The five levels of employee motivation

Title

Impact of economic stability on the employee’s motivational levels and sustainability

Aim

The aim of this research is to find the strategies and theories of motivation for economic stability and sustainability of Sumudra Technologies Pvt Ltd employees and explore the effectual ways by examining the factors that employees made their decisions for their development.

Introduction

Motivation amplifies as employees or team members take pleasure in one another and struggle not to let each other down. For motivating employees organizations must always work to support employees for their sustainability and for their financial growth. Satisfied and happy employees about their work are motivated to work better in an organization. Other factors also play a vital role in motivating employees then pay rates. Therefore management must do best to make available an environment of work which increases employee satisfaction even if the market is in uncertain conditions. Then economic instabilities would never affect organizations employees’ bank. The Hawthorne study proves this point after conducting a research on the employee productivity and its effects on working environment (William M. Pride, Robert J. Hughes and Jack R. Kapoor, 2009). Motivation leads to higher productivity and longer sustainability of employees in an organization. As self motivating is crucial for employees it is also necessary for organizations to ensure that their employees are motivated. To some level, a great level of motivating employees obtains from valuable management practices. Hence this research will identify the strategies in order to motivate employees under economic instability conditions. Therefore choosing this topic for conducting research will help to learn and experience the practical conditions of employees in economic crises. Example for this topic is Sumudra Technologies Pvt Ltd.

Sumudra Technologies Pvt Ltd

Sumudra Technologies Pvt Ltd is a service provider of web designing and development. Company believes in thoughts as the starting and ending of all creative work. This is a total creative workshop handling a to z things of internet and intranet solutions including ASP, PHP, ASP.NET, website and brochure design and development etc. It is situated in London, and servicing to provide complete end to end internet solutions to customer’s requirements. Major services provided by the company are web designing and development, graphic design and SEO services, to provide these services with the best technology based solutions, company has to maintain speed in terms of following latest technological changes with the support of their employees.

A discussion on the Sumudra technologies pvt Ltd issue

As discussed above, it is one of the best companies to provide best internet solutions to the customers in London and it also worries about its employees pay packages due to the fear of their productivity and sustainability in their company. Though, from the employee’s perspective over a 3years there was about 86% higher total return to shareholder for the companies which have maintained elevated levels of trust evaluated to those with low levels of trust (Watson Wyatt, 2002). Regional or global strategies of sustainability of employees should be chosen wisely by companies. Strategies chosen according to the regional requirements would give fruitful results to companies or to individuals (SAS, 2008). Hence, company should improve its strategies of motivation and sustainability to pace according to the new changing market conditions in order to overcome the hurdles of market situations. This research work will give valuable information on how company can improve its strategies to motivate its employees.

Literature Review

Motivation

Motivation is a drive which leads people towards achieving their goals. It’s a enthusiasm and determination with a kind of excitement that directs one to continue to achieve greater heights, whether it is personal or professional. Motivating oneself is a continuous requirement for constant growth. Kanfer (1990) says that it is a imaginary construct that cannot be seen or cannot be felt. People can observe the impacts that are indicative of various motivation levels. Another author Pinder (1998) resolves the direction, form, strength, and duration of work-related behavior. He argues that by observing these dimensions of behavior, one can make conclusions about the effects of motivation on employee’s behavior (Steve M. Jex, 2002). This is a crucial factor because in economic instability of the present market conditions it’s very important to have a workforce with high spirits of motivation. This is a factor which normally produces results that are incompatible to study the employee behavior. It can also be defines as the quality of actions, initiation, persistence and it can be categorized with their comparative constructs, goals and strategies. Strategies are the techniques used to get the goals and therefore to assure the goals and motives are the direct objectives of specific sequences of employee behavior. It is all about an individual moving towards the goal to understand the thing that sends them into deed. Intrinsic and extracts are the two types of motivation. These two types help to achieve and develop skills of a particular species. Jere E. Brophy (2004) says that motivation is differed from its related parts called goals, approaches which are used to achieve aimed goals and objectives. It is used to boost people to initiate useful activity sequences. Motivation is considered as an important factor in making employees upbeat and down to business which results in increasing organizations output.

Levels of motivation

Motivating employees would be a challenging task for management. The decision on how dedicated and committed will be an employee towards the company will totally depend on the individual employee. Here management of Sumudra technologies need to understand that applying one strategy to all employees cannot help to motivate everyone in the organization. While looking at the levels of motivation Maslow’s hierarchy theory of needs has helped us to guide to recognize what to look for management with their employees.

Level 1: Security and safety

Employees need to be assured about their safety and security at the work place; management must provide security services and create an fear free environment.

Level 2: Incentives

This is a level which is known by every individual. Most of the people don’t work after winning a huge amount of reward. With this perception companies try to satisfy the compensation and benefits requirements of employee’s.

Level 3: Affiliation

This level discusses about the sense of belongingness. It contains being in the know and being part of the team. This is too a variance in professional and personal values can have a great affect on the motivation of employees.

