Motivation

Dr. Nazan Avcı

• What is motivation?
• Work motivation theories
• Need theories
• Expectancy theory
• Self-efficacy theory
• Justice theories
• Goal setting theory
• Control theory

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Motivation
Motivation: the processes that account for an individual’s
intensity, direction, and persistence of effort toward
attaining a goal.
The three key elements:
• Direction: Direction refers to the choice of specific
behaviors from a number of possible behaviors
• Intensity: Intensity refers to the amount of effort a person
expends at doing a task (reflected in how quickly or how
forcefully/ enthusiastically they work)
• Persistence: Persistence refers to continuing engagement
in a behavior over time

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Work Motivation Theories
• Concern with the reasons of good job performance, other than ability.
• Aim to predict people's choice of task behavior, their effort, or their
persistence.
• View of work motivation from different perspectives: offering
different and sometimes complementary insights.
• Considering how people are motivated:
• To satisfy needs
• By personal traits
• In response to cognition of their work environment
• When they feel fairly treated at work.
• By characteristics of their jobs.
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Need Theories
• View of motivation as arising from people’s needs or desires for
things
• Needs can differ within the same person over time and across people.
• People can vary in the rewards they want from work
• Need theories were once popular. However, research hasn’t shown
much relation to job performance.
• The rather general needs in these theories can be satisfied in many ways.

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Needs Theories
Maslow’s Need Hierarchy
Theory
• Research has not been
supportive of Maslow’s theory,
possibly because of rather
vague definitions.
• But the theory has affected
organizations by placing an
emphasis on the importance of
meeting employees’ needs at
work.

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Need Theories
Herzberg's Two-factor theory
(Motivation-hygiene theory)
• Motivation comes from the
nature of the job itself.
• The human needs that work
addresses
• Hygiene factors: Needs deriving
from the animal nature of human
beings, such as the physiological
needs
• Motivator factors: Need relating to
human ability for psychological
growth.

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Need Theories
• Hygiene factors include pay, quality of
supervision, coworkers, organizational
policies, rewards and social factors.
• When these do not meet expectations of
employees, they tend to result in
dissatisfaction and demotivation.
• Motivator factors include achievement,
recognition, responsibility at work, and
the nature of work.
• Focus on the important issue of providing
meaningful work to people.

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Expectancy Theory
Explaining how rewards lead to behavior by focusing on internal
cognitive states that lead to motivation.
• People will be motivated when they believe that their behavior will
lead to rewards.
• If they do not want the contingent rewards, they will not be
motivated to perform a behavior.

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 Three factors that influence an employee’s decision to
exert effort at work.
Expectancy • Expectancy: the effort–performance relationship.
Self-confidence about effort will result in the
Theory required level of performance.
• Instrumentality: the performance–reward
relationship. Perception that effective performance
will result in the desired outcome.
• Valence: the rewards–personal goals
relationship.value of rewards to the person

Force = Exp x Σ(Instrumentality x Valence)

• Force: represents the amount of motivation a person
has to engage in a particular behavior or sequence of
behaviors that is relevant to job performance.
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 • Motivation and performance are determined in
Self-Efficacy part by how effective people believe they can
Theory be.
• Self-efficacy: An individual’s belief that he or
she is capable of performing a task
• Personal self-fulfilling prophecy effect
• People vary in their self-efficacy across different
tasks.
• Expectancy is concerned with a specific activity
at a particular point in time, whereas self-
efficacy is concerned with the general feeling
that a person is or is not capable in some
domain of life.

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Self-Efficacy Theory
• Self efficacy can be increased.
• The effects of successful performance on self-efficacy.
• Providing guidance or technical or logistic support to the
individual and successful role models.
• Encouragement by expressing confidence in their ability
to accomplish a difficult task
• Reducing stress stress in the individual’s environment
that is unrelated to the challenging task.
• Self-efficacy can be effective only if people have
the necessary ability and constraints on
performance at work are manageable.

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Justice Theories
• Focus on norms for fair treatment of employees by their
organizations.
• Equity theory: Inequity is a psychological state that arises from
employees’ comparisons of their ratios of outcomes to inputs on the
job to those of other employees.
• Outcomes are the rewards or everything of personal value that an employee
gets from working for an organization.
• Inputs are the contributions made by the employee to the organization.

