Motivation and Incentives

Motivation

TI subscribed to the philosophy that companies' goals are best served when they give employees the chance to pursue their personal goals. Satisfaction depends on two factors: dissatisfiers (matters of pay, matters of supervision, and working conditions) and motivators (responsibility, recognition, and autonomy). Decreasing a dissatisfier will not increase satisfaction, but increasing it will significantly reduce it; increasing a motivator will help, decreasing it will have a lesser negative effect.

The motivation seeker generally likes things like recognition, responsibility, work itself, advancement, and growth. The maintenance seeker is motivated, rather, by enjoyable work environments, job retention, and company policy. The study broke employees up into further categories according to what their jobs require that they perform.

Some people by and large, are motivated by work itself, and they are dissatisfied mainly be excessive responsibility. Male technicians and Factory Supervisors are motivated mostly by advancement and responsibility and they are dissatisfied regularly by pay and work itself. Motivations vary greatly among different types of workers and people, but strong patterns can be found when they are classified properly.

Accommodations need to be made for workers of different character types and who work in different fields. This is an 'easily translatable (replicable) supervisory action', as the concepts of motivation and maintenance needs are 'already well known 'to management and worker-types alike.

Incentives

. Individual incentive systems have hidden costs in the form of the construction and maintenance of standards and the resistance of employees to their implementation. Also, relationships between pay and skill may be distorted as workers sometimes 'cheat' the system and it becomes difficult to know how well it is working. When productivity and cooperation are needed, the author concludes, piece-work destroys the will of workers to collaborate as it forces them to concentrate on their own plight rather than the company's.

The author recommends, rather, that group incentives be looked at. When workers, who know themselves better than anyone else, have a say in matters concerning how to do their jobs, almost assuredly production rates will rise. Group incentive programs shift the paradigm of worker-management relations; they give way to more communicative structures that promote ideas for improvement from all areas of the company. These programs utilize 'group-organized' monetary incentives as a way to promote this change in culture within the organization.