Employee Motivation At Work

An employee of any company can find himself in a job that does not satisfy at any time. If that company does not support their employee’s effort-performance expectations, foster job satisfaction, employee empowerment, and doesn’t allow the employee to take ownership of his job then that company risks losing productivity, increasing turnover, and declining motivation from their staff. There are many theories on how to cater to these employee needs and many causes for companies to fail their staff in these areas. This paper will look briefly into a personal experience that illustrates the ebb and flow of employee motivation.

An individual employee’s job satisfaction and productivity is intimately connected to the motivation the job offers the employee. Often, jobs that emphasize employee empowerment and employee individualism will often develop stronger employee loyalty, productivity, ownership, and ultimately satisfaction. When an employee is not receiving this in their work lives they often lose or never attain loyalty to their company or their job. Satisfaction is at a minimum and the company suffers.

The following is an illustration that is directly specific to my personal work experience. In this scenario the acts of my superiors at work severely threatened my loyalty to the company and nearly lost me as an employee due specifically to their lack of supporting my satisfaction on the job. During this period of my career I wasn’t satisfied with my job and therefore had little motivation to excel in my position. As could be expected, this resulted in my offering very little to the company as my productivity fell.

Not long ago my department went through an organizational restructuring. Our department was highly motivated and retained our objectives and job descriptions but we fell under a different division and a different manager. Management typically has a lot to do with comfort and job loyalty and it is safe to say that before our restructuring management really made my job a pleasant experience. We were capable of doing what we thought was necessary as an audit department and we were expected to do what it took to pass our own audits as well as audit other departments. We were trusted to achieve this with little meddling from upper management.

Poor Workplace Motivation

The restructuring however, put our department under the watchful eye of a new upper manager who operated as if we couldn’t do our jobs without his direct influence on every aspect of our duties, right down to the nuts and bolts of the operation. My personal situation with this manager was in the constant reworking of financial statement analyses that contained no errors but were not written in the textual pattern that this man would have used himself. I was constantly duplicating my work because this new manager decided that it was now necessary to edit every document I prepared and have me re-write these documents to use the wording that my new manager would have written himself.  Word to the wise: this is not motivational.

At first after this restructuring I felt that my new manager was merely familiarizing himself with my work but after quite some time it became apparent that this man wasn’t just familiarizing himself, he was micromanaging my position and everyone else’s in my department. After six months of this micromanagement many of my fellow employees agreed that their work was not any better than it was before the micromanagement began but their turn times for virtually everything were now slower. On a personal level my turn times were slower and my working motivation to do anything more than was expected of me decreased because I knew that anything I did would require a re-work later on: twice as much work for the same amount of output. The job became a chore, my employee motivation fell, and my productivity declined rapidly. Even more seriously my company almost lost a quality employee due to unnecessary turnover because management had disengaged me from my job.

Strangely this set of circumstances illustrates Vroom’s Expectancy Theory which I learned about when I went through my post grad, accredited MBA program. The Expectancy Theory states that for a person to act a given way depends on his expectancy that the act will be followed by a given outcome that is attractive to the actor. To summarize further an employee completing a job will be motivated to do the job based on the amount of work involved compared to the expected outcome.

In my specific example from my own working life you can see that the amount of work required for any given task increased while my expectations on the results of my work decreased. This shift in perception caused my employee motivation to decline because the effort involved no longer met my expectations for outcome. With declining motivation my goals began shifting away from my work and to my educational pursuits as I began looking to get my CFP certification and make a career move.

There are a number of factors which influence expectancy perceptions one of which is “previous success at the task” and another is “self-efficacy”, which are both related. In this circumstance my new manger who micromanaged me caused me to expect extra effort on every task making me feel as if I was no longer successful. This of course directly causes declining self-efficacy.

To correct this problem of declining employee motivation management needs to take action to improve the factors that affect employee expectancy perceptions.  Self-efficacy can be improved when management becomes satisfied with our quality work output.  They must be satisfied that while requiring no revisions.  In order to accomplish this management expectations need to be clearly disseminated so that the employees have the “information necessary to complete the task” correctly the first time.  In my case this was exactly the problem that led to my department’s declining motivation.  We all were submitting work that was of high quality but not exactly what our new manager wanted to see.  We unfortunately didn’t know what management wanted to see and our productivity suffered.

Micromanagement is a difficult thing to overlook on the job but it can be dealt with if management provides clear expectations and guidance for their employees.  Until the employee’s performance outcome expectations realign with their perceptions of effort expended, employee motivation will continue to suffer.  But once these outcomes return to balance expectancy of performance will lead to higher self-esteem, greater job loyalty, higher productivity, and greater job satisfaction.