Motivation and Job Satisfaction Result in High Performance - Essay Example

Management and Organisational Behaviour and Section # of 30th November 2009 This paper sheds light over the management and organizational behavior. It starts off with a discussion on how motivation and job satisfaction result in high performance. It then goes on and explains the difference between transactional and transformational styles of leadership and how one is more effective than the other. After some examples and analysis of an organizational culture, this paper talks about how management, today, has to cater to changes and challenges in the modern era. ANSWER 1 It is not very difficult to realize the important correlation between motivation, job satisfaction and effective work performance. These are the guidelines that every organization in today’s era aims to establish in order to be successful. Motivation is the thing that gets people to work and perform better. It is the driving force for the employees. However, it is important to note that different people have different motivators in different stages of life. As highlighted by Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, there are five broad categories that might act as motivators for different people. These are Physiological Needs, Security Needs, Social Needs, Esteem Needs, and on top of the pinnacle lies the Self Actualization Need. Depending on the level an individual is, these needs act as motivators for him or her, result in satisfaction and consequently effects his or her performance. (Wagner, n.d.) Motivation will have almost no effect if the person involved has no intentions or is unable to do a job. Therefore, it is very important for the person who is in the managing or the leadership position to allocate the tasks depending on the person and the skills that he or she has. Proper execution of this is so important that if an employee is made to work on a particular task that he is unwilling or unable to do, then, even with motivators in place, it might back fire and result in depression and low morale. This would consequently lead to low overall performance. (Marques, n.d.) There has been a prevailing mindset in the managers that eliminating job dissatisfaction would result in job satisfaction for the employees. But this is not the case. As pointed out by the theorist Frederick Herzberg, job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction depend on different factors. (Herzberg, et al., 2009) Herzberg in his motivation theories highlights that job dissatisfaction is caused by factors such as unpleasant working conditions, poor or biased supervision, low salaries, improper policies, and so on. Eliminating these might remove job dissatisfaction but is not a guarantee of job satisfaction for the employees. In fact, job satisfaction is a result of essential motivators in the work environment. These include achievement, recognition, growth, responsibility and the work itself (Herzberg, et al., 2009). It is only when these factors are properly implemented in the work environment that job satisfaction would be achieved and performance of the workers would be improved. Therefore, with the right kind of hygiene factors in place, these motivators are necessary for success of any organization. Motivation is so important for performance that if every American increased efficiency by 3% everyday, the country could come out of any economic depression. (Marques, n.d.) Companies throughout the world realize the importance of motivation in the workforce. For instance, the chief financial officer of Procter & Gamble Co., Clayton Daley Jr., was awarded a bonus of $1.5 million as recognition for his outstanding work in the attainment and integration of Gillette Co. (Fasig, 2008). Also, IBM has a Long Term Incentive Program grants stock options to the senior management depending on the performance of the organization (Spooner, 2001). ANSWER 2 Transactional Leadership is the kind of leadership style in which an exchange relationship between the leaders and the followers exist. The leaders reward or punish the employees based on their performance. In contrast, in transformational style of leadership, is one which the leaders motivate the followers to achieve more than they initially aimed to, by establishing a vision in their minds and stressing on team work rather than individual performance. (Xiaoxia, et al., 2006) The main components of Transactional Leadership are Contingent Reward, Management-by-Exception and Laissez Faire Leadership. Contingent Reward defines what the leader expects from the employees. It includes the performance criteria for the employees in order to be rewarded. In Management-by-Exception, the leader sets a fixed set of job requirements and is satisfied with average performance. In Laissez Leadership, the manager would delegate work and would avoid making decisions. (Xiaoxia, et al., 2006) In Transformational Leadership, the main attributes include Idealized Influence, Inspirational Influence, Intellectual Stimulation and Individualized Consideration. Idealized Influence specifies that the employees have faith and trust in their leader. The leader respects their subordinates and acts as their role model. Inspirational influence includes the leader’s role in presenting the employees with a vision and making them feel that their work is important them. (Xiaoxia, et al., 2006) Furthermore, in Transformational Leadership, the leaders encourage creativity. They encourage employees to take controlled risks and have the courage to question their and the company’s beliefs. Finally, Transformational leaders make sure that they pay individual attention to the employees. They encourage group work, but do not ignore the individual workers who make up the group. Transactional Leadership