Level 4: Development

Employees wish to have the faith that success is taking place. They feel secure, obtain all the money they want to earn and feel part of the group. But if there are no development opportunities employees think about absconding from the organization.

Level 5: Life or Work Harmony

Employees may have all types of rewards which are desired by them, but they will burn out closer or later if employees don’t have the sufficient time to spend it on the other things they desire for (Derik Mocke, 2010). Therefore it is advisable to be aware of these five levels of motivation of employees when management employ with their employees. Company should assess what are the needs and desires of every individual employee before applying these levels in their organization. Employ with every individual and explain them about the various levels and inquire them where employees find themselves suitable on the pyramid. Engaging with greater teams and eventually with the entire company about the levels of motivation of employee etc are some points which are to be remembered when management engages these five levels with their employees. This needs a detail discussion which will be done in the research dissertation project. As there are six more steps to high levels of motivation. This needs to be discussed in detail in order to understand the intensity of motivation factor when applied on employees.

Theories of motivation

Motivation of human beings is a study which has been carried from past many years. But none of them were not developed to explain employee behavior at workplace or were they practical enough to apply in the working environment. The following are some theories which specially explain motivation for employees. Theories of motivation are categorized into four:

• Require based theories explains work motivation in terms of the level to which employees satisfy their necessary needs at the place of work.
• Job based theories rest the resource of motivation majorly in the content of jobs that employees execute.
• Cognitive procedure theories highlight the decisions and choices that employees make when they distribute their attempts.
• Lastly behavioral approach highlights principles of learning. These will be discussed in detail in the research dissertation.

Motivation and Communication

Motivation is depended on having clear goals and objectives. As motivation is personal, goal is align staff’s individual constrains with the companies uses in common and units in specific. Motivation can be done through communication organizational goals correctly to the employees (John Kotter, 1995). Author says to analyze how much communication of the vision is required, and then multiply that attempt with ten. He mentions that management should not limit to the meeting rooms. Actions adjoined with words are powerful communicators of the fresh ways. Here one needs to understand that transformation effort will fail if most of the employees doesn’t understand, realize, commit and try to make the effort occur. The principle behind this is utilize every possible communication channel and opportunity to motivate in order to achieve the organizational goals. Teach fresh behaviors by showing the example of the guiding coalition team to the company’s employees. Communication at the workplace can acquire numerous forms and has a lasting cause on motivation of employee. If employees feel that communication from organization is valuable it can show the way to feelings of employee work satisfaction, loyalty towards the company and increase trust at the workplace. This is an area of which a detail research and review is required. This will be done in dissertation part.

Process of motivating employees

Some standards are required to motivate the employees to achieve the objectives (quality) and to continue improvements and growth of the organization. Achievements of an organization completely depend upon the workforce and its activities so the organization will recruit the staffs who are motivated to attain the organization goals. Motivation is a key to the performance where it depends upon the environment, motivation and ability to perform the task. Motivation can be simply defined as it is an inner mental state to prompt intensity, directions and persistence. The proposed dissertation will explain about the motivation process which operates inside the individuals (Marjaana Gunkel, 2006).

From the diagram motivation occurs if the employees satisfies their personal requirements and also work expectation from the company. Usually any employee can be motivated if an organization recognizes his efforts and appreciation and hence they can feel like, they are the main part of an organization or team.

This process also explains about the barriers which affect the motivation process like job related, goal related, fear of failures, suspect of management, not a challenging environment, little respect, no rewards, no responsibilities. So the manager has to motivate the employees by removing these barriers to achieve the organization goals. Employees can be motivated if proper training and counseling sessions should be conducted to improve the process under the controlled conditions (David Hoyle, 2000).

Sumundra technologies are also providing the motivation process to increase the employee capabilities in order to enhance the business prospects. Here the employees should have proper communication skills because this organization majorly deals with the customers throughout the world so better understanding of the customer requirements is very important. So the staff should have good communication skills to interact with the various customers and they ought to know American and UK accent to understand the clients without any disappointments (David Hoyle, 2000).

Culture and leadership

Culture is defined as learning values, norms, symbols, beliefs, traditions which are common to the group of people. Sharing these qualities of a group will make people unique. According to gudykunst and ting Toomey (1988), culture is the way of different customs, different scripts of group and their lives. Whereas nature of the leadership itself is the complex and it can be defined as stepping forward to solve the problems by sheer force of will. It is the influenced relationship between the followers and the leaders who plan for real revolution and outcomes to replicate their shared purpose (Richard L. Daft, 2007).

The main important task that the leaders can do is, managing and creating the culture in addition to this they (leader) also have the capability to understand the work with culture.

Studying the organizational culture can be focused more on performance and behavior of an employee than the values. If the interaction or the communication between the employees and management is good then the organization culture could be created. If it not good then the culture of an organization has to be changed inside and outside of an organization. But changing the organizational culture is not an easy task and it takes more time through the relationship of individuals and interactions (Mary J. Davis, 2000).

