Significant Motivators to Employees

In an organization, human resource always plays an important role to the activities and achievement of company's goal. How to arouse employees' performance, to make them work more effectively is a critical element to the success of an organization. Also, to contain the elitist employees is what management should do in order to achieve higher goals.

Over the decades, the topic of motivation and satisfaction in the workplace has been studied by industrial and organizational psychologists (Locke and Latham, 1990). In different decades, there are different comments on the motivators to people. The factors of motivation can simply divided into monetary and non-monetary.

Objective

The objective of this paper is to discuss that the implement of monetary rewards or financial encouragement is a significant motivator to the employees to achieve higher satisfaction and commitment. Also, there is some discussion about how the organizations can motivate their staff to achieve higher performance. There will be some analysis of the situation in Hong Kong.

Review of Relevant Literature

Motivation is in a psychological basic which is the reason behind human behaviors. There are several reasons including basic needs, an object, goal, state of being or ideal and morality (Deci & Ryan, 1985). According to Geen (1995), motivation is concerned with the influences that govern the "initiation, direction, intensity, and persistence of behavior". Motivation can be defined as the willingness to exert high levels of effort toward organizational goals, conditioned by the effort's ability to satisfy some individual need and is a view of personal trait as some have or some might not have it (Robbins and Coulter 1998).

The general definition of motivation was identified by Mitchell (1982) into four common characteristics which underlined his definition of motivation as 'the degree to which an individual wants and chooses to engage in certain specified behaviours'(p.82). Mitchell believed that every person is unique. The theories of motivation allow for this uniqueness to be demonstrated in one way or another. Thus, motivation is a kind of individual phenomenon. Also, he pointed out that motivation is an intentional behaviour which is assumed to be under one's control and behaviours of action. From his point of view, motivation is multi-faceted, where there are two factors with greatest importance. First, is the factor to get people activated or arousal, and second is the force of an individual to engage in desired behaviour, i.e. direction or choice of behaviour. The last characteristic described by Mitchell is that the theories of motivation are aimed to have prediction on people's behaviours. Motivation is not the behaviour itself, nor a performance. Instead, action and internal and external forces that influence the individual