Workplace Motivation and Leadership Style: A Business Research Proposal

This research proposal explores the relationship between workplace motivation and leadership style and their impact on employee performance. The study aims to analyze the importance of leadership style and motivation in the organization, evaluate the factors that may impact them, and find out their impact on employee performance. The research methodology involves an online quantitative survey, and the contributions and limitations of the study are discussed.

Running Head: Workplace motivation and leadership style 1
Business Research Proposal

Workplace motivation and leadership style 2
Contents
Abstract.......................................................................................................................................................3
Introduction.................................................................................................................................................4
Literature Review........................................................................................................................................6
Theoretical framework and hypothesis development.................................................................................7
Research methodology................................................................................................................................8
Contributions & Limitations.........................................................................................................................8
References...................................................................................................................................................9

Workplace motivation and leadership style 3
Abstract
Workplace motivation and the leadership style have become vital for the organization as it
encourages employee towards performing the tasks in well efficient manner. Employee
motivation is considered as the major concerns in every industry that is why it is required for the
top authority of the organizations to focus on various motivations tools to increase the
productivity of the employees. The leader has the ability to bring the changes in the organization
by including the leadership styles so that the employee of the organization can get motivated
towards a good job. The relation of leadership style and the motivation and the impact of them
on the employee performance are discussed in a well-efficient manner. the result of this study
will give proper insight into business perception related to the effective leadership style and the
workplace motivation.

Workplace motivation and leadership style 4
Introduction
Globalization has created the workplace more competitive in today’s world. It is essential for the
leaders to have the efficient skills, vision, traits and directions to help in the growth of the
business. Thus, there should be proper knowledge of understanding the weakness, strength,
attitude and behaviour of the employee towards work which is considered as vital for the success
of the company. Motivation is another factor that encourages employees to work more with a
positive attitude which helps in making good working environment. It is not vital to provide only
monetary incentives to the employee but also company needs to focus on the non-monetary
motivation as it has the same potential as monetary motivation. The research paper will evaluate
the critical evaluation of the literature review along with the theoretical framework and
hypothesis development. Research methodology is an important section that helps in making
understanding that from where information has been gathered. The discussion will be made on
eh contributions and the limitations that would be facilitated in making better understanding of
the concept of the research.

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Problems and its scope
Leadership and motivation are two major aspects that have the potential to impact the overall
strategy and the growth of the company. It has been found as per Renko et al. (2015, 70), that
organization can get influenced due to the inefficient strategy of the motivation and the
leadership. There is an example of Wal-mart Company that faced a number of issues due to the
ineffective strategy of leadership and motivation. Employee turnover has been increasing day by
day due to lack of motivation which has become the major concerns in every industry.
The scope of the research is wide as it contains the major aspects of the success of the
organization by covering motivation and leadership. The research will be facilitated to define the
entire concepts of the d the importance of leadership style and motivation in the organization.
The research will be completed by attaining responses using an online quantitative survey.
Research objectives and questions
The objective of the research is defined below:
 To analyze the importance of the leadership style and the motivation in the organization.
 To evaluate the aspects that may impact these factors and be the cause of low
productivity.
 To find out the impact of these factors on the performance of the employee.
Research questions
 How can leadership style and motivation impact the productivity of the organization and
employees?

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 What are the organizational and managerial motivation tools and what is the role of them
in the organization?

Workplace motivation and leadership style 7
Literature Review
According to Top et al. (2016, 1262), there are major two factors that impact the productivity
and the performance of the employee and the organization respectively. These two factors are
leadership style and the motivation because leadership style can put a significant impact on the
performance of the employee. On the other hand motivation can increase the productivity of the
employee.
Leadership style
There is various kind of leadership style that can be adopted by the leader in increasing the
revenues of the organization. These are democratic leadership style, autocrat leadership style,
Laissez-faire leadership and Charismatic Leadership style (Nguyen, et al. 2017, 213). All style
has different impacts and importance in the organization. it has been found that there are many
leaders all over the world in the 21st century who offered analytical thinking and problem-solving
attitude which is important to run the business. Along with that, there is another example of
famous leader that is Jeff Bezos who is a founder of Amazon. Com. Along with that Howard
Schultz is the CEO of Starbucks who has the ability to run the business in an efficient manner
and due to its leadership skill; he has released various branches of Starbucks in all over the
world. Leadership has a strong influence on employee’s behaviour against their work. Autocratic
leadership style allows the manager to make decisions without taking any suggestions of others.
Democratic leadership is a kind of participative leadership which help to increase the workplace
motivation in more efficient manner. In the style of Laissez-faire, leadership employees are
allowed to make their decisions which helps to develop the workplace motivation. Charismatic
Leadership style motivates their employees to do work or improve it in a certain way. These

