Motivation

Capital One employees are high performers partly because the company has found ways to keep everyone motivated. Motivation refers to the forces within a person that effect his or her direction, intensity, and persistence of voluntary behavior. Motivated employees are willing to exert a particular level of effort (intensity), for a certain amount of time (persistence), toward a particular goal (direction). Even when people have clear work objectives, the right skills, and a supportive work environment, they must have sufficient motivation to achieve work objectives.

Most employees (92 percent of them, according to one recent survey) agree that motivating employees has become more challenging. One reason is that many firms have dramatically changed the jobs that people perform, reducing layers of hierarchy, and jettisoned large numbers of employees throughout the process. These actions have significantly damaged the levels of trust and commitment necessary for employees to put out effort beyond the minimum requirements. Some organizations have completely given up on motivation from the heart and, instead, rely on pay-for-performance approaches and layoff threats. These strategies may have some effect (both positive and negative), but they do not capitalize on the employee’s motivational potential.

A second problem is that as companies flatten their hierarchies to reduce costs, they can no longer rely on supervisors to practice the old command-and-control methods of motivating employees. This is probably just as well, because direct supervision is incompatible with the values of today’s educated workforce. Still, many businesses have not discovered other ways to motivate employees.

Lastly, employee needs are changing. Younger generations of employees are bringing different expectations to the workplace than their baby boomer counterparts. Workforce diversity and globalization have added to this complexity because diverse employees typically have diverse values. Recall from the previous chapter that values represent stable, long-lasting beliefs about what is important in a variety of situations. These values influence what we want, what we need, and a what organizational should not to do full-fill those needs.

In this articles, we look at the foundations of employee motivation. Motivation theories fall into two main categories: content theories and process theories. Content theories of motivation explain the dynamics of employee needs, such as why people have different needs at different times. By understanding an employee’s needs, we can discover the conditions that motivate that person. Process theories of motivation do not directly explain how needs emerge. Instead, they describe the processes through which needs are translated into behavior. Process theories of motivation help explain why people behave the way they do. In doing so, they help us understand, predict, and influence employee performance, attendance, work satisfaction, and other outcomes.