Motivation Work Performance
High performance organizations are those organizations with a culture that is flexible and encouraging dynamism, inventions, knowledge sharing, allowing diversities in working across boundaries, stimulates its people to be high performers; it is based on certain values and a great place to work.
These key elements are believed to be what encourages the employees to be performing highly.
Researchers use these organizations to find out several barriers as a result of cultural variations that subsequently contribute to low performance in the organization (Sanford and Bracey 1977).
Such organizations have a pure formal structure of administration of which the positions in the organization have professionals. Any informality in the organization disqualifies it from being a high performance organization, since it has to have clear means of communication without misunderstandings from either the source, or towards the source.
Members of such organization put mechanism in place that act in a mediating capacity to help resolve any arising matters that may result into a problem of the future e.g. if a member is rejecting another’s opinion then he is considered by being appraised positively in order to generate new opinions.
Groups are people sharing one commonality. They (groups) exist because of a common interest that is necessary for the survival of individuals belonging to the group. An example of a group is the community which has a complex commonality.
Groups can be informal and others can be formal depending with each one group’s interest. Group of young boys (peer group) can not be considered to be formal because of its nature of operation, even though they have their rules, regulations, code of conducts, and valued opinions amongst themselves. All the above mentioned about a peer group is not written anywhere, they all adapt to those factors through the natural process of learning as they socialize one another in relation to the society they live in. For such groups it is either you abide by the set standards in order to fit in, even if it is that bad, you either do it as a way of showing solidarity. Refusal whatsoever displays deviance and it could lead to punitive measures at times it could be death or rejection.
In some instances it is correct to say that a group can improve itself till it gets to the status of a high performing organization. Some things have to be observed so that a group can finally increase its performance for better. The informal status of a group has to be changed; in that case it should have a formal procedure in terms of handling matters related to the affairs of the group. The other important initiative to consider is the manpower, and the availability of staff that are professionally fitting in the capacity they occupy in that group (Anderson 2001)
Many groups have taken an initiative to offer their employees equal chances in terms of pursuing further education, or granting employees’ funds for studies. Such a move has a positive impact on the progress of the group towards becoming a high performer in future.
Motivation is a concern of study that has varied approaches on how to define it, even though describing it seems a little more understandable and common to many of us i.e. running home very fast because of a possible down pour in the next ten, or so minutes. In such a situation is it the rain, or a person own determination and willingness to run that can be accounted for that state of motion, or action?
Let’s consider here the fact that one energizes himself after thinking that he will be wet in no time unless h/she does something about it. Motivation can be described as a human’s internal state of being in need, or having a desire towards achieving a set goal, that goal is a target which acts as the source of energy we use while we engage ourselves in a goal directed/oriented behavior. This goal oriented behavior is believed to persistently continue until we achieve our set goal. Motivation thus can be said to be an activity that is result oriented, while we undergo an internal experience.
Hertzberg’s two-factor-theories- of work and motivation, it is a clear and very simple theory which tends to confine itself to a circle of activities that revolve around the human-work relationship. As the theory goes it starts with satisfaction and dissatisfaction. In between the two is a neutral state; satisfaction is achieved through motivation which entails several other factors that make it achieve the state of satisfaction, they include; achieving the set goals, to move forward by advancing in whatever one is pursuing, being recognized as an important person, or personnel in the organization, or place of work.
Dissatisfaction is believed to be accelerated by several other factors that are coined into one title; hygiene factors, this factors include, low salary pay that really make one undergo too much constraints in his day to day budgeting while attempting to make ends meet, the other one is the company policies which are at times unfavorable to the employees by putting them on toes all the time throughout the working time at times draining the workers to the point of performing poorly; hence being in a constant conflict with management, the other factor is work mates who might not be getting along well with one of the employees; or even amongst themselves, one might feel out placed in such a situation, another last but not least hygiene factor is the supervisory styles from the management; supervisors at times are always a headache to employees because they at times clash at work with their juniors because most supervisors are poorly trained, of which it would have been better in the maintenance of good work relationship and performance in the company.
A point to note is that when one will attempt to manage dissatisfaction h/she will get to the neutral state, and he needs to put in motivational factors in order to achieve satisfaction (Steers and Porter, 1987).
Leaders are people who are thought to be intelligent than the persons they lead this assumption is based on the fact that they (leaders) have a greater influence to the people they lead than how the people can influence them. Leaders be it political ones, religious ones, diplomatic leaders, traditional leaders, or spiritual leaders all of them have a following they command and at times these leaders are used to influence the people they lead in order to satisfy certain goals. People in organizations will always respect their bosses simply because they are above them; and that they lead them especially those people heading unions that represent the rights of workers, students and religious based organization, most of the time they are taken seriously, even in times of declaring protests, demonstration, riots, strikes, and many more activities such as ejecting other people in offices simply because their territorial leaders have declared.
Employees’ team spirit is a major contributor towards motivation at work places because of several other factors, including the relationship amongst them, and with the management. Good relationship is needed in all direction so that it improves the blame game that always interferes with group motivational abilities. Most employees will be seen as competing among one another only to spoil so much, this is a negative type of motivation since they have not realized how harmful the competition is to them. Hence employees need to realize they are one against many others out there, as a matter of concern they should convert their motivation of competing against one another, into a motivation of competing with the outside competitors.
The managerial staff is in charge of many functions that go on in the organization and that they have the ability to influence employees positively and ethically in order to make them productive at will without violating the code of ethics. Employees’ rights should be observed carefully because it is very hard at times to realize that one is oppressing employees more so if the part of pay is high and the working conditions are bad. Employees should provided with transport services to enable them to get to work early and at the end of the day they appreciate what they are offered since they remain with an excess that would have gone towards payments of transportation costs.
Conclusion
High performance organization can be defined as agro up setting only that it has way far standard than that of an ordinary group we all feel is still immature in a number of ways, although it is hard maybe for some people to understand such a comparison because, generally the two are made up of people.
Groups ought to be motivated by giving them examples of high performing organization, the trend of their success so that they see it as an achievable value of improvement, otherwise its easy for members of a group to disbelieve and dismiss claim that a group can grow into an outstanding performer in future. Many might be believing that, unfair means e.g. corruption might work fast towards achieving the high status.
Motivation theories at times don’t simply agree to one thing as a contributing factor of motivation, why are we doing things we always do? Money is a form of external extrinsic factors of motivation we encounter in our day to day life not to forget other extrinsic factors such as promises of reward if one performs best at a given work., threat to do something; like running fast to avoid being mugged, scrambling for little food in order not to starve is intrinsic factor of motivation, but salivating to food upon seeing them on display is an extrinsic factor of motivation. Such ways of describing how motivational factors work need a closer understanding by reading almost the whole explanation of how motion is related to our environment, physiology, society, and our psychology.
References
Anderson. N. 2001. Handbook of Industrial, Work and Organization Psychology. Sage, ISBN 0761964894.
Sanford. C. A and Bracey. J. H 1977. Human Relationship: The Theory and Practice of Organizational Behavior.Merill. ISBN 0675085055.
Steers, R M. and Porter. W 1987 Motivation and Work Behavior.NY McGraw-hill
