The Role of Leadership and Motivation in Life - Assignment Example

Madiha Hussain Chapter 13 (Motivation) and 14 (Leadership) Reading Guide Define motivation. Give an example of how motivation is used in your personal or professional life, referencing the text. Motivation is the set of forces that initiates, directs and makes people persist in their attempt to accomplish a goal. Motivation is an essential thing for every human action. If the person is not motivated properly in his action or profession he will finish his works mechanically without any purpose. For example, my initial posting was in a manufacturing industry as a production planning & control executive. My main responsibility was to take the inventory on every shift, schedule the work accordingly and monitor that the schedule has not been violated. The production people often violated the schedule in order to increase the section-wise production in order to get incentives. But such section-wise production increase, by violating the schedule will affect the overall production. Initially, I was bit reluctant in reporting the schedule violations because of the seniority of the production people. But my manager has made me aware the importance of my duty and he has told me that planning people is the police force in a manufacturing unit which controls all the manufacturing actions inside the unit. His words and support motivated me immensely and I started to insist the schedule strictly which brought dividends to my career. 2. Explain the role of needs in motivation and give an example. Physical or psychological needs are important in motivating a person. These needs must be fulfilled in order to motivate a person. For example, recognition is a psychological need most of the persons wish to achieve. For example, most of the organizations give incentives or promotions to the better performing employees in order to motivate them further. If the organizations failed to recognize such talents, their performance will be affected. 3. Explain the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic rewards and give an example of each. Extrinsic reward is the one which is visible to others whereas the intrinsic reward may not be visible to others. For example, promotion is an extrinsic reward for outstanding performances which is visible to all. A cricket player who scored a century may derive the great feeling as an intrinsic reward for his outstanding performance which may not be visible to others. 4. Explain equity theory in your own words. As a manager how could you use it to motivate? The essence of equity theory is that people will be motivated automatically if they are treated fairly and equally. A manager should always treat all the employees fairly in order to achieve maximum productivity from them. The employees should never develop a feeling that the manger is treating the employees differently based on the gender, culture, race, designation or intellectual level. Manager must take extreme precautions while assigning jobs. The employees must feel that everybody treated on their merits and the manager has not done anything with prejudices or biases. 5. Compare and contrast expectancy theory, reinforcement theory and goal-setting theory in your own words. As a manager, how could you use one of them to motivate? Expectancy theory is based on the assumption that good performances will be rewarded. Goal setting theory on the other hand believes that the employees will set the goals only based on the feedbacks they receive. Reinforcement theory argues that the employee motivation is based on the feedbacks he may receive. Behaviors which achieve positive feedbacks will be reinforced while behaviors with negative feedbacks will be rejected by the employee as per reinforcement theory. Punishment by a manager may be considered as a negative feedback by most of the employees and the behaviors which cause punishment will be avoided by such employees. For example, an employee who regularly attends his duty late, should be punished by the manager in order to reject his negative behavior. 6. Explain trait theory in your own words and give an example. Trait theory argues that effective leaders have similar sets of traits and characteristics. For example, effective leaders always keep a balance between democratic and autocratic methods in their approach. It is not possible for them to be 100% democratic or autocratic. Effective leaders always treat the organizational goals and the employee welfare equally well. They will act as a bridge between the organization and the employees. For example, a marketing manager can never manage his sales team effectively by simply sitting in his cabin inside the organization. He must visit the market along with his subordinates in order to get direct experiences from the market and also to learn about the difficulties facing by the marketing people 7. Consider the Blake/Mouton leadership grid (14.1). Describe a leader from your personal or professional life. Where does that leader fall on the grid? Explain. “Blake and Mouton studied leadership behavior and described two extremes of leadership concern: Concern for Production: Concern for People: The leader cares little about people and operates in fear of something going wrong. This persons focus is on achieving results and productivity. Concern for People: This leader cares little about productivity and operates wholly from a desire to be loved and approved of” (Blake and Mouton Leadership Grid) I have worked under a production manager who has concern for production only. He never bothered about the employee’s willingness, health or attitudes while scheduling overtime. Whenever, emergency jobs come, he has scheduled overtime for all the employees irrespective of their opinions or convenience even without prior information. He has not showed any concern towards the people or the employees and concentrated only on production activities. 8. Explain contingency theory in your own words. As a manager how could you use it to lead? Contingency theory states that the leaders must be ready to adapt to the situations based on the internal and external constraints. In other words the leaders must change their leading styles based on the circumstances. It is not possible for a leader to implement same leadership styles in different organizations. He must fine tune his styles based on the requirements of the organization. For example, a production manager who worked in Chinese organization cannot use the same strategies in an American organization because of the difference in work culture, social and economical backgrounds, linguistic differences etc. 9. Identify a leader in your personal or professional life. How would you identify her or his leadership style based on section 4.1 in Chapter 14. Explain. I have worked under a production manager in a manufacturing unit who has adopted both democratic and autocratic methods effectively to manage us. At times, we thought he was autocratic in approach; the very next moment we forced to change our opinion. He has adopted a mixture of both these strategies in order to satisfy both the organization and the employees. He was always adamant on completing the projects and at the same time he never compelled a worker for overtime if he was convinced that the worker has some genuine problem in attending the overtime duty. 10. Compare and contrast charismatic and transformational leadership. Give an example to illustrate. Charismatic leaders always attract others because of their personal characteristics while transformational leaders always succeeded in making the employees aware of the importance of their responsibilities beyond their personal interests. Charismatic leaders always set better examples by leading from the front. They will never shy away from complicated situations. They will always involve in all the difficult situations and will give effective instructions always whenever the worker was in a confused state. In short charismatic leader will attract employees because of their personal characteristics. Transformational leaders will try to transform the employees from their existing mind set. For example, some employees may not improve their productivity much even if the manager tries too much with the conventional managing techniques. Such employees must be approached in a psychological manner in order to make them aware of the need for change; both for him and for the organization. In other words transformational leaders will be successful in transforming the employees from their existing mind set. Works Cited 1. “Blake and Mouton Leadership Grid”. 24 July 2009. Read More