ME2 Management and Business for Engineers

LECTURE 4: MOTIVATION
LECTURE OBJECTIVES
To examine some of the major theories of motivation and their application to
work organisations.

1. Introduction
It has been seen in earlier lectures that the major reason for working in industrial
and commercial organisations is money. Put crudely, people are motivated to go
to work (and put up with the stress and inconvenience involved) because they
need the cash. Certainly this was the view of F. W. Taylor, who placed money
incentives at the heart of his system. Similarly, Henry Ford’s response to high
levels of labour turnover at his Highland Park plant was to double the rate of pay
from $2.50 a day to $5 a day. Not only did labour turnover decline but the plant
was besieged by some 10,000 men (many of whom had spent their last dollar to
get to the plant) who wanted a job at the new rate!
Having said this, however, money is not the whole story and, in any case, does not
always motivate workers. High rates of pay and regular pay increases do not
necessarily lead to increased productivity. Even Taylor and Ford were aware that
workers were motivated by factors other than cash: pride in the job, the desire to
be associated with a winning team or a successful product, cultural expectations
and conditioning… all influence motivation. As was seen in Lecture 3, as early as
the 1930s Elton Mayo argued that non-financial incentives, such as friendly
supervision and pleasant working arrangements, were key elements in promoting
high levels of motivation and therefore production.
There is now a consensus in management circles that worker motivation is a
complex issue and not entirely a question of cash.

2. Abraham Maslow and the hierarchy of needs

Maslow outlined his hierarchy of needs theory of human motivation as early as
1943 and continued to use it as a basis for his academic work until his sudden
death in 1970. He claimed that human needs or desires are arranged
hierarchically and that the appearance of one need usually rests on the prior
satisfaction of what he termed another ‘prepotent’ need. He also argued that
human beings are ‘perpetually wanting’ animals.
Maslow identified five sets of basic goals which he termed needs. These, he
claimed, were arranged in ascending order starting at the base with physiological
needs and rising through safety needs, love needs, esteem needs and, finally,

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what he called self-actualisation. Maslow placed self actualisation at the top of

the hierarchy, arguing that that this was the state that to which every
individual was in some way aspiring. Even if the physiological, safety, love and
esteem needs are all more or less satisfied, as he puts it (in somewhat idealistic
terms), ‘we may still often (if not always) expect a new restlessness will soon
develop, unless the individual is doing what s/he is fitted for. A musician must
make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write if s/he is to be ultimately
happy. What a person can be, s/he must be. This need we may call self-
actualisation… the desire to become more and more what one is, to become
everything that one is capable of becoming’ (Maslow, 1943, 382).
Maslow was careful not to claim too much for his theory. For example, he was
ready to concede that the hierarchy of needs might be subject to variation
depending on individual circumstances. In some cases the drive for the higher
needs might be totally lacking. As he put it,
“in certain people the level of aspiration may be permanently deadened or
lowered. That is to say, the less prepotent goals may simply be lost, and
may disappear forever, so that the person who has experienced life at a very
low level… may continue to be satisfied for the rest of their life if only s/he
can get enough food” (Maslow, 1943, 386).
Further, some variation in the extent and order of needs was likely to occur as a
result of variations between societies. Having said all of this, however, Maslow
was confident that the hierarchy of needs illuminated significant truths
concerning human motivation. In his later years, Maslow became increasingly
frustrated by what he saw as a wilful refusal on the part of his fellow Americans to
self-actualise or to share his conception of life as a process of ‘becoming’. Basically
he was reacting against the rising tide of consumerism. We will examine this
phenomenon in the next lecture in the context of innovation and marketing.

