Gyanam Knowledge: March 2017

15 March 2017

Nature of Motivation

A manager gets results through other people. His effectiveness depends on a large extent on the willingness of his employees to do the assigned tasks with interest an enthusiasm. Motivation is the work a manager performs to inspire and encourage people to take required action. According to Scott motivation is a process of stimulating people to action to accomplish desired people. Motivation has three distinct features:

1) It results from a felt need. Motivation triggers behavior impelling a person to action.

2) It is goal directed. Motivation is a driving state that channels behavior into a specific course that is fulfillment of a felt need.

3) It sustains behavior in progress. It persists until the satisfaction or reduction of a need state occurs.

Further, motivation is a personal and internal feeling. The feeling arises from needs and wants. Human needs are unlimited. Fulfillment of one set of needs gives rise to other needs. Therefore motivation is a continuous process. Since needs are interrelated a person cannot be partly motivated as he is a self contained and inseparable unit. The successes of an organization ultimately depend on how effectively managers are able to motivate their subordinates. In the other words of Allen poorly motivated people can nullify the soundest organization. It is not easy to understand the complexities involved motivating people. If an employee has an argument with this boss and fails to report to work the next day it may appear that his behavior is a result of the confrontation. However his behavior may actually be motivated by a combination of factors including overwork, family illness or some other problems, As things stand now the whys of behavior cannot be explained easily. Let us examine some of the factors that complicate this process.

Multiple Cases:

Different people may have different visions for behaving in the same manner For example a bank officer may join a service club because it is a good place to have business contacts another may join because of the social atmosphere still another joins because of the interesting programs and speakers at the club . Thus, three different ways underline the same behavior further complicating the process of inferring motivation from behavior. For example, the motivation of people trying to pursue a certain behavior can spring from quite different reasons. Personality background experiences group effects or many other factors can impact a person’s career choice.

Multiple behaviors:

Further the same motive or drive may results in different behavior. For example, if Sam wants a promotion he may concentrate on performing his job exceptionally well, but Saurabh who also wants a promotion may take a different approach. He may try to apple polish the boss to get the promotion. Another manager who also wants the promotion very badly may be afraid to do anything at all for fear he will fail. The motivation for these three behaviors is the same, but it cannot be determined simply by viewing the behaviors f three managers.

Motivation obviously is a complex subject. It is difficult to explain and predict the behavior of employees. The introduction of an apparently favorable motivational device may not necessarily produce the desired ends if it brings opposite motives into play. In a factory, when blue green lighting was introduced to reduce eye strain, the output of men workers increased but that of women workers decreased. On investigation it was found that the latter disliked the change in lighting because they felt that the new lighting made them look simply ghastly! An intelligent manager is expected to look into the complex factors that go into the behavior of employees carefully initiate appropriate steps to motivate them.
Source: HRM

Extra Ordinary Successful people

Often we get caught in the mental trap of seeing enormously successful people and thinking they are where they are because they have some special gift. Yet a closer look shows that the greatest gift that extraordinarily successful people have over the average person is their ability to get themselves to take action. It is a gift that any of us can develop within ourselves. After all, other people had the same knowledge. People other than Ted Turner could have figured out that cable had enormous economic potential. But Turner and Jobs were able to take action, and by doing so, they changed the way of many experience the world.

We all produce two forms of communication from which the experience of our lives is fashioned. First, we conduct internal communications; those things we picture, say, and feel within ourselves. Second, we experience external communications: words, tonalities, facial expressions, body postures, and physical actions to communicate with the world. Every communication we make is an action, a cause set in motion. And all communications have some kind of effect on us and on others.

Communication is power. Those who have mastered its effective use can change their own experience of the worlds and the world’s experience of them. All behaviors and feelings find their original roots in some form of communication. Those who affect the thought, feelings, and actions of the majority of us are those who know how to use this tool of power. Think of the people who have changed our world – John F Kennedy, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi. In a much grimmer vein, think of Hitler. What these men all had in common was that they were master communicators. They were able to take their vision, whether it was to transport people into space or to create a hate filled Third Reich, and communicate it to others with such congruency that they influenced the way the masses through and acted. Through their communication power, they changed the world.

In fact, isn’t this also what sets a Spielberg, a Springsteen, an Iacocca, a Fonda, or a Reagan apart from others? Are they not masters of the tool of human communication, or influence? Just as these people are able to move the masses with communication, it’s the tool we also to move ourselves.

Your level of communication mastery in the external world will determine your level of success with others – personally, emotionally, socially, and financially. More important, the level of success you experience internally – the happiness, joy, ecstasy, love, or anything else you desire – is the direct result of how you communicate to yourself. How you feel is not the result of what is happening. Successful people’s lives have shown us over and over again that the quality of our lives is determined not by what happens to us, but rather by what we do about what happens.

You are the one who decides how to feel and act based upon the ways you choose to perceive your life. Nothing has any meaning except the meaning we give it. Most of us have turned this process of interpretation on automatic, but we can take that power back and immediately change our experience of the world.

