Motivation for Human Resources Managers

Human Resources and Motivation:

A Literature Review

Human Resources Management and Motivation

Motivation is one of many areas of responsibility for the human resource manager. This includes “taking initiatives to engage staff in their work, surveying to understand engagement levels, and planning training and development activities (Mayhew, n.d.). Motivation is defined as “the processes that accounts for an individual’s intensity, direction, and persistence of effort toward attaining a goal” (Robbins & Judge, 2015). The study of motivation has a long and complicated history in the social sciences. The business world is interested in motivation results in order to improve productivity, efficiency, and creativity in the workplace. After a literature review of traditional and contemporary models of motivation, this paper explores a scenario where a human resource manager makes use of motivation theories to assess the performance of an employee.

Traditional Views on Motivation

Motivation 1.0: The Lower Order Needs of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Early and mid-twentieth century motivational theories were centered on the assumption that people were motivated by only two drivers. In 1943, Abraham Maslow developed a five level hierarchy of needs pyramid. The bottom two levels of the pyramid includes physiological and safety needs such as hunger, thirst, and shelter (Robbins & Judge, 2015). Maslow called the bottom two levels of the pyramid the lower-order needs, which will be referred to as Motivation 1.0 or survival (Pink, 2009b).

Motivation 2.0: Fredrick Taylor’s Rewards and Punishments

The second driver of motivation refers to people’s desire to seek rewards and to avoid punishments. Fredrick Winslow Taylor applied this driver to the workplace when he wrote The Principles of Scientific Management. Taylor’s goal was to improve industrial efficiency through rewarding the behavior wanted and punishing the behavior not wanted (Robbins & Judge, 2015). “It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured” ( Fredrick, n.d.). Tylor’s methods resulted in dramatic improvements in productivity, but he was blamed for “destroying the soul of work, dehumanizing factories, and making men into automations” (Fredrick). A modern day example of this management system is the ballpark worker selling peanuts and pop. The ballpark worker’s compensation is based on piece-rate pay or a fixed sum for each unit sold (Robbins & Judge, 2015). The reward and punishment driver will be referred to as Motivation 2.0 (Pink, 2009b).

Failures of Motivation 2.0: Rewards and Punishments

Harry Harlow and Monkeys

In 1949, professor of psychology Harry Harlow placed three-step puzzles in the cages with his eight rhesus monkeys. Without any urging or prompting by the experimenters, the monkeys immediately played with the puzzles. The experimenters started changing the puzzles and the monkeys got faster at solving the problem without encouragement. Harlow decided to add raisins as a reward, thinking that a reward would make the monkeys perform even faster. Distracted by the raisin reward, the monkeys made more errors and had trouble solving the puzzle. Harlow concluded there must be a third factor to motivation (Pink, 2009b).

Karl Duncker and The Candle Problem

Moving from monkeys to people, Karl Duncker introduced the candle problem in 1931. Subjects were given a candle, matches, and a box of tacks and told to fix the candle to the wall so the wax does not drip. In order to solve the problem, a person must overcome what is called functional fixedness by taking the tacks out of the box so the box can be used to catch the wax (Pink, 2009a). The test found that if a subject was offered a reward to solve the candle problem, the subject took more time to figure it out then the subject not given a reward. To clarify, opposite of what Motivation 2.0 says, “the incentive intended to clarify thinking and sharpen creativity ended up clouding thinking and dulling creativity” (Pink, p. 42, 2009a). Rewards narrowed the subject’s thinking and put them in a functional fixedness so they could not see the new use for the box once the tacks were taken out. For routine left brain tasks, like the assembly line of the Industrial Revolution, rewards work. However, rewards can be harmful for right brain tasks that require creative and conceptual skills (Pink, 2009a).

Teresa Amabile and Artists

In 1993, Teresa Amabile, a professor at Harvard Business School tested the effects of extrinsic rewards on creativity. Professor Amabile had twenty-three professional artists each produce 10 pieces on commissioned work and 10 pieces of noncommissioned work. A panel of professional artists then rated the pieces on creativity and technical skill. The results showed that the artists in the study were restrained when commissioned and the works that were not commissioned were more creative (Pink, 2009b).

Contemporary Theories on Motivation

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Higher-Order Needs

Motivation 2.0 came under fire when researchers proposed there was more to human motivation. Maslow’s top three levels of the hierarchy pyramid indicates that human behavior was more than the seeking of positive stimuli and avoidance of negative stimuli. Maslow’s theory recognized a progression up the pyramid. After the lower two levels are satisfied, a person will be motivated to progress up the pyramid to satisfy higher order needs. At level three, a person is seeking social needs such as making friends, belonging, and love. Maslow recommended that managers provide a sense of community via team based work. At level four, a person is seeking esteem or the need to feel important. Managers can meet that need in the workplace by providing employees with recognition, appreciation, and value. At level five, people are seeking self-actualization through wisdom, truth, and justice. The workplace can meet these needs by providing challenges and opportunities (Maslow’s, n.d.)

Herzberg’s Two Factor Theory

In 1959, Fredrick Herzberg proposed the Two-Factor Theory of Motivation or the motivator-hygiene theory. Key to Herzberg’s theory is that the opposite