will be incentivised for the work done. External factors of motivation involves
incentive and reward, promotion, work environment and authority of work (Moon, Hills and
Demiris, 2018). All these factors target individually external and thus known as extrinsic factors
of motivation.
The various factors which motivate employees to work
Salary:- Salary refers to pay check and consideration employees received in return to the
activities and work they have done for the organisation. This is basic amount received by the
individuals which is worth equal to the work done (Ylikoski, 2017). These are basically paid in
the fixed intervals for instance it can be weekly, monthly or quarterly.
Promotion:- Promotion is one of the extrinsic factor that is effecting motivation of employees
externally. It is a incentive provided to employee or individual in addition to salary they get for
the activities they have done. Basically promotion refers to providing higher job role, authority
and salary in comparison to previous position.

Work Environment:- Work environment is also very important factor that affects employees
motivation as without proper employees might not able to perform task with their full capacity
and thus lag behind in the work. It is also counted as one of the extrinsic factors of motivation.
The positive factors employees experience as a result of their job roles
Job satisfaction is a one of the most important thing in individual and employees life (Shin,
Seok and Lim, 2018, April). Like everyone is unique in their work but job satisfaction is
needed by everyone for to be motivated and keep working hard for the organisation.
Positive factors for job satisfaction are listed as follows:
 Working environment: Its very important to provide good working
environment(clean,neat and attractive) to the employee so that it can be easy for
employee to go through the work.
 Appreciation:as everyone loves appreciation so it doesn't matter if a person is from
from small job or big job as person have done good work it should be appreciated.
 Pay:money which help the person to survive in this person so if doesn't paid as per its
work the person will get demotivated and will not get the satisfaction.
 Promotion: as promotion is very important for a person if he is working hard for the
organisation from many year he should be promoted for the job satisfaction .
 Safety and security: like now a days we can see that many companies provide health
insurance and regular medical check-up for the employees so that employees can be fit
and fine and get job satisfaction.
The negative factors employees experience as a result of their job roles
Negative factors are those factors which effect employees and individuals working negatively
and thus reduce employees job satisfaction and productivity. There are various negative factors
that can effect employees productivity and reduce job satisfaction which are listed and explained
below:-
 Conflict with co-workers:- Conflict with co-workers is major negative factors that effect
employees performance and job satisfaction (Mattioli, Walters and Cannon, 2018). It is

mandatory for employers to resort all these conflict if they want their members to work
efficiently.
 Negative work environment:- Negative work environment is also another negative
factor that affect employees motivation negatively. when employees do not receive a
proper working place they tend to work unproductively and thus it is very necessary for
organisation to provide proper work place to employees.
 Personal problems:- Personal problem is also another negative factor which have
adverse affect as when employee have personal problem they tend to work unwillingly
and thus it is necessary to resolve employees personal problem too.
Strategies to cope with negative factors employees experience as a result of
their job roles
Productive working of employees is very necessary for the organisation because achievement of
goal and targets are totally rely on productivity of human forces. Thus elimination of negative
impact of factors on employees is very necessary for organisation. Following are the few
strategies that will help in elimination of negative impact on employees:-
 Employees engagement:- With proper employees engagement in activities and
conversations employers might able to resolve problems such as personal problems and
conflict with co-workers. Resolving these problems will help to remove all the negative
affect on the employees.
 Providing satisfying work environment:- By providing proper and satisfying work
culture employees can perform with their full productivity and thus removing all the
negative affects job role have on employees (Prahl and Van Swol, 2017). Also providing
job environment help employees to eliminate all the distractions.
 Providing growth and development opportunities:- By getting proper growth and
development opportunities employees will work with full commitment and engagement
and thus all the negative factor of job role that affect employees satisfaction will be
eliminated.
 Creating a culture of learning:- Learning attitude from the past mistakes and dynamic
thinking in employees is very important for employees to reduce or eliminate all the
negative affect of work and job role on employees. Also with learning attitude

employees will be willingly learning from their co-workers and thus it will reduce
chances of conflicts.
Conclusion
From the above report file, it can be concluded that working is necessity for any individual to
fulfil basic needs of their life. Without working individual is not able to fulfil their needs and
also with no working there are high chances that individual will lost their productivity in long
term. For this purpose regular motivation is required for individuals and Maslow's hierarchy is
used to elaborate motivation and psychological needs in the above report. Also this report
included various negative and positive factors that effected individuals during their tenure of Job
roles. And it also included various ways and strategies to cope up with these negative effects.
References
Books and journal
Pritchard, J.B. ed., 2016. Ancient Near Eastern texts relating to the Old Testament with
supplement. Princeton University Press.
Garland, C., 2018. Understanding trauma: A psychoanalytical approach. Routledge.
Srivastava, M. and Banerjee, P., 2016. Understanding Gen Y. Journal of Management Research
(09725814), 16(3).
Moon, M.C., Hills, R. and Demiris, G., 2018. Understanding optimisation processes of electronic
health records (EHRs) in select leading hospitals: a qualitative study. BMJ Health &
Care Informatics, 25(2).
Ylikoski, P., 2017. The illusion of depth of understanding in science.
Prahl, A. and Van Swol, L., 2017. Understanding algorithm aversion: When is advice from
automation discounted?. Journal of Forecasting, 36(6), pp.691-702.
Shin, I.G., Seok, J.M. and Lim, Y.K., 2018, April. Too close and crowded: understanding stress
on mobile instant messengers based on proxemics. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI
Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-12).
Mattioli, D., Walters, L. and Cannon, E.J., 2018. Focusing on the caregiver: compassion fatigue
awareness and understanding. Medsurg nursing, 27(5), pp.323-328.