Article review

Introduction
Recent developments in service industry have heightened the need for motivating employees.
The aim of this study was to have better understanding on factors of employee motivation and
their association with job performance in Malaysian servicing organizations. The dependent
variable in this study is job performance. The independent variables are motivational factors
namely payment, job security, promotion, freedom, friendly environment and training.

A correlation research design was used in this study. Survey method was used to collect data.
The research instrument was a structured questionnaire.

Background
As performance of employees is significant for organizations, the management should consider
improving performance of workers in their companies by encouraging them to do their tasks and
duties as efficiently and effectively as possible. Therefore, motivation in firms is absolutely
important and necessary because it could change the behaviour of employees in positive ways.
That is why many managers believe that when they establish motivated employees in the
workplace, they can observe significant achievements in their organizations.

Problem
Taylor (1856–1915) and Gilbreth (1868–1924) believed that the employees have little feeling to
work, so they need to be motivated. In this study, we would like to examine the correlation
between organizational motivation factors consisting payment, job security, promotion, freedom,
friendly environment, training and employee job performance. Therefore, we measure
motivation with relation to job performance.
Conclusion
A convenience sampling technique was used to select the respondents for this study. A total of
130 employees of service organizations constituted the sample. The results showed that among
the motivational factors, two variables were found to be significant predictors of job
performance. Training contributed 40.4% to job performance while promotion contributed an
additional 3%. An interesting finding of the research is that intrinsic motivational factors are
considered more important compared to extrinsic motivational factors such as payment, job
security, and friendly environment. Freedom an intrinsic variable however was not found to be
significantly related to job performance.