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Justice Theories
Equity theory
• Person A will
experience equity or
inequity depending
on whom he or she
chooses as a
comparison

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 Justice Theories
• How would you respond to overpayment and underpayment?
• According to Adams (1965), underpayment inequity induces anger and
overpayment inequity induces guilt.
Ways to reduce inequity
• Changing inputs, e.g. increasing or decreasing
productivity,
• Changing outputs, e.g. seeking additional rewards
from work, asking for a raise
• Withdrawing from the situation, e.g. quit or be
late or absent more often

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Justice Theories

Fairness theory
• Distributive justice is similar to equity and concerns the fairness with
which rewards are found among people.
• Procedural justice is concerned with the fairness of the reward
distribution process as opposed to the results of that distribution.
• Perceive injustice emerges when something negative happens and
employees perceive it to have been done purposefully in an unfair way.
• Justice climate: how fairly organization treats employees.
• Justice perceptions are related to job performance, job satisfaction, and
intention of quitting the job.
Fairness
theory
 • Goal-Setting Theory: behavior is motivated by their internal
intentions objectives, or goals.
Goal-Setting • People can vary in their goal orientation:

Theory • Learning orientation: Focus on enhancing knowledge and

skill
• Performance orientation: Focuses efforts on achieving
certain levels performance on specific job tasks.
• Goals affect behavior by directing attention and action to
behaviors towards goals, increasing persistence, and motivating
search for effective strategies to attain the goals.

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 Important Factors for Goal Setting to Improve Job
Performance
• Goal acceptance by the employee
• Feedback on progress toward goals
• Difficult and challenging goals
• Specific goals
• Self-set goals
Goal-Setting Limitation of the studies:
Theory • With more complex jobs and multiple goals,
performance was lower when goals were difficult.
• Employees sometimes focus so much on the goals that
they ignore other equally important aspects of the job.
• Difficult goals can actually lead to worse performance
when stress is high.
• Difficult goals work best when situations are relatively
simple (single goals and simple jobs), people are
working on individual tasks, and there are low levels of
stress.
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Control theory
Control theory builds upon goal setting theory but it also focuses on how feedback affects effort
toward goals
• The person will evaluate the feedback by comparing current goal progress to some internal
standard or expected progress.
• If progress is insufficient, the person will be motivated to take action, which might include goal
reevaluation and modification or adoption of different strategies to improve performance

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 Remove sources of demotivation and
treat people fairly

Motivating Ensure an abundance of valued

people at outcomes of work

work: Set goals and objectives

Integrating
theories of Give people feedback
motivation
Design jobs in ways that make them
rewarding to people
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Example: Alternative work arrangement to motivate
employees
Job rotation: the periodic shifting of an employee from one task to
another with similar skill requirements at the same organizational level.
• Cross-training and flexibility
• Increase motivation, job satisfaction and organizational commitment
• reduces boredom,
• helps employees understand how their work contributes to the organization
• May reduce repetitive-based work injuries
• Drawbacks
• Increase in training costs and supervision time, reduces overall productivity
• Adjusting to new work groups

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• What is motivation?
• Work motivation theories
• Need theories
• Expectancy theory
• Self-efficacy theory
• Justice theories
• Goal setting theory
• Control theory

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 References
• Aamodt, M., G. (2015). Industrial/Organizational Psychology: An
Applied Approach (8th ed.). Cengage Learning.
• Landy, F. J., & Conte, J. M. (2013). Work in the 21st century: An
introduction to industrial and organizational psychology (4th
ed.). John Wiley & Sons, Inc..
• Spector, P. E. (2016). Industrial and organiza/onal psychology
(7th ed.). Wiley & Sons, Inc.
• Robbins, S. P., & Judge, T. A. (2019). Organizational behavior (18
th ed.). Pearson Education.

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Image Credits
• https://www.resourcefulmanager.com/employee-motivation/
• http://thequotes.in/they-are-able-because-they-think-they-are-able-
virgil/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Can_Do_It!
• https://www.lucidchart.com/blog/the-ultimate-goal-setting-process-
in-7-steps
• https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-maslows-hierarchy-of-needs-
4136760

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