reflects the style of leadership that had been prevailing in the organizations till the recent past. Even though it follows the basic guidelines of effective leadership in organizations, it would not be the most successful style of leadership in today’s world of globalization and increased competition. Transactional Leadership fulfills the basic criteria of rewarding employees for exceptional work, punishing them for showing poor performance, not wasting resources in “unnecessary” work and practicing some delegation of authority. For instance, small scaled businesses in the past used to follow transactional style of leadership. But today’s world demands the leaders to squeeze out maximum possible efficiency from the employees through motivation, rewards and high levels of job satisfaction. can be achieved through the Transformational style of leadership. Transformational style of leadership would help attain maximum performance in an organization. The reason is that this style of leadership goes beyond the old norms of simply rewarding the employees based on their work. It incorporates motivation and job satisfaction in the equation. Highlighted in the Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, individual needs go beyond money and rewards. They have emotional and psychological needs as well that the transformational leaders take into account. It is important for every leader to understand that in today’s world, customer satisfaction is an essential ingredient for success. And customer satisfaction cannot be achieved without employee satisfaction (Nicholas, 1994). Therefore, utmost care of every individual employee must be taken. Another important feature of Transformational leaders is their personality and charisma. Leaders today have to be more than just delegators of work. They must have the charisma to have employees look up to them, respect them, trust them, and want to work for them. Such leaders include Steve Jobs of Apple and Bill Gates of Microsoft. (Friedman & Langbert, 2000) ANSWER 3 Chevron Corporation is an oil marketing company headquartered in San Ramon, California, USA. It is an energy company that explores, refines and sells oils and natural gas to meet the energy demand of now and the future (Chevron, 2009). It is known to focus on one thing more than all the others: human energy. Its human resource is one of its most important resources that have enabled the company to operate at such a large scale today. At the outset, the company has many different types of jobs available for example, accounting, maritime operations, transportation, legal, maintenance, geophysics and many others. Therefore, work is divided according to the requirements of these jobs. The organization is highly functional, or divided into functions. The organizational chart for Chevron Corp. illustrated below will identify this. Source: Cogmap, 2009 This chart shows the roles and responsibilities of the personnel at Chevron Corp. It starts off with the Chief Executive Officer, and shows that he is at the highest post in the organization. Six people, mainly vice presidents of various functions, report directly to him. Their subordinates then respectively report to them showing that the organization is a decentralized one. This means that subordinates at Chevron are delegated the power to make decisions on their own. They have to report to their managers but have enough authority to carry out their work the way they wish to, The current model of this organizational chart shows that there is a relatively wider span of control. This enables managers to develop clear goals and objectives. However, at the same time, each manager might have to carry out more work than what is required of him/her and look after a greater number of people. This is especially ineffective if the organization is decentralized, which it is. In this case, all decisions and initiatives have to be monitored. However, in this situation, the current model is close to ideal. The span of control is wide but not too wide. It can be made better by enabling more communication in the chain of command. Junior managers must be able to communicate with the senior managers effectively, and vice versa ANSWER 4 Wal-Mart is known for its strong values and persistent culture. It is due to this culture and its consistency that Wal-Mart, today, is known to be one of the most successful companies in the world. Even with its marvelous growth rate, which has made it to be of a humongous size, it has managed to retain its culture. Sal Walton had always believed that success was a result of satisfied customers and that the satisfaction of the customers is in the employees’ hands. (ICMR, 2003) Wal-Mart’s culture had always been customer-centric and service-oriented (ICMR, 2003). The employees were encouraged to take controlled risks and contribute as much as they could. It enabled Wal-Mart to achieve its goals of becoming a store that provided the best value in exchange of lowest prices in the market. The culture promotes unity in the vision of the employees to make Wal-Mart achieve its goals. There are certain features in the work place that are unique to Wal-Mart and link the people associated with the company together. One of these is the special calendar that Wal-Mart uses that is based on the fiscal year of the company that starts on the 1st of February every year. This means that according to the ‘Wal-Mart time’, the first week of the year is the first week of February. (ICMR, 2003) There is a very optimistic and joyful environment present in the company. It believes in taking care of its employees. Wal-Mart was actually one of the first companies to initiate profit sharing plans to its employees which tied the employees’ rewards with the performance of the company. This strategy made the