Employee Motivation and Manipulation

Introduction

A manager’s prime responsibility is getting activities completed efficiently with and through other employees to achieve organisational goals. Motivating employees to peak performance at work, even in tough situations, is one of the most challenging tasks of a manager. Motivation can be defined as the power that reinforces behaviour in a person, gives route to that behaviour  and continues the conduct of that behaviour. With human resource being considered as one of the most valuable assets in an organisation, managers are constantly fiddling amongst motivational tools and techniques to improve the performance of their employees. This essay will analyse using employee motivation as a management tool and as a manipulation tool to achieve organisational goals and will discuss the ethical implications involved.

Employee motivation, if used correctly by managers, is a powerful tool to raise performance level of their employees from mediocre to excellence. According to Muhammad et al (2011), a positive relationship exists between employee motivation and organisational effectiveness. Employees are different from each other and what motivates one employee does not motivate others (Blanchard, 2007). This can be also attributed to the fact that we live in an era of cultural diversity which is an add-on to the pre-existing differences amongst employees including the education level, age and socio-economic group. Moreover, all employees are not going through the same phase in their lives and thus they are all motivated by different needs (Zivaljevic, 2011). Needs can be defined as deficiencies that trigger behavioural drive for maintaining inner stability (McShane & Travaglione, 2009). Emotionally intelligent managers identify the most dominant need in employees and create that unsatisfied needs in them; understand the valence which they tie to that need or reward and apply the most appropriate motivation theories on those employees to boost their motivation level and to extract more work from them.

Content theories such as Maslow, Herzberg and the Theory X and Y involves specific needs that motivate employees at work and the assumption that each person respond in the same way to motivating pressures that lead managers to believe that there is a better way to motivate everyone. Therefore, some managers follow these theories to improve productivity. However, process based theories such as Vroom’s Expectancy Theory puts an emphasis on the valence of a reward and the processes by which employees are motivated. It analyses the behaviour maintained by employees to lead them to a specific goal or need and decrease the internal tension (Ismajli et al, 2015). As a satisfied need wears out its motivational potential (Kreitner & Kinicki, 2013), managers create a motivational cycle of non-satiating needs to sustain their employees’ performance at the optimal level.

Employee motivation is the only tool that can make people do what they have to do. This can also be interpreted that managers have the one and only tool called motivation at their disposal that can be exploited to extract maximum work from their employees. 

Manipulation can be defined as a rational persuasion to make employees under your control and is not limited to physical coercion. The word ‘manipulation’ has a negative connotation attached to it and is mostly used while describing an unethical conduct. With employees being in a relatively lower-ranking position compared to their employers, it can be difficult for the employees to negotiate with them. This inequality in power gives rise to the possibilities of several types of employee exploitations such as insufficient compensation, discrimination and intrusion into their privacy.

Motivating an employee is at its core a manipulation in itself. The problem starts whether it is a positive or a negative manipulative action. Central to the distinction between a negative and positive motivational manipulation is an ethical issue of creating a climate that eliminates a sense of injustice and negative manipulation. Through the process of negative manipulation, employees are conditioned to believe that they are working for their own good and benefits without mentioning the unethical issues. For instance, in the case of Uber which is popular ride-sharing service, a group of behavioural scientists at the Uber headquarters is actively exploiting the driver’s app to persuade them to change their behaviour. This happens when a a driver would try to log out of the Uber app, the latter would inform them that they are only a few dollars away from achieving an arbitrary sum for that day or it would measure their earnings from that point to the precedent week. These tactics would prompt them to drive for longer hours just to obtain those few dollars. In other words, the drivers are being treated as ‘guinea pigs’ by the different app designs to persuade them into doing what the company wants. This makes it difficult for them to follow their own instincts and they are being coerced into work longer hours at the expense of their own gratification for less pay. Therefore, this motivation tactic of Uber can be thought to be unethical and more of a manipulative technique since the purpose of the motivation is being hidden from the drivers. By constantly modifying the driver’s app, Uber is trying to magnify the company’s outcome at the cost of the drivers’ leisure time. It is hard for these drivers to spot that they are being manipulated by someone else. Generally, aggressive behaviours, for instance bullying may be easier to identify, but covert attacks are harder to recognise and most victims are usually ignorant that they are being manipulated (Michael, 2013). It is safe to say that with Uber experimenting with its drivers without their knowledge and consent, it has crossed the line between motivation and manipulation. The length to which the drivers are being overworked in order to maximise profits for the organisation (Sugumar, 2012) is unethical and employers cannot build a good working relationship with their employees based on deception (Davey, 2017).