The Socializing Organization and Motivating Workers

Check Your Understanding

1. Define the qualities of a motivating job. Discuss skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback in your response. With which are you most familiar? Discuss your experience.

Exercises

2. Quality of Worklife (QWL) programs typically provide flextime, job sharing, and a compressed workweek. However, you have been given the task of job redesign for your department and you must institute a new QWL program that will provide increased job enrichment. The objective of your program is to make work more interesting.

3. Place your work environment in an outdoor setting. For example, you might create a work environment in which you work with several bridge inspectors and you have decided that work could be made more interesting if your group of workers wore rainbow colored jumpsuits in place of their business suits while performing inspections.

4. Explain how you would overcome objections and handle the diverse opinions of the workers in your group in implementing your new program. Remember, this is your opportunity to be creative. Be imaginative.

5. Explore the possibilities. The objective is to exercise your creative thinking muscles while exploring the application of what you have learned in this module.

Professional Development

6. What are some rules of thumb about motivating people at work? Provide some examples where you have witnessed the successful motivation of a co-worker. What methodology was used to motivate the individual?

Issues to Consider

7. Each individual worker may be motivated by different things. How will you meet the needs of a diverse workforce?
Discussion

8. What limitations and/or boundaries are there on the ability of a manager to successfully motivate his/her employees? How can these be overcome? For example, budgets may prohibit using money as a motivator.