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leadership styles have the significant influence on the workplace motivation that impact the
employee performance (Renko, Maija, Tarabishy, Carsrud, and Brännback, 2015). So, it is
apparent that the adverse impact on one factor may influence another two factors as well.
Motivation
There is another factor of motivation that facilitates in developing the efficiency of the business
in more effective manner. It has been discussed in a previous assignment that every individual is
considered in relations of daily needs of shelter, water and foods for their survival. The nature of
a person is different from person to person which caused them to be more submissive and more
passive (Ganta 2014, 224). There are some motivation tools that are used in motivating the
employees. There are various kinds of motivation tools such as a Psycho-social motivational
tool, economic motivation tools and managerial and organizational tools.
Psycho-social motivational tool
The psycho-social tools entail various independent employment compliance, opportunities, and
competition with the career, promotion, transfer of competence, special life respect, participation
in the social activity and development opportunities. It is essential for the organization to have
the effective working environment as under-pressure work may lead to loss of works, counter
pressure and escapes from work and these kinds of activities lead to reduction in performance
and productivity level. Along with that the value change and stat are also valuable motivational
tools for employee. It would motivate them to work to do their position and status in the
company (Zabel 2016).
Economic motivational tools

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It has been defined by Massenberg and Kauffeld (2015, 168), that the major reasons for the
employee to work are the reason of economy. There is a number of aspects that influence the
employee’s performance such as salary of employees, incentives of employees and right to
involve in profits of the company.
Organizational and Managerial motivational tools
It is another tool of the motivation that includes the opportunities, empowerment, delegation,
goal setting, training opportunities, business expansion, flexible working hours and many more
that cover the organizational and managerial motivational tools (Conrad and Isaacson 2015, 97).
Employee performance
The employee is significantly impacted by employee motivation and the leadership styles. It is
essential for the working environment to have the satisfied employee from their job that is why it
is required for the leaders of the company to have the good bonding between the employee
motivation factors and the leaders’ leadership styles (Perryer et al. 2016, 333).

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Theoretical framework and hypothesis development
Figure 1: Framework adopted
for this research
According to this framework, it has been cleared that employee motivation, leadership style, and
the employee performances are interlinked. Impact on one aspect can influence the entire
structure of the organization. It has been found that the leadership style of the leader can impact
the performance of the employee significantly (Sekaran and Bougie 2016, 58).
The primary objective of the research is to validate if there is a bonding between the three major
aspects such as leadership, motivation and the employee performance.
H1- Is leadership style a positive or negative factor to increase the productivity of the employee?
H2- Is employee motivation a positive or negative factor to increase the productivity of the
employee?
H3- Is employee performance a positive or negative factor to increase the productivity of the
employee?

Workplace motivation and leadership style 11

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Research methodology
Sampling Frame
The nature of the research is exploratory research as it helps to connect with an idea to
understand the various concepts and ideas. The aim of this research is to conduct the research in
the regards to research problem when there are no earlier studies to define upon to predict
results. The main focus of this research is to attain the insights and familiarity for later
investigation at the time of research problems in the stage of preliminary of investigation
(Hafford and Pindus 2018, 237).
Instrumentation
A quantitative survey is being conducted as the instrumentation in which it will be provided as
an online instrument for gathering the data. It will make use of Likert scale to measure the
propensity of the respondents to adopt effective work environment in which the employee get
motivated towards work with good potential. The nominal demographics of the organizations
will be offered the answers (Open Science Collaboration 2015, 6251).
Data analysis techniques
The data will be gathered with the help of survey in which it will be verified and validated in a
sophisticated manner. The survey will be evaluated in an efficient manner and in case of any
issues such as incomplete survey or with errors will be excluded from the analysis. The nominal
data will be coded into sections by utilizing statistical tools like IBM SPSS.

