EFFECT OF EMPLOYEE MOTIVATION ON PRODUCTIVITY IN AN ORGANIZATION

A CASE STUDY OF ZENITH BANK PLC, ABUJA

BY

FADUMO, KEHINDE OLUSEYI MATRIC NO. 154622

BEING A PROJECT PROPOSAL SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN

SUPERVISED BY DR. SHENGE

SEPTEMBER, 2011 CHAPTER ONE

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Introduction The management of people at work is an integral part of the management process. To understand the critical importance of people in the organization is to recognize that the human element and the organization are synonymous. A well-managed organization usually sees an average worker as the root source of quality and productivity gains. Such organizations do not look to capital investment, but to employees, as the fundamental source of improvement. An organization is effective to the degree to which it achieves its goals. An effective organization will make sure that there is a spirit of cooperation and sense of commitment and satisfaction within the sphere of its influence. In order to make employees satisfied and committed to their jobs in the banking industry, there is need for strong and effective motivation at the various levels, departments, and sections of the bank. Most people have an intuitive sense that motivation is linked with performance. Although some may disagree on how much impact motivation has on performance, most would agree that high levels of performance are difficult to achieve when little or no motivation to perform is present. Educational situations are perhaps the best example of the motivationperformance relationship. Many smart students flunk out of college each year because they failed to attend class, failed to study, or simply became too distracted to perform their school duties. This study used archival data to examine the link between student pilot motivation and performance during flight training to estimate the extent to which motivation levels account for performance. Motivation is a basic psychological process. A recent data-based comprehensive analysis concluded that competitiveness problems appear to be largely motivational in nature (Mine, Ebrahimi, and Wachtel, 1995). Along with perception, personality, attitudes, and learning, motivation is a very important element of behaviour. Nevertheless, motivation is not the only explanation of behaviour. It interacts with and acts in conjunction with other cognitive processes. Motivating is the management process of influencing behaviour based on the knowledge of what make people tick (Luthans, 1998). Also, over the past three decades, an impressive amount of research efforts have been devoted to understanding the nature, antecedents, and consequences of organizational commitment. Employee commitment is important because high levels of commitment lead to several favorable organizational outcomes. Meta-analyses indicate that commitment is negatively related to turnover (CooperHakim & Viswesvaran, 2005), absenteeism (Farrell & Stamm, 1988), and counterproductive behavior (Dalal, 2005) and positively related to job satisfaction (Cooper-Hakim & Viswesvaran, 2005), motivation (Mathieu & Zajac, 1990), and organizational citizenship behaviors (Riketta, 2002). Moreover, research studies have provided evidence of a positive correlation between organizational commitment and job performance (e.g., Meyer, Paunonen, Gellatly, Goffin, & Jackson, 1989).

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Statement of problem The view that specific motivation and commitment will encourage increases in production has not always been substantiated, even though management has often attempted to spur production by such offerings and has often attributed production increase to them. Throughout the years production has increased for many reasons in addition to the particular motivation and has erroneously over simplified a highly complex phenomenon. Since then psychologists have been concerned with understanding an individual through his motives and acquired a body of knowledge in this field that often differs from the laymans knowledge. It is necessary to review briefly, from the psychologists point of view what is known about motivation and commitment at the present time, and how they influence employees performance. 1.2 Purpose of the study The main purpose of this research is to examine how motivation and commitment of employees act as predictors of job performance using First Bank Nigeria Plc as a case study. Therefore, this study is based on the following objectives: 1 To examine how motivation influence job performance among employee of First Bank Nigeria Plc. 2 To examine how commitment influence job performance among employee of First Bank Nigeria Plc. 3 To examine the joint influence of motivation and commitment among employee of First Bank Nigeria Plc. 4 To examine the influence of demographic variables like age, sex, religion, work experience, income, educational qualification and job status on employees performance among employee of First Bank Nigeria Plc.

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Relevance of the study

The findings of the study will help develop a better insight on motivation and commitment influence job performance. The research will also recommend to the management of organizations, on how to educate and provide ways of preventing problem that might be associated with motivation and job performance. The study will also be a valuable contribution to knowledge and prove useful researchers, who want to carry out further research in this area. CHAPTER TWO THEORETICAL BACKGROUND AND LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Theoretical background The scope of this chapter is to present an overview of some basic propositions that can help in fostering an understanding of this study on motivation and commitment as predictors of job performance. The theories of Maslow, Herzberg, Vroom, exchange and investment were highlighted in this chapter. 2.1.1 Motivation Theories According to Maslow, employees have five levels of needs (Maslow, 1943): physiological, safety, social, ego, and self- actualizing. Maslow argued that lower level needs had to be satisfied before the next higher level need would motivate employees. Herzberg's work categorized motivation into two factors: motivators and hygiene (Herzberg, Mausner, & Snyderman, 1959). Motivator or intrinsic factors, such as achievement and recognition, produce job satisfaction. Hygiene or extrinsic factors, such as pay and job security, produce job dissatisfaction. Vroom's theory is based on the belief that employee effort will lead to performance and performance will lead to rewards (Vroom, 1964). Rewards may be either positive or negative. The more positive the reward the more likely the employee will be highly motivated. Conversely, the more negative the reward the less likely the employee will be motivated. 2.1.2 Organizational commitment theory Two major theoretical approaches have been employed in the literature on organizational commitment: (a) the exchange approach, and (b) the investment approach. According to the exchange theory, the individual's organizational commitment depends on his or her perceived balance of reward utilities over input utilities (March and Simon, 1958; Homans, 1958; Gouldner, 1960). This approach emphasizes the current exchange relation between individuals and organizations. The more favorable the exchange from the participants viewpoint, the greater his or her commitment to the organization (Hrebiniak and Alutto, 1972).

