Motivation system
| Motivation system |
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Motivation system is a term that describes one of the management instruments. It consists of purposely chosen motivators which are all connected to each other; they satisfy the assumptions and the mission of company by encouraging the employees to certain behaviors and practices.
Motivation system supports processes of undertaking decisions, planning and controlling (Stabryła 1996).
Begginings of motivation systems
Basically, motivation is described as a need that causes a person to take some action. Most of the times, this process comes from a desire which leads to behavior and then is connected to a reward. There has been underlined a few theories about motivation and its sources. The most common are:
- Reward and punishment theory – very significant instruments which are connected mostly with promotion perspectives for employees; they create constant behaviors for reaching company's aims and also they eliminate unwanted actions. Rules for these issues in particular are most often executed by the management board.
- Needs theory – firstly combined by Maslow, these instruments assume that every little action is being undertaken because of a need or a desire that every human has, even not-knowing about them. The Maslow's hierarchy consists of five levels in so-called ‘pyramid of Maslow’, where the most basic needs are located at the bottom (order of the needs: physiological, safety, belonging, esteem, self-actualization).
- Process theory – underlines psychological acts that affect motivation, which are values, aims and justice.
Motivation in companies
Assuming that associations are based on a rewarding system of motivation, we can distinguish processes of encouraging the employees at three levels:
- Earning motivation (bonuses, raises in wages, perks)
- Non-earning material motivation (health programs, insurances, company gadgets, conferences, special trainings)
- Non-earning non-material motivation:
- Organizational – promotion possibilities, authority, higher information access
- Social and psychological – commendations, self-realization, job certainty
- Technical – working on better ware, assistance.
Beside listed above instruments for encouragement, also the work environment itself takes part as one of the motivator for companies. Each employee gets benefits from good atmosphere at work, decent localization of the firm, good ware to work on and a good economical situation of the company that implies less stressful work.
One of the most important factors occurring in processes of motivating are also principals’ attitudes to all of workers. According to Douglas McGregor (McGregor 1960), the way a superior covers for job is exactly the same as it becomes to all of his subordinates. Another important rule makes that the amount of information that reaches an employee is as significant as it increases his work motivation.
Motivation systems are influenced by certain factors:
- Coming from the outside of the company (i.e. political and tax structures, gross domestic product, unemployment rate, different systems of values)
- Coming from the inside of the company (i.e. enterprise's strategy, organizational structure, competition, size and wideness of the company)
References
- Matsubara, Y., & Nagamachi, M. (1996, June). Motivation system and human model for intelligent tutoring. In Intelligent Tutoring Systems (p. 139-147). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Author: Anna Wilkońska
