Assignment Cover Sheet Student Name: Syed Redwanur Rahman Unit Name: Organisational Behaviour Student Number: s239377

77 Unit Code: s112 PRBM022 Lecturers Name: Jianhua(Jane)Zhang Assessment Title Critical Review and Evaluation Assignment 2 Due Date (dd/mm/yyyy): 25-05-2012 Lodgement Date (dd/mm/yyyy): 25-05-2012 Applied for Extension: N/A NO (dd/mm/yyyy) YES to Phone: (08) 8946 6830 Semester: 1 Year: 2012 School of Law and Business Charles Darwin University Casuarina NT 0909

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Introduction
Productivity is one of the most important factors that a business takes into consideration, while analyzing its overall performance and in that regard, the topic motivation has taken a central role of discussion all around the world, as motivation is seen as one of the most significant factors that influences the overall productivity of a business. Motivation has become so popular world wide as a worthy research topic now-a-days that a large range of theories and practices of motivaton has been evolved and some are still evolving. People and businesses from all backgrounds have more or less started to understand the importance of motivation and have started to implement the thoeries of motivation in practice in every single possible way available. Three academic journal articles have been taken into consideration here in reviewing and analysing the ideas, concepts and theories of these articles and with a pupose of presenting the analysis of these articles more effectively, the each article has been related to a specific area of discussion of motivation and discussed accordingly.

Motivation Concepts Motivation is seen as an endeavour to behave in a certain manner with intention to achieve specific, unfulfilled needs. The article that has been taken into consideration is Understanding Employee Motivation (Linder, J.R) which provides siginificant motivating factors relating these to the implications of employee motivation theories.Understanding Employee Motivation (Lindner, J.R.) delivers key motivating factors in the context of employee motivation theories. Five major approaches have been prescribed here by the author who believes that these approaches may assist the managers to find out the decisive factors that can actually motivate the employees. Firstly, taking Maslows Hierarchy of Needs theory into consideration, it is understood that the needs of the workers are divided into five different levels and they are Psychological, Safety, Social , Ego and Self-actualization. Maslow argued that for motivating people, any lower level needs must be met before going to the higher level. Secondly, comes the Herzbergs theory

which classifies motivation into two different groups of factors intrinsic factors like achievement and recognition which produce job satisfaction and extrinsic factors like pay and job security which produce dissatisfaction. Thirdly, in his theory, Vroom emphasized that employee effort is responsible for performance which fetches the employees positive or negative rewards. With positive reward, the employee becomes highly motivated and naturally becomes less motivated with negative rewards. Fourthly, the theory of Skinner argues that there are certain behaviours of employees leading to positive outcomes are repeated and certain behaviours behaviours leading to negative outcomes are not repeated. Consequently the managers should encourage the behaivours that bring positive outcomes and discourage the behaviours that lead to negative outcome. Lastly, the Adams theory is taken into consideration and this theory implies that workers always search for equity among themselves and other workers. The author of Understanding Employee Motivation categorized the motivation factors into following way: interesting work, good wages, full appreciation of work done, job security, good working conditions, promotions and growth in the organisation, personal loyalty to employees, tactful discipline and sysmpathetic help with personal problems. Again, in comparing the results to Maslows need-hierarchy , the author delivered some significant insights into employee motivation. According to the author, interesting work is a self actualization factor which is the number one motivation. Good wage which is a psychological factor is the number two motivational factor. Motivator is an esteem factor which is ranked at number three and then comes the number four motivation number in the form of job security which is a safety factor. In response to that, according to Maslows Theory, the psychological, safety, social and esteem factors must be met first before addressing the most important motivation factor which is interesting work. Then in the second place comes pay in this study which ranks the full appreciation work done into next category and is followed by good working conditions. The most significant findings of the study nurtured the idea that the motivatonal factors of employees varies according to the perspectives and conditions in which they work. Interesting work and high wage rate have been ranked as number one and number two in this study, irrespective of the theories followed. But at the same time , the author also emphasizes on

the fact of taking options like job enrichment, promotions, job enlargement, monetary and nonmonetary compensation into consideration. However, the author has mentioned that other options such as job enrichment, promotions, job enlargement, monetary and non-monetary compensation should be considered. The managers can effectively exploit the findings of this study to set up an effective system that can motivate their employees in the long run and can lead them to positive results, by getting to know about the most influential motivational and blending these factors with the reward system which may lead the organisation to its targeted productivity in bringing the very best out of the motivated workforce.

