Important information about Motivation

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One approach to help you with an essay assignment like this one is to address each question providing workplace examples to consider, which can help in writing your final copy. I also attached two resources, one of ways mangers can motivate employees and one APA sample paper for using to write your final copy.

RESPONSE:

1. Choose one of the theories from the Motivation Concepts Table and describe how this theory would and would not be applicable if applied to two or more workplace situations drawn from your personal experience.

Let's go with Drive theory of motivation as the least helpful to explain workplace behavior.

Motivation theories are many; but putting them into practice is often extremely challenging (Stringfellow, 1999, 2009). Freud described four characteristics of each instinctual drive:

1. A source: internal body stimulation. This differs from an external stimulation by coming from the body itself rather than from the environment, by being constant and recurring rather than episodic, and by being inescapable.
2. Impetus: force or energy, which is a function of the intensity of the need.
3. An aim to end the stimulation which gave rise to it. This is satisfying. Intermediary steps towards ending the stimulation may be sought if they are perceived as leading to the desired end state.
4. An object: anything that will abolish the stimulation. This assumes that there is no innate link between any instinct and any given object (Korman, 1974)

In fact, Bolles (1975) summarized Freud's ideas as follows: "Instinctual drives are characterized by their energy or impulse to action. Men learn to attain certain objects or goals that make possible the discharge of this energy". However, Freud believed these "energies" were of the sexual nature, which hardly seems applicable to the workplace.

In fact, this theory also seems the less likely to apply to workplace motivation based on one of the main criticism that has been proposed at drive theories as explanations of motivation is that they add little to simple descriptions of behaviour: "To say that ... an individual takes a job because he has an instinct [drive] to work is merely to give a redundant description of the observed behavior that adds nothing to our understanding of why the behavior took place" (Lawler, 1973, as cited in Gray, 2000). Therefore, it ...