Motivation is a significant factor in business, as well as life in general. It is necessary for any endeavor to succeed, from one’s day-to-day plans to major business undertakings. Furthermore, motivation has a major beneficial effect on the company, firm, or unit in general (Lorincová, 2019). Thus, maintaining motivation in employees is oneself is critical skill in any leader as self-motivation translates to employee motivation and employee motivation translates to productivity and company performance.
Cooperation plays a vital role in creating a positive workplace atmosphere and improving productivity. Thus, motivating workers to cooperate can be a significant benefit. This motivation can be created by fostering a positive attitude and fostering a view of the firm’s positive impact. Workers should feel as if they belong to a group and contribute to a greater common goal. Furthermore, highlighting individual employees’ contribution to said goal and identifying their skills and preferences, and finding ways in which these skills and preferences can be applied in the workplace can improve one’s engagement with work.
Motivating others to accept one as a leader requires demonstrating and maintaining positive leadership skills and personal qualities. These skills include organizational ones such as workload and task allocation, communication, and coordination, but also skills and traits related to interaction with employees. For instance, a personal approach that seeks workers’ feedback and suggestions that may improve the work environment, trying to resolve their issues to everyone’s benefit. One’s fairness in determining rewards and disciplinary measures applied is also a significant factor. Most importantly, a leader should emphasize the work unit’s common goal and encourage everyone, including him- or herself to work towards that goal.
For self-motivation, the same goal orientation is important; maintaining a clear objective and path towards it can be a significant benefit. Splitting it into realistic, achievable, and measurable goals as per the SMART framework (Bjerke & Renger, 2017). Most importantly, perceiving the objectives as in such a way allows one to measure progress towards achieving them. This helps combat a significant demotivating factor: the lack of perceived progress and, therefore, feeling that one’s work is ineffective or useless.
Money is a critical motivator; however, it is not universal and may not be effective in some situations. Specifically, while some aspects of work performance can be measured and evaluated for a monetary reward, others are less conducive to such evaluations (Gallus & Frey, 2016). Furthermore, strictly monetary, performance pay, rewards can hurt employee performance and productivity as one begins to focus on the measured aspects of his or her work to the detriment of others (Gallus & Frey, 2016). It is possible to diminish one’s motivation and, therefore, productivity, by overemphasizing pecuniary rewards (Gallus & Frey, 2016). Thus, although money is a critical and necessary motivator, it should not be the only one available in the workplace.
A variety of non-monetary rewards can serve as motivators in a workforce. Awards and recognition, such as “employee of the month”, can increase one’s motivation even when they are not accompanied by a significant prize sum (Gallus & Frey, 2016). The ability to maintain one’s authenticity at work can be another motivating factor (Van den Bosch & Taris, 2018). Authenticity is one’s ability to act by his or her self-identified “true self” (Van den Bosch & Taris, 2018). It is associated with improved well-being, motivation, and engagement (Van den Bosch & Taris, 2018). Thus, monetary and non-monetary motivators should be applied in tandem to achieve employee motivation.
References
Lorincová, S., Štarchoň, P., Weberová, D., Hitka, M., & Lipoldová, M. (2019). Employee motivation as a tool to achieve sustainability of business processes. Sustainability, 11(13), 3509. Web.
Gallus, J., & Frey, B. S. (2016). Awards as non-monetary incentives. Evidence-Based HRM: a Global Forum for Empirical Scholarship, 4(1), 81-91. Web.
Van den Bosch, R., & Taris, T. (2018). Authenticity at work: Its relations with worker motivation and well-being. Frontiers in Communication, 3. Web.
Bjerke, M. B., & Renger, R. (2017). Being smart about writing SMART objectives. Evaluation and Program Planning, 61, 125-127. Web.