How useful are content and process theories of motivation in explaining what really motivates people to work
In this essay I will look at various theories of motivation to see how useful they are. First I will give a brief description of what motivation is. Motivation is the term used to describe the things that make people do what they do. In this context, we are looking at what factors make workers work hard and what factors do not make them work hard.
Understanding these factors can be very complex but also very useful to a manager of a company. However, as many authors have noted, to understand motivation you need to understand human nature. Understanding human nature is something that many people have tried to do over the years. They all agree that it will take a lot more research to even come close to understanding human nature. This leads to the problem of understanding motivation and how useful it can be. Sometimes what motivates someone can be very simple, but it could equally be very complex. Factors that motivate differ from one individual to the other.
Different Theories
I will now briefly go over the difference between content and process theories of motivation. I will also give examples of the more famous theories that fall into the categories. I will start with content theory. Content theory is the theory that concentrates on what factors make the individual tick. This theory looks at what it is about people that make them want things and what will make them do or not do certain things. A paper on www.opax.swin.edu.au says that, ‘these theories suggest that people have certain needs and/or desires which have been internalised . (This means that as we have grown up we have learned that these are things that we want and need and we come to believe it so strongly that we think that it is a natural thing to want these things.)’ The main theories in this category are Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which identifies five levels of needs, and Hertzberg’s two-factor theory.
Process theory looks at how and by what goals a certain individual is motivated. Theories in this category look at what factors an individual is thinking about when they decide how much effort they put into a certain task. One of the main theories in this category is Vroom’s Expectancy Model. This model suggests that individuals choose different behaviour in order to achieve different levels of desired outcome.
How useful are the theories?
In this section I will look at reasons why motivation theories are useful and why they could not be useful. I will first look at the advantages of the motivational theories. The main reason why these motivation theories are useful is that they can be used to identify the main factors that help motivate the individual. This will mean that the organisation will perform better. This is supported by a paper by Ball (2003). In it he emphasizes that motivation theory, particularly that of Hertzberg, goes a long way to improving company performance. Another advantage is that the existing theories can be used to identify factors. This saves time and money on carrying out your own research. This time and money can be better used in other areas of the business. Another advantage is that motivation theories can be used to identify individuals that have good promotion prospects. If that individual is motivated by the correct factors such as achievement and success then this person could be a better individual for promotion compared to someone who is only motivated by the money and does not care about the job they are doing.
I will look at some reasons why motivation theories could not be useful. The main reason is that each individual is different from any other. This will mean that it will be difficult to place individuals into the same theory. Identifying the motivational factors for each individual will be time consuming. This is supported by Allen (1998) who says, ‘It is not an easy task to increase employee motivation because employees respond in different ways to their jobs and their organization’s practices’. Another reason is that of human nature. An individual could be placed in one theory and that decision could be a good one. Then one day the individual could just change his/her attitude for no good reason and the motivational factors change. This could mean that the job they were doing could now become more or less important to them. Another reason is that circumstances could change within the personal lives of the individual. This could mean that motivational factors of the individual are different. Another reason is that more than one motivational theory will need to be used. Sometimes different theories will have to be used together to identify the factors of motivation of the individual. Using these different theories in conjunction with one another will be time consuming, which will cost the company money.
Conclusion
In this essay I looked at different motivational theories. These were content theory, concentrating on what factors make the individual tick, and process theory, concentrating on how and by what goals a certain individual is motivated. I also looked at reasons why these theories could be considered useful or not. These reasons included the fact that existing theories can be used to identify many motivational factors saving time and money for the company. The main disadvantage was that each individual is different from the other and categorising them will be difficult and time consuming.
In conclusion, I can say that these theories have both usefulness and cause problems to the manager of a company when he/she is trying to identify motivational factors. I can say that they have more use than not because many individuals can be classified into the separate categories identified in the various theories. There will only be a few individuals whose motivational factors will be hard to identify.
Tags: behaviour, content, manager, motivation, motivational theories, organisation, performance
