Modern business environments are highly competitive, and organisations are encouraged to motivate their employees to obtain the best results. An individual considered as a leader should act as an example to inspire junior workers to realise the better outcomes for the organisation. In this regard, adoption of democratic styles of leadership as opposed to autocratic models whereby the senior management employs a strict policy to control members of staff is one of the ways of motivating people in the workplace.
In many cases, situational leadership is the best in encouraging groups and teams to surpass the set targets. This means that the leader or the manager aspires to design policies and principles based on the views of the majority instead of forcing followers to abide by the set rules and regulations (Youssef, & Noon, 2012). Another way of motivating others in the workplace is issuing incentives, irrespective of whether they are financial or non-financial.
The best strategy to enhance motivation is to employ the policy that would ensure happiness. This means any policy formulated has to focus on improving performance of the organisation, an individual employee, and all stakeholders. Members of staff have various aspirations and ambitions to fulfil, and the best way to facilitate happiness is aligning individual expectations to those of the entire organisation.
For instance, taking employees for further training is one of the ways of ensuring that the best results are realised because less time would be spent doing something. Additionally, training allows efficiency given the fact an individual would carry out his or her functions easily. A trained employee is manageable because the chances of making errors are reduced. Through this, each person would be happy leading to goal attainment in the organisation.
Fredrick Taylor and Abraham Maslow were the two theorists to have talked about motivation in the workplace extensively. According to Taylor, an employee is mostly motivated in case financial rewards are given. In his analysis, an employee is not always focused on accomplishing organisational tasks and close supervision is highly recommended to ensure better results are achieved.
In this regard, organisational tasks should be broken down into manageable units (McGregor, 2006). Employees are to be given sufficient training to facilitate efficiency and effectiveness. In other words, specialisation is needed in the workplace, and training is the best way to facilitate this. The payment structure should be based on the work done, since this would encourage the best performing employees while discouraging laziness.
On his part, Maslow talked about the five levels of human needs, claiming that each employee is focused on fulfilling them. The employee cannot move on to attain the higher need without first realising the lesser one meaning the needs regulate and motivate workers to produce the best results in the work place. In his view, giving employees both financial and non-financial incentives would offer them an opportunity to perform well.
Financial rewards play a critical role in encouraging members of the staff to accomplish the desired tasks. According to both Maslow and Taylor, money motivates employees to work hard since they always want to earn more.
However, Maslow suggested that employees aspiring to accomplish lower needs would be interested in monetary rewards, but those wishing to achieve high results are interested in non-financial rewards (Maslow, 1987). In this regard, financial rewards are not the best in inspiring senior managerial staff. For Taylor, financial rewards are the best in improving the performance of the organisation, but his view suggested that human beings are similar to machines.
References
Maslow, A. (1987). Motivation and Personality. New Delhi, India: Pearson Education.
McGregor, D. (2006). The Human Side of Enterprise. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006.
Youssef, C. & Noon, A. (2012). Industrial/organizational psychology. New York: Bridge point Education.