Employee Motivation & Productivity

Job enlargement, job enrichment and job rotation are three basic approaches; 1. Job Enlargement: Job enlargement involves expanding the job of an employee that has them doing more work of a similar nature to what they already do. This may be allowing them to complete the whole task instead of just part of it, for example, packaging the products as well as manufacturing them. This process ideally removes the boredom out of the job by eliminating the repetitiveness out of tasks and allowing them to complete the whole process, further increasing their responsibility. 2. Job Enrichment: Job enrichment is an attempt to give workers more control over their tasks and more responsibility for design, execution, and output. The worker assumes some of the functions previously carried out by his or her immediate supervisor or by other staff. 3. Job Rotation: Job rotation is a practice whereby each employee learns several operations in manufacturingprocess and rotates through each in a set pe...

There is an old saying you can take a horse to the water but you cannot force it to drink; it will drink only if it's thirsty - so with people. They will do what they want to do or otherwise motivated to do. Whether it is to excel on the workshop floor or in the 'ivory tower' they must be motivated or driven to it, either by themselves or through external stimulus. Are they born with the self-motivation or drive? Yes and no. If no, they can be motivated, for motivation is a skill which can and must be learnt. This is essential for any business to survive and succeed. Performance is considered to be a function of ability and motivation, thus: Job performance =f(ability)(motivation) Ability in turn depends on education, experience and training and its improvement is a slow and long process. On the other hand motivation can be improved quickly. There are many options and an uninitiated manager may not even know where to start. As a guideline, there are broadly seven strategies...

 It is adequately documented in the literature that several thinkers from Adam Smith to Abraham Maslow and others have studied human behavior from different perspectives – economic, psychological, behavioral, etc., to understand what motivate people to do the things they do. In the process, they developed several theories of motivation. This section presents a brief review of some of the theories and empirical evidences on the relationship between motivation and productivity. Broadly speaking the theories of motivation can be classified in to content theories and process theories. The former deals with what motivates and are concerned with identifying people’s needs and their relative strengths, and the goals they pursue in order to satisfy these needs. The main content theories include Maslow’s hierarchy needs; Herzberg’s two factor  theory and McClelland’s achievement motivation theory. Process theories on the other hand, place emphasis on the actual process of motivati...

 Spreitzer and Quinn (2001: 5) discuss organisations where people “do their best work because they want to”. These people also show initiative, they take responsibility, are innovative and creative. “Their power to contribute is unleashed.” The writers call people who behave in this manner “leaders”, and encourage organisations to strive to building companies of leaders where every employee takes ownership, contribute their best effort willingly, not because they have to in order to keep their jobs, but just because they want to. Poisat (2006: 80) agrees that employees generally value the need for autonomy and authority, and that they prefer a job that would require increased responsibility and risk. An organisation where every employee acts and behaves as a leader has a competitive advantage. Spreitzer and Quinn (2001: 5 – 6) not only sees this characteristic as and advantage, but arguably a necessity for the following reasons: • Considering the fact that most products and even se...

Training is defined as “the process of developing a staff member’s knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to perform tasks required for a position” (Hayes & Ninemeier, 2009, p. 172). Training and development can influence organizational performance also in the hospitality industry (Aksu, 2005; Boella & Goss-Turner, 2012). This study is examining the influence of relevant training programmed that employees should receive in order to develop their capacity of their work performance. If the organization does not have an effective training and development programme, it will fall behind in terms of the skill sets and knowledge required for competitive advantage. Hayes and Ninemeier (2009) point out that only by continually upgrading the skills of employees it can help the organization to achieve and maintain its competitive advantage. Training and development is a big challenge that every organization should address. Leadoff, Erasmus, Van, Mda, and Nel (2...

  Various studies have established the correlates between staff motivation and productivity in an organization. According to Bob (1997), to accomplish organizational objectives, the management must not only create a favorable environment in which the employees must work but motivate workers to greater productivity. An unmotivated worker becomes a liability to the organizational setting (Akintoye, 2000). Motivation is therefore very important to management, for it is a reflection of management efficiency and workers’ effectiveness. Ubeku (2004) viewed motivation of workers through wages and salaries as directly consequential to the productive level of the employees. Ogunsaju (2006) defined motivation as something that manager needs to do to get the worker respond to certain expected ways. Robbins (2000) defined motivation as the process that account for an individual’s intensity, direction and persistence of effort toward attaining a goal.       ...

  The word ‘motivation’ is derived from Latin word ‘ Movere’ which means ‘to move’ (Luthans, 2002). According to the Oxford Advance Learner Dictionary (2006), motivation is the element that propels a person to do something or behaves in a particular way. This is why Akinwunmi (2000) conceived of motivation as the psychological state of mind that causes a person to behave in a way that will make the accomplishment of goals possible. Kootz (2005) defined motivation as a general term that drives desires, needs and wishes. Analoui, (2000) sees motivation as the general set of forces that cause someone to act or react in certain ways.             Cole (2002) defined motivation as the processes, both instructive and rational which occur in an individual when seeking to satisfy perceived needs and wants. It is the term used to describe those processes both instinctive and rational by which people seek to satisfy the basic drives, p...

Technically, it could be said that productivity has been the long run aim of every work organization, from the smallest to the largest work organization; the zeal to be productive is supposed to be the goal of all and sundry in the work organization. As it is, because it has been realized that no work organization could survive without the productivity of its members, then productivity has been one of the major areas of study in many disciplines such as Business administration, Economics, Public administration, Industrial relations and so on (French 2003). According to Tangen (2002), the concept of productivity has been a subject of enquiry among intellectuals since over two centuries before now and has been applied in many different circumstances on various levels of aggregation in the economic system. It is argued that productivity is one of the basic variables governing economic production activities and perhaps the most important one. With this observation, it could be said that th...

   Productivity and Motivation is an important element in all work organizations. This is because, the survival and continuity of the organization really depends on it. As a result of this, research effort geared towards the concept has spanned over centuries. One of the major concerns of earlier research efforts is to uncover those factors that could enhance of affect the productive dispositions of people in the workplace. Although series of research efforts have been directed towards analyzing the impact of motivation on employee’s behavior but few of such researches were empirically situated and not much of such were carried out in private organizations in Nigeria. It is against this backdrop that this research effort empirically examined the influence of motivational packages on productive prospect of employees using workers of CNSSL, Ilorin as the case in point. Survey design was adopted to achieve the objectives of the study. Data for the study were generated throug...