The investment approach centers on the time element; the longer a person has been with an organization, the more that person wants to stay (Salancik, 1977). According to Sheldon (1971), "investments" refer to participation in an organization to the extent that possible participation in another organization is decreased. This is mainly affected by the accumulation of various credits such as tenure and pension benefits (Becker, 1960) or social involvements, which is the interaction and identification with other members of the organization (Sheldon, 1971). It is assumed by the investment approach that investments will produce commitments to the organization, regardless of other features of the relationship of the person to the organization (Sheldon, 1971). The investment approach and the exchange approach are examined simultaneously as factors of organizational commitment. In the organizational, vocational and industrial relations literature, the concept of organizational commitment of employees has recently received increased attention. Several reasons account for this heightened interest in organizational commitment: (1) highly committed employees may perform better than less committed ones (Jauch, Glueck and Osborn, 1978; Mowday, Porter and Dubin 1974 (2) such commitment is often a better predictor of turnover than is job satisfaction (Porter, Mowday and Boulian, 1974), and (3) organizational commitment may be used as an indicator of the effectiveness of an organization (Schein, 1970; Steers, 1975). It should be noted, though, that in certain cases organizational commitment may be undesirable (Salancik, 1977; Steers, 1977; and Dalton and Todor, 1979). 2.2 LITERATURE REVIEW 2.2.1 Motivation and Job Performance Judging from all these empirical studies and findings, one may generally conclude that a good Remuneration package, which ties financial rewards to individual performance, can be expected to result in higher productivity. Another study carried out, which is of importance to this research, is that of Wood (1974). He investigated the correlation between various workers attitudes and job motivation and performance using 290 skilled and semi-skilled male and female paper workers. The study revealed that highly involved employees who were more intrinsically oriented towards their job did not manifest satisfaction commensurate with company evaluations of performance. They depended more on intrinsic rewards as compared to those who were more extrinsic in orientation. Also, in a related study, Kulkarni (1983) compared the relative importance of ten factors such as pay, security, etc. which are extrinsic to the job, and other intrinsic factors like recognition, self esteem, responsibility etc among 80 white collar employees. And it was hypothesized that higher value will be placed on intrinsic rather than extrinsic job factors. Data was obtained through personal interview in which individuals were asked to rank each factor according to its importance. The result did not uphold the hypothesis and it shows two

extrinsic factors adequate earnings and job security as the most important. Also, it was found that there were no consistent trend between the findings of this study and similar studies using blue-collar workers, except in ranking of adequate earnings and job security. The above are empirical works carried out by different researchers in the areas of reward and performance. However, the question is what magnitude of performance variation can rewards both extrinsic and intrinsic induce taking into consideration the argument and counter argument on the consequences of tying reward to performance. 2.2.2 Organizational Commitment and Job Performance Committed employees give a big contribution to organizations because they perform and behave on achieving organizations' goals. Furthermore, workers who are committed to their organization are happy to be members of it, believe in and feel good about the organization and what it stands for, and intend to do what is good for the organization (George and Jones, 1996,p.85). Thus, we could say that there is any relationship between organizational commitment and job performance. However, surprisingly, previous research suggested that organizational commitment is largely unrelated to job performance (Mathieu & Zajac, 1990). In addition, Mowday et al. has also concluded that the link between commitment and performance is largely nonexistent (1982). 2.3 1. Hypotheses Employees who experience high motivation will significantly perform better than those with low motivation in First Bank Nigeria Plc. Employees who experience high commitment will significantly perform better than those with low commitment in First Bank Nigeria Plc. There will be interactive effects of motivation and commitment employees performance among staff of First Bank Nigeria Plc. Operational Definition of Terms

2.

3. 2.4

Organizational commitment may be defined as the relative strength of an individual's identification with, and involvement in, a particular organization (Steers, 1977). Motivation - for this study, motivation is operationally defined as the inner force that drives individuals to accomplish personal and organizational goals. Job performance is defined as the extent to which an organizational member contributes to achieving the objectives of the organization (Greguras, 1996).

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