Empowerment Empowerment is another widely discussed topic that has taken its place in the list of important success factors for a business. The development of an individuals self-motivation, self-thinking and self-control is widely associated with the word Empowerment. In this regard, The article Employee Empowerment (Nykodym N., Simonetti J.L., Warren R., Welling N.) has been taken into consideration and it describes the main components and actual system of empowerment and it also focuses on the fact that if the method of empowerment is correctly put into practice following specifiic guidelines, it can bring a huge amount of success into a business arena. As the first remark of empowerment, the author has mentioned the term Goal Setting. There are always opportunities for employees to determine their objectives and then plan, design job and manage time accordingly so that they can reach the company goals, by reaching their own goals. In the second place, there is always option for employees to choose from the available alternative ways to complete their day-to-day tasks. In the next place, the employees can go for the solution of problems that demand the task of identifying the issues first and coming up with all the

possible alternatives. Lastly, the authors argue that the employees play an instrumental role in bringing organisational changes like hiring, investment or layoff. In addition to the criterias mentioned above , the authors have emphasized on some systems that can be integrated with all the areas that are subjected to employee participation. Employee participation could be in any form. The employees could take part in the decision making process, either as an individual or they can approach it by playing in a team with other employees. The participaion could be both formal and informal depending on the working environment and situation. The article also provides a clear picture about the possible margin of influence that employees may have in a certain decision making process. The study focuses on the fact that when the employees have the final say about a certain decision, it tends to produce much more positive approach towards their managers and towards the company all together. The other study (Locke, E.A) mentioned in the article implies that organisation must sort out the appropiate motivational mechanisms for participation to make it work in the best possible way. This step plays the ultimate role towards effective participation process. Motivational mechanisms include actions such as trust, greater control of the work, the setting of higher goals and more ego involvement in the job and increased identification with the organisations are some of the motivational mechanisms that the study suggested to work on. The authors of the article have emphasized on the fact that the managers must make their employees aware of the overall participation process right in the beginning, must give employees an idea about the factors that the result will be measured on and about the possible rewards and benefits that the employees will enjoy after the successful completion. The authors have finished their article, by throwing a question to readers about whether the empowerment of employess has a positive influence on job stisfaction or not. Infact Locks study mentioned in the article puts special emphasis on setting up specific goals that can play a big role in performance rise than the generalized goals and in regard to this the study argues that motivatonal effects of participation play a minimal role in performance. The study implies that the form of participation and people personalities and attitudes cause the

variation in effectiveness of the empowerment of the employees and there is no single specific way to determine the effectiveness of employee empowerment. At the end of the day, it can be argued that empowerment is another managerial approach that focuses on collaborative style of solving a problem by sharing responsibilty and making decision making process more open.

Rewarding Employees It is argued all over the world that the rewarding methods and factors are not enough for providing employees their expected job satisfaction, but no way the fact can be ignored that the rewards do motivate people. In this regard, the Article Employee motivation: a Malaysian Perspective (IslamR., Zakai A., Ismail Hj.) has been taken into consideration. It argues that the importance of the motivating factors is decided by its effectiveness. The research tried to find out the ranking of motivators like empowerment, good working conditions, promotion, job security, high wages, appreciation of work done. The research was conducted among employees in different Malaysan organisations in 2004. The findings of research show that, high wage is considered as number one motivational factor followed by good working conditions and promotion. Even though the money has turned out to be the most influential motivational factor in Malaysian environment and if global perpective and continuous change of it is taken into consideration, the money being the main motivator has several disadvantages as well. Because the monetary value of a reward can be very short lived, as money can be spent very quickly and the weight of the reward and as a basis of motivation can be forgotten very soon. Even though monetary reward can still be considered as a substantial rewarding and motivating method, the managers, under present scenario, must find out more effective and longer lasting rewarding methods to motivate employees for better productivity. On the other hand, taking external environmental factors that lead employess to a position of uncertainty and insecurity, it can still be said that pay would be considered as the most

influential motivator. If Maslows Hierarchy of Needs theory is taken into consideration, pay is indeed an important motivator, as it can fulfil several needs at different levels. Infact, the ranking of motivators quite naturally varies from situation to situation. For the people of developing countries, money can be the ultimate motivator, while people from developed countries may rank motivaors like competition, empowerment or promotion much higher than the money. So, in this regard, the managers must be careful and aware of the fact that different employees are motivated differently and the managers must take their steps while motivating employees, taking this very important issue into consideration. Inspite of the Malaysian result, the authors of the article emphasized on the fact that employee participation does play an influential role in making a motivation program successful. Rewarding system always has an all important effect in motivating employees and is completely critical to the productivity of a business. So, a business must fine tune their rewarding policies from time to time to motivate the employees successfully based on different perspective and sort out the different motivators that can be integrated into certain motivating programs.

Conclusion
The success of an organisation largely depends on the productivity of its employess and it is beyond doubt that a motivated employee is the source of better productivity. So, irrespective of the industry background, the managers must consider certain motivational concepts and theories and take effective measures to put those theories into practice so that the practice can effectively motivate the employees, bring them greater job satisfaction, finally leading them to a situation where they will improve the productivity of the organisation and run towards the greater personal and organisational achievement.

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