employees feel like they are a part of the company. This promoted a sense of belonging and ownership for the employees in the company and acted as a motivator for them to work hard and efficiently for the company they “owned”. (ICMR, 2003) Wal-Mart is known to have policies that benefit employees and keep them happy. One such policy is that the company does not allow workers to work over-time. When, once, it was found that in many of the Wal-Mart stores, employees had been made to work overtime by the managers, strict actions were taken against the store managers who were either demoted or fired. (ICMR, 2003) Today, being one of the biggest and most successful companies in the world, Wal-Mart puts great emphasis on promoting and retaining its cultural elements in order to keep the employees satisfied and thus, achieving high performance. ANSWER 5 There are many challenges that today’s manager’s face. In today’s environment there are many new factors and changes that the leaders and managers need to realize and tailor their practices to deal with them. Changes and Challenges First and foremost is the issue of globalization. The advent of internet has eradicated boundaries between countries. This means that any person sitting anywhere in the world could set up a business with minimal costs and becoming a threat for a company. Because of this, the concept of monopolies has almost been eradicated and fierce competition now exists in every market. Starbucks, which has enjoyed its position in the market for offering premium coffee, is also hit by this increased competition (123jump.com, 2008). Recipes for producing rich coffee flavors are readily available on the internet and Starbucks has noticed many small companies recently opened to compete with it. Moreover, there has been a drastic change in the diversity of the workforce present in today’s environment. People of different races, cultures and countries might be working together in an organization and the manager would have to treat them all equally making neither one feel inferior or superior to the other just because they belong to a certain background. Also, because of the global media today, leaders have to deal with situations with much more involvement and utmost cautions. Because of the Israeli attacks on Gaza, Muslims throughout the world decided to boycott Starbucks (Glover, 2009), as it was taken to be a supporter of Israel. Another challenge facing the manager’s today is that of Global Economic Crisis. Starbucks had been facing a decline in the sales due to the reduced spending of the American consumers (123jump.com, 2008). Solutions All these changes in today’s environment have put more responsibilities on the shoulders of today’s leaders. Starbucks would have to deal with the problems by tightening the management controls and squeezing out as much efficiency out of the work force as possible. This does not mean that the employees should be made to work overtime. In fact, controlled risk taking and creativity should be encouraged throughout the work force in order to achieve an edge over its competitors (Nicholas, 1994). The culture in the organization should be emphasized upon. This would result in higher levels of job satisfaction and performance which would, in turn, result in customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. Starbucks should use the media to its advantage. It should communicate with its customers throughout the world and remove all sorts of misunderstandings, such as its involvement in the Israeli attacks against Gaza, which may exist amongst them. It is also seen that restructuring of Starbucks Corporation is being taken place when Martin Coles was made the Chief Operating Officer. This was done to achieve effective management in today’s global environment (Starbucks Corporation, 2007). This is evident of the fact that Starbucks does realize the changing environment that it operates in and is taking steps to deal with it. CONCLUSION In today’s era of globalization, managers have to be on their toes to drive their organizations to success. Firstly, they must realize the link between motivation and job security and how it results in better organizational performance. They must understand the nature of needs that the employees possess and must cater to them in order to keep them happy and eager to work. Managers must understand what the challenges of today are and what they demand from them. This is the era of transformational leaders who inspire their followers and extract out creativity and highest levels of efficiency out of them. This is an essential ingredient of success in today’s extremely competitive environment where maximum utilization and efficiency of resources must be achieved in order to gain an edge over the competition and be successful. BIBLIOGRAPHY Books Herzberg, F. Mausner, B. & Snyderman, B. 2009. The Motivation to Work. Twelfth Edition. New Jersey. Transaction Publishers. Xiaoxia, P. Xiaoxia, P & Jing, W.,2006 Transformational Leadership VS. Transactional Leadership. Kristianstad University. 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Available from http://www.allbusiness.com/management/468028-1.html [Accessed 28 November 2009] Spooner, G. 2001. IBM counting on services for growth. CNet. Available from http://news.cnet.com/IBM-counting-on-services-for-growth/2100-1001_3-254044.html [Accessed 29 November 2009] Starbucks Corporation. 2007. Starbucks Poises Organization for Continued Global Growth. CSR Wire. Available from http://www.csrwire.com/press/press_release/24586-Starbucks-Poises-Organization-for-Continued-Global-Growth [Accessed 29 November 2009] Wagner, K. n.d. Heirarchy of Needs. About.com. Available from http://psychology.about.com/od/theoriesofpersonality/a/hierarchyneeds.htm [Accessed 29 November 2009] Read More