This article is about taking the kinds of massive, focused, congruent actions that lead to overwhelming results. Producing results! Think about it. Isn’t that what you’re really interested in? May be you want to change how you feel about yourself and your world. May be you’d like to be a better communicator, develop a more loving relationship, learn more rapidly, become healthier, or earn more money. You can create all of these things for yourself, and much more, through the effective use of the information in this book. Before you can produce new results, however, you must first realize that you’re already producing results. They just may not be the results you desire. Most of us think of our mental states and most of what goes on in our minds as things that happen outside our control. But the truth is you can control your mental activities and your behaviors to a degree you never believed possible before. If you’re depressed you created and produced that show you call depression. If you’re ecstatic you created that, too.
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Cooperative Line and Staff

Because both line managers and human resource managers have human resource management duties, it is useful to ask? Exactly which HR duties are carried out by line managers, and by staff managers? There is no single division of responsibilities we could apply across the board in all organizations, but we can make some generalizations.

The most important generalization is that the relationship is generally cooperative. For example, in recruiting and hiring, the line manager describes the qualifications employees need to fill specific positions. Then the human resource team takes over. They develop source of qualified applicants, and conduct initial screening interviews. They administer the appropriate tests. Then they refer the best applicants to the line manager, who interviews and selects the ones he or she wants. In training, the line manager again describes what he or she expects the employee to be able to do. Then the human resource team devises a training program, which the line manager then (usually) administers.

Some activities are usually HR’s alone. In the United States for example, 60% of tasks assigned to human resources the exclusive responsibility for pre-employment testing, 75% assign it college recruiting, and 80% assign it insurance benefits administration. But employers split most activities, such as employment interviews, performance appraisal, skills training, job descriptions and disciplinary procedures, between HR and line managers.

For example, HR alone typically handles interviewing in about 25% of firms, but in about 60% of firms, HR and the other hiring departments both get involved in interviewing. Sensing the importance of line management in HRM, many Indian firms promote HR awareness among line managers through training programs. Some firms also encourage line managers to take HR assignments at some point of their careers.

In summary, human resource management is part of every manager’s job. Whether you are a first line supervisor or middle manager or president or whether you are a production manager or country manager or HR manager getting results through committed people is the name of the game. And to do this you will need a good working knowledge of the human resource management concepts and techniques in this article.

Form line Manager to HR Manager:

Another reason to be familiar with the HR knowledge and management processes is that you may well make a planned or unplanned stop over some day as a human resource manager. A survey by the Center for effective Organizations at the University of Southern California found that about one fourth of large US businesses appointed managers with no HR experience as their top human resource management executives. Reasons given include the fact that these people may find it easier to give the firms’ human resource management efforts a more strategic emphasis, and the possibility that they may sometimes be better equipped to integrate the firm’s HR efforts with the rest of the business. It’s not unusual at all for companies to promote their line executives through HR on their way up the corporate ladder. For example, after spending about a year and a half as Wal-Mart’s chief human resource officer the company promoted Lawrence Jackson to run its global procurement division. The trend of promoting executives without any HR experience to top HR jobs is seen in India too. For instance, TV Mohandas Pai, the HR director of Infosys, was responsible for finance as the CEO of Infosys before being assigned to head HR.
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Consequences of Stress

Stress shows itself in a number of ways. For instance, an individual who is experiencing a high level of stress may develop high blood pressure, ulcers, irritability, difficulty in making routine decisions, loss of appetite, accident-proneness, and the like. These can be subsumed under three general categories: physiological, psychological, and behavioral symptoms.

Physiological Symptoms

Most of the early concern with stress was directed to physiological symptoms. This was predominantly due to the fact that the topic was researched by specialists in the health and medical sciences. This research led to the conclusion that stress could create changes in metabolism, increase heart and breathing rates, increase blood pressure, bring on headaches, and induce heart attacks.

The link between stress and particular physiological symptoms is not clear. There are few, if any, consistent relationships. This is attributed to the complexity of the symptoms and the difficulty of objectively measuring them. But of greater relevance is the fact that physiological symptoms have the least direct relevance to students. Our concern is with attitudes and behaviors. Therefore, the two other categories of symptoms are more important to us.

Psychological Symptoms

Stress can cause dissatisfaction. Job-related stress can cause job-related dissatisfaction, in fact, is â€œthe simplest and most obvious psychological effectâ€? of stress. But stress shows itself in other psychological states — for instance, tension, anxiety, irritability, boredom, and procrastination.

The evidence indicates that when people are placed in jobs that make multiple and conflicting demands or in which there is a lack of clarity about the incumbentâ€™s duties, authority, and responsibilities, both stress and dissatisfaction are increased. Similarly, the less control people have over the pace of their work, the greater the stress and dissatisfaction. While more research is needed to clarify the relationship, the evidence suggests that jobs that provide a low level of variety, significance, autonomy, feedback, and identity to incumbents create stress and reduce satisfaction and involvement in the job.

Behavioral symptoms:

But moderate levels of stress experienced continually over long periods, as typified by the emergency room staff in a large urban hospital can result in lower performance. This may explain why emergency room staffs at such hospitals are frequently rotated and why it is unusual to find individuals who have spent the bulk of their career in such an environment. In effect, to do so would expose the individual to the risk of â€œcareer burnoutâ€?.