Motivational Theories in Business Management Psychology Assignment
Motivation is a vital component of being successful. Having a motivated staff means that you are quicker to achieve your business goals. For a long time the only incentive for common workers to do their jobs was just to
keep them. Nevertheless, this strategy did not prove to be a very efficient one, as people were not interested in doing more than was required of them to keep their positions. Although, all people agree that something must be
done to motivate workers, there were and are a lot of varying thoughts on how it is possible to achieve that. That is why it is important to know common theories of motivation to understand how employees behave themselves
in different situations.
Hawthorne Experiments
The Hawthorne experiments are a name for revolutionary studies that were conducted during the late 1920s and early 1930s at Western Electric Company's Hawthorne Works near Chicago. What was at the inception studies
to determine how employees are influenced by changes in work environment turned out to be some groundbreaking discoveries that greatly affected the modern understanding of motivation. The research team was led by Elton Mayo and his co-workers from the Harvard Business School. The thing is that initial results of studies could not be explained by scientists with the help of evident data that is why a number of other experiments over a decade were held. The thought derived from the research was really innovative for the society, as it was previously thought that the only form of motivating people was just their personal enrichment. It was understood that workers are influenced by a number of other things such as light, rest breaks, personal recognition, direct feedback and so on. Mayo’s contribution resulted in him being recognized as one of the forefathers of organizational behavior. Probably a discovery that really stunned the society is that employees are actually more productive when know themselves being watched after by some other people. The researchers noticed that over the time they spent at the production the output was constantly growing, although it was not induced by workplace changes. With time they understood that it was the result of employees feeling themselves involved in the experiment, and thus the definition of Hawthorne effect appeared.
The Needs Hierarchy
The needs hierarchy is a concept created by A.H. Maslow and was first mentioned in one of his 1943 articles. It is most commonly pictured as a pyramid with different types of needs. Their list includes such categories from bottom to top as follows: physiological, safety, love …
