Employee Motivation – Basics of Leadership.

Any Organization past or present if ever have touched the glories of success unarguably it is because of the people (Employees). Any Company, empire can never be successful without great people working towards the success of the Company. Recently I came across couple of wonderful articles about human motivation, I wondered and pondered for a while because almost all the articles I have came across so far, have missed out one of the most important aspects of commitment and motivation.

In this article I would like to spend some time on what others have to say and what I have experience personally as well as thoughts from couple of my colleagues who work in esteem organizations. I would like to start from the great Masslow the man who gave the basic theory of motivation and people have been smart enough to develop more theories than required. Masslow categorically said “you can never motivate people; you can only create an environment where people get motivated”.

Even after this thought we have seen organization using different methods to motivate people, if you find time.. You just need to type motivation in Google and you will find thousands of quick fixes which hardly can help any organization to motivate people. I call these methods as beggar method; give what beggar wants he will come to back to your house tomorrow to beg again. I some times laugh when I read these articles about motivation or other aspects of leadership and management; if leadership or management were to be so simple then each one of us would have had an Apple company for ourselves. We would not have called Steve Jobs being the most innovative leaders; we would not have called Google being the most dreamed company of any one around the globe.

There has always been a huge gap between what employee wants and what companies offer. I m not saying that without paying right salary you can motivate people, what I m saying is that as everyone says Money is not the only way to motivate people. I feel almost all the times we have misunderstood the basics of motivation. Let’s understand the basics of motivation and go back to Masslow again about the motivational theory.

Motivation can be defined as a process refers to a process that elicits, controls, and sustains certain behaviors. Motivation is a group of phenomena which affect the nature of an individual's behavior, the strength of the behavior, and the persistence of the behavior. For instance: An individual has not eaten, he or she feels hungry, and as a response he or she eats and diminishes feelings of hunger (Wikipedia).

In a very simple term motivation can be defined as the urge, passion, dedication to do some thing. In an organization motivation can play a major role, it can be some times positive or negative motivation, depending upon the situation and the employee.

There are two kinds of Motivation as we all know Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation refers to motivation that is driven intrinsically; exist within individuals and relying on external factors. External motivation is some thing opposite to intrinsic motivation, and we all know the fact that intrinsic motivation is the most important and it’s rarely found in any organization.

Masslow says that you cannot satisfy a person with offering the same benefits to a person; he says a man moves from one quadrant to another, it depends upon the man and the situation he is in. I have seen many companies offering money as one the most effective and feasible methods of motivating employee and researchers have said time and again that money is not at all the way.. Lets consider what some of the experts needs to say about motivation.

It is a central theme of economics that incentives promote effort and performance, and there is a lot of evidence that they often do (e.g. Gibbons (1997), Lazear (2000)). In other words, contingent rewards serve as “positive reinforcers” for the desired behaviour. In psychology, their effect is much more controversial. A long-standing paradigm clash has opposed proponents of the economic view to the “dissonance theorists”, who argue that rewards may actually impair performance, making them “negative reinforcers”, especially in the long run (see, e.g. Kruglanski (1978) for an account of this debate, and Deci, Koestner and Ryan (1999) for a recent and Comprehensive meta-analysis of experimental results).

I have worked under so many different bosses, all were good considering the situation but I personally feel almost all the time people get de-motivated because they feel that bosses and manager do not understand them. They don’t consider their managers as human beings, well it’s an irony but that’s the fact. Major reason being is that when an employee comes up with a new Idea or innovation, almost 99 percent times his Ideas are not being considered and the corporate tag, which says employees are our best assets are never been put into practice. Some times companies think its not viable, feasible are they may have a better Idea, but by not considering the Idea, you are de-motivating your employee and he/she looses interest in his Job and I can guarantee you even when he has the best Idea he won’t tell you.

If you want to keep motivation level high in organization, give importance to learning and innovation. Some times it’s not the Sr manager who gets the best Idea it is the housekeeping guy.