3. The managerial implications of the hierarchy of needs

By the 1960s there was a growing awareness in the West that the techniques of
scientific management and mass production often led to frustrated workers and
poor levels of quality and productivity. As has been seen in earlier lectures, the
imperatives of efficiency and control required workers merely to do as they were
told by management. Spontaneity, creativity, and innovative action were largely
banished, not only for blue-collar workers on the assembly track but also for
white-collar staff employed in bureaucracies.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory suggested that many of the higher needs, not
least self-actualisation, could not be met under the prevailing systems of
management. Inspired by Maslow, advanced management thinking began to
emphasise a more constructive approach to supervision and job design that

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encouraged workers to identify with (and even internalise) the goals of the
organisation. The aim was to reduce frustration and enhance satisfaction by
enabling workers to fulfil their need for self esteem, and even self actualise,
through their job.
In the strangely titled Eupsychian Management (1965) Maslow applied the insights
of humanistic psychology to the relationships between managers and workers
and developed the notion of ‘enlightened management’. The outcome of
enlightened management he claimed could be wholly beneficial, not only for
business or managers or workers but for an entire society. As he put it:
“highly evolved individuals assimilate their work into the identity into the
self, i.e., work actually becomes part of the individual’s definition of the
self.… This is of course a circular relationship to some extent, i.e., given
fairly o.k. people to begin with, in a fairly good organisation, then work
tends to improve the people. This tends to improve the industry, which in
turn tends to improve the people involved, and so it goes. This is the
simplest way of saying that proper management of the work lives of human
beings, of the way in which they earn their living, can improve them and
improve the world and in this sense be a utopian or revolutionary
technique” (Maslow, 1965/1998, 1).

Frederick Herzberg and motivation — hygiene theory

Herzberg developed his motivation–hygiene theory during the 1950s and 60s, as
noted above a period of economic expansion in the West in the years before the
onset of serious competition from the emerging Asian economies. He set out to
discover what workers really wanted from their jobs. In part at least his research
was inspired by the fact that generous pay and working conditions were
apparently failing to motivate American workers. Herzberg had trained as a
psychologist and his early work was concerned with mental health. He published
his research findings in two major books, The Motivation to Work (1959) and Work
and the Nature of Man (1966). However, he gained the greatest publicity for his
ideas in his 1968 article the Harvard Business Review, One More Time: How Do You
Motivate Your Employees? which sold over a million copies.
Herzberg set up a series of interviews in which workers were asked when they felt
exceptionally good about their jobs and when they felt exceptionally bad. It
might be thought that good and bad would be polar opposites and could
therefore be placed at opposite ends of a continuum. In the event, however, this
was not the case. Instead, good and bad sprang from two quite different sets of
phenomena. As Herzberg commented many years later, ‘people are made
dissatisfied by bad environment, the extrinsics of the job. They are made satisfied
by the intrinsics of what they do, what I call motivators’.

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Briefly, Herzberg identified the extrinsics as such things as pay, supervision,

interpersonal relationships, physical working conditions and a sense of fairness in
the allocation of work and rewards. Herzberg termed these things the hygiene
factors. If the hygiene factors were poor then attitudes to the job would be
negative. Although improving the hygiene factors could reduce dissatisfaction
and produce a satisfied worker, such improvements would not produce a
motivated worker.
Motivation, Herzberg argued, came from the intrinsics, the sense of achievement
the worker experienced in carrying out the job. As he put it, following Maslow,
‘the profoundest motivation to work comes from the recognition of individual
achievement and from the sense of personal growth in responsibility’. Herzberg
did not rule out the possibility of an individual being motivated to work through
a group or team. He was, however, scathing about bureaucracy. The framework
of rules encountered in a bureaucracy must, he argued, inhibit the opportunities
to exercise personal judgement and therefore ‘decrease the available amount of
motivation’.
Herzberg’s formula for improving the motivation of workers was a programme of
job enrichment, thereby reversing the tendency to ‘degrade’ work which he
claimed had occurred during the previous century. Jobs should be designed in
such a way as to ensure that ‘the individual should have some measure of control
over the way in which the job is done in order to realise a sense of personal
growth’. Herzberg’s work was immensely influential and the terms job satisfaction
and job enrichment became part of received management wisdom.

5. B.F. Skinner and operant conditioning

Maslow and Herzberg both emphasised the value of human freedom, enabling
workers to maximise choice and create themselves through their work. A
radically different approach was advocated by the behavioural psychologist B.F.
Skinner. Perhaps the best known example of behaviourism is the theory of
classical conditioning developed by Pavlov and contained in his book Conditioned
Reflexes published in 1927. Basically Pavlov demonstrated that an instinctive
reflex could be ‘conditioned’. In Pavlov’s case, he conditioned dogs to salivate
when they heard a bell in the expectation of receiving food. Basically the
instinctive reflex of salivation had been separated from the arrival of food to
merely the expectation of it triggered by a sound. There are many examples from
life which demonstrate the way in which our own responses have been
conditioned because of previous experiences of pain, guilt or fear. Sitting in a
dentist’s waiting room and hearing the sound of the drill may stimulate an
increase in our blood pressure or heart rate even though we are not experiencing
any pain. Some of these issues will be examined further when we look at the
impact of stress in a later lecture.