Proposed dissertation will give a detailed description about the culture and leadership definitions and with some examples. It also discusses about the organizational cultures and how will be the organization if it does not maintain proper leaderships and culture inside and outside the company, how it effects on the present economy will be discussed.

Present sumundra technologies are maintaining proper culture and leadership qualities among themselves. This is a corporate culture and they are completely aware of how to behave, how to understand, how to manage the things, how to communicate, how to work in a team. Their managerial staff also recognizes what the present culture is expecting, and how to nurture and feed the current culture is. Here the corporate changes has been occurred and is successful because of its good team work and proper leadership. From this I can say that culture can effect on a strong leader. And if and only if the culture and leadership of an organization is maintained well then that particular organization can give best customer satisfaction and good customer service.

Psychological contract levels and factors

Rousseau, D.M. (1989) describes psychological contract as an entity’s belief in mutual compulsions among this entity or person and another person or party, like employer. This faith is forecasted on the perception that an exchange of promises have been prepared to which the parties are vault. Tekleab (2003) in the book Supervisor Psychological Contracts Management suggests designing realistic job previews to comprise data on employee obligations and socialization agendas to contain information on company’s obligations. Psychological contract levels and individual factors that influence data formation of the contract are discussed by many authors in their articles. Like in the same book Vos et al (2005), views at how work values and locus of manage or control influenced data seeking during socialization. He also agrees that individual factors influence psychological contract level developments. But these factors are of limited significance when talking about psychological contract levels which intends to indentify organizational and supervisor chances to make easy positive psychological contracts (Maida Petersitzke, 2009). A 3rd group of extra-organizational factors contains wider political, economic and legal changes that in turn form observations of the psychological contract (Neil Conway and Rob B. Briner, 2005). Psychological contracts would be operationalised from a diversity of viewpoints. A prior cut on operationalization happens with the decision whether to focus or not on the aspects of the psychological contract considered to simplify across persons and settings. And a 2nd cut on the operationalization happens with the decision of whether to concentrate upon content, characteristics, evaluations. This refers to the terms and elements which have the contract (Rousseau, D.M. and Tijoriwala, S.A., 1998).

Economic Circumstances

Economic conditions play a major role in motivating employees and in creating sustainability. Assessment, tax rates, revenues, municipal debt, financial assets like development charge accounts, reserve funds, complete fire protection system charges, employment and unemployment conditions, previous and present political philosophy regarding the budget up/downs, borrowing, etc, loss affect of one employer, main industry institution, barriers to rebuilding like zoning and climatic needs are some of the economic circumstances which effects the employees (Ontario, 2010). For example decreasing prices have not allowed decreasing nominal pensions in a way of prevailing monetary circumstances. So for the time being undoing the move from payment to price indexation would result in the level of pension waiting, comparative to national income, anticipated for the year 2008 was attained in 2002. This is presented by Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (2004).

Perceptual Process

Perception or awareness is a process through which people choose, systematize, understand and react to data from the world in the region of theirs. This is the data which is collected from the 5 senses like hearing, seeing, touching, tasting and smelling. It responds to the psychological process whereby people take data from the atmosphere and make sense of their particular worlds (Don Hellriegel and John W. Slocum, 2007). Perceptual process permits management to test their present level of perceptual expertise. Perception engages several sub-processes like Stimuli, attention, translation, recognition, behavior, performance and satisfaction etc are some of the things which takes place only after giving some attention to them (Perception, 2010). Sumudra Techonologies pvt ltd has to know and understand all these procedures and processes to motivate and sustain their existing employees.

Conclusions

According to the discussion happened above makes clear that there are some questions which have risen out from the initial literature review:

• There is a minute literature which examines theories of motivation.
• There is also a minute literature that investigates theories and processes of motivation with respect to Sumudra technologies.
• There is no literature that evaluates Sumudra Technologies management in detail.
• There is no discussion about the surveys of relationship between motivation and communication.
• There is no research that scrutinizes the benefits of motivating employees by Sumudra Technologies Company.
• There is also no literature that revises the gap of perceptual apprehension recruitment management among management and employees concurrently.
• There is no discussion done on the sustainability benefits which can be earned if Sumudra technologies motivate their employees in down turn economic situations too.

• Therefore, this proposal proposes the following objectives for the proposed dissertation:

• To find out the effect of economic instability on the Sumudra Technologies employees motivation levels.
• To identify the advantages of motivating employees in Sumudra Technologies Pvt Ltd.
• To examine the sustainability aspect of employees in detail.
• To study the various elements of motivation theories and levels in order to fulfill the proposed aim for the dissertation.
• To suggest Sumudra Technologies to the way that it’s motivational strategies are able to manage employees effectively. Hence there is need for conducting enough research on this topic to know the sustainability and motivational levels of employees to be consistent in this company.

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