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Along with that, the data will be analyzed by using different techniques to decide whether there
is firm co-relation or a reason and impact the relationship between the leadership styles and the
employee motivation. It will involve the T-test and regression between the factors that have
discussed above (Hair et al. 2015).
Ethical considerations
The details regarding ethical consideration respondents will be kept anonymous and entire
information which gathered from the survey will be kept confidential with a respondent number
to make sure that respondent contact description is not stored with research data. The entire data
will be spoiled after taking information about them for the research so that others cannot take
advantages of it in their research or any other purpose.
Contributions & Limitations
The main aim of the research is to design to be used by managers of the organization at the time
of determining whether to utilize in the organization for improving the productivity of the
employees or not. The main contribution of the research will be increased the understanding of
the concept of developing the effective leadership style and the motivation. It will offer the
academic community with advancement into the motivators for the adoption of a good attitude in
the working environment; and along with this its insights into the research area of sustainability
of the organization (Castleman and Baum 2015, 34). The research will facilitate to provide the
in-depth information about the motivation tools to the organization so that they can understand
the strategy of the different motivation tools in a different manner.
Along with the contributions in the research, there are some potential limitations of this research
which are the validity of the size of the sample, and the lack of diversity of the industry of

Workplace motivation and leadership style 14
respondent’s organization. A money constraint is another limitation for the researcher by which
the researcher is unable to access the data. It is vital for gathering the information regarding the
topic to attend a number of seminars and conduct survey with taking help of well efficient
software. Due to money constraints this activities could not be completed by the researcher in
well manner. This activity will require more accosts and due to lack of money, research would be
unable to collect the data in more significant manner. Lack of time is another limitation will
impact the entire research adversely; however, it would not be possible for the researcher to
analyze the huge data in one go due to less time (Strom and Kelly 2015, 72). That is why the
researcher will adopt the random sampling technique which facilitates to give chance to the
entire population to get selected. Along with that, there is an online survey conducted with the
help of software that facilitates in developing the proper survey by which the researcher can
collect the reliable information about the research topic.

Workplace motivation and leadership style 15
References
Castleman, Benjamin L., Saul Schwartz, and Sandy Baum. 2015. Motivation, Behavior, and
Performance in the Workplace: Insights for Student Success in Higher Education." In Decision
Making for Student Success, pp. 32-49. Routledge,.
Conrad, David, Amit Ghosh, and Marc Isaacson. 2015. Employee motivation factors: A
comparative study of the perceptions between physicians and physician leaders." International
Journal of Public Leadership 11, no. 2 pp. 92-106.
Ganta, Vinay Chaitanya. 2014. Motivation in the workplace to improve the employee
performance." International Journal of Engineering Technology, Management and Applied
Sciences2, no. 6 pp 221-230.
Hafford, Carol, Steven Pedlow, and Nancy Pindus. 2018. Household Survey on Tribal Lands:
Frame Building Through Rural Address-Based Sampling and Traditional
Enumeration." Cityscape 20, no. 1 pp 233-240.
Hair Jr, Joseph F., Mary Wolfinbarger, Arthur H. Money, Phillip Samouel, and Michael J.
Page. 2015. Essentials of business research methods. Routledge.
Massenberg, Ann‐Christine, Daniel Spurk, and Simone Kauffeld. 2015.Social support at the
workplace, motivation to transfer and training transfer: a multilevel indirect effects
model." International Journal of Training and Development 19, no. 3 pp: 161-178.

Workplace motivation and leadership style 16
Nguyen, Thi Thu, Lokman Mia, Lanita Winata, and Vincent K. Chong. 2017.Effect of
transformational-leadership style and management control system on managerial
performance." Journal of Business Research 70 pp. 202-213.
Open Science Collaboration. 2015. Estimating the reproducibility of psychological
science." Science 349, no. 6251.
Perryer, Chris, Nicole Amanda Celestine, Brenda Scott-Ladd, and Catherine Leighton. 2016.
Enhancing workplace motivation through gamification: Transferrable lessons from
pedagogy. The International Journal of Management Education 14, no. 3 pp. 327-335.4
Renko, Maija, Ayman El Tarabishy, Alan L. Carsrud, and Malin Brännback. 2015.
Understanding and measuring entrepreneurial leadership style. Journal of Small Business
Management 53, no. 1 (2015): 54-74.
Sekaran, Uma, and Roger Bougie.2016. Research methods for business: A skill building
approach. John Wiley & Sons.
Strom, Diana L., Karen L. Sears, and Kristine M. Kelly. 2014. Work engagement: The roles of
organizational justice and leadership style in predicting engagement among employees." Journal
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Top, Mehmet, Mesut Akdere, and Menderes Tarcan. 2015. Examining transformational
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Zabel, Keith Lynn. 2016. The impact of age on workplace motivation: A person-centered
perspective." PhD diss., Wayne State University.