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Skinner was the pioneer of programmed learning. In his book Walden 2,

published in 1948, he argued that, ideally, human beings should be systematically
subjected to the techniques of psychological reinforcement in order to create a
better society. In a later book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) he rejected the
view that human beings can be autonomous (i.e. free) and therefore responsible
for their actions. Briefly, he shifted the emphasis to the environment and to the
outcomes of conditioning. Skinner studied the effects of reward and punishment
on animal learning and demonstrated the power and control of rather simple
learning principles — the identification of a stimulus and reward following a
successful response. He applied these principles in the process he termed
shaping, whereby behaviour is shaped through a series of small but successive
steps with rewards given for those responses which approximate to the desired
end result. This process he termed operant conditioning and it is widely used in
modern organisations — not least in the process of appraisal which we will
examine when we deal with organisational culture.

6. Putting the bits together: Edwin Locke and goal-setting theory

In 1980, Edwin Locke and his associates published the results of an extensive
survey comparing the impact of various management techniques on the
motivation of workers. In the period since Herzberg had carried out his research,
tougher times had arrived in the West and many workers — rather like the
situation today — were under pressure. Not surprisingly, perhaps, financial
incentives scored well in Locke’s survey (reflecting the arrival of less idealistic
attitudes?) and money regained its credibility as a motivational factor. Locke did
not conclude that money was the only motivator but nevertheless recognised its
significance as the medium that allowed individuals to choose how to satisfy their
needs.
Locke later developed a technique of worker motivation based on goal-setting.
The basic premise of goal theory is that people will strive to achieve goals in order
to satisfy their emotions and desires. Goals act as a guide people’s responses and
actions and therefore can direct work behaviour and performance and lead to
specific outcomes. Locke argued for the development and setting of targets for
workers to accomplish, the more specific the target the better the response was
likely to be. Goals should be set so as to challenge (but not exceed) an
individual’s abilities and the individual should be able to monitor progress
through regular feedback. Incentives, both financial and non-financial, were
necessary to reward the meeting of goals. Goal-setting combined the common
sense ideas of the scientific managers with the insights of human relations
thinkers such as Maslow and Herzberg and the behaviourist approach of Skinner.
The customary way of monitoring this involves the use of regular appraisal. As
Bratton and Gold put it:-

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“In recent years, appraisal has become a key feature of an organization’s

drive for competitive advantage through continuous performance
improvement. In many organizations, this has resulted in the development
of integrated performance management systems… Appraisal therefore
acts as an information-processing system providing data for rational,
objective, efficient decision making regarding improving performance,
identifying training needs, managing careers and setting levels of reward”
(Bratton and Gold, 1999, 214).

7. Post-script — personality and psychometric testing

Motivation is linked to personality and employment recruiters often use various
psychometric tests to ‘measure’ personality traits and, by extension, motivation.
Personality, in the words of Huczynski and Buchanan, ‘refers to the psychological
qualities that influence an individual’s characteristic behaviour patterns, in a
distinctive and consistent manner, across different situations and over time’ (2001,
143). Psychometrics is the area of psychology concerned with systematic testing,
measurement and assessment of intelligence, aptitudes and personality. There
are many tests related to particular occupations, an example being the British
Army Recruitment Battery or BARB test. The various tests have been the subject
of criticism regarding their predictive value and accuracy. Nevertheless, they are
widely used, particularly in the area of selecting appropriate candidates for jobs.

Sample examination questions

1. “Money provides the main source of motivation for most workers in
organisations”. Discuss this statement in the light of the management
thinkers you have studied.
2. In what ways might Abraham Maslow’s ideas influence how managers seek
to motivate workers?
3. Critically examine the theories of Frederick Herzberg on motivation at work.

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