Successful Workforce: Employee Motivation, Reward System, and Skilled Managers

A Successful Workforce
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A Successful Workforce
Q1. You currently work for a medium-sized Canadian government department. Your manager, Christina (they/them) has just asked you to work on increasing employee motivation in your work group. They want you to identify and provide a motivational theory and the approach that you would present to your work group.
Employee motivation refers to the forces within individuals that affect the objectives, persistence, and intensity of their voluntary behavior. In essence, motivated employees exhibit diverse levels of intensity for a given time toward accomplishing desired goals (McShane et al., 2021). Employee motivation is an integral component of all organizations since it significantly increases commitment, which leads to improved performance. To be precise, an organization with a motivated workforce has a competitive advantage over its rivals since the output remains optimum.
One of the motivation theories that I would recommend to consolidate motivation in my work group is the four-drive theory, which encompasses drives, emotions, and needs. The theory states that motivation is rooted in emotions generated through four drives (McShane et al., 2021). The four drives comprise the drive to acquire, bond, comprehend, and defend. This implies that employees feel inspired to seek, control, and retain objects and personal experiences. This is critical as it considerably enhances employees' competence, status, and self-esteem. In addition, the four-drive theory cultivates and promotes a sense of belonging among employees and results in the upward trajectory of cooperation among employees. Equally critical, the four-drive approach triggers curiosity among employees and the broader need to reach their full potential. Lastly, applying the theory would pave the way for employees to protect themselves physically, psychologically, and socially. This is paramount since it cushions the possessions, self-concept, values, and welfare of all people involved. In short, the theory enables employees to seek the accomplishment of their innate drives. To make the theory work, I would suggest that our company provides incentives, learning opportunities, and social interactions to the employees.
Q2. You work on a team of creative people who collaborate to design and deliver unique products to the consumer market. Your manager offered a bonus to each team member who offered a creative idea that made it to market. The incentive failed miserably — the team actually became less productive. Explain why this reward system didn’t work and what kind of reward system would be more effective.
In any given organization, employees are the most valuable assets, which makes it imperative to institute mechanisms, such as rewards, to motivate them. Rewarding power, more often than not, is the preserve of managers, who distribute incentives, such as pay, promotions, and vacation schedules (McShane et al., 2021). Organizations with competitive reward systems manage to attract, retain, and motivate top-quality employees and teams. The contrary is true, and poor reward systems can have far-reaching implicatio...