Motivation and Performance Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Motivation and Performance - Essay Example In fact the intrinsic motivation is preferable as the employee develops affinity with the organization and considers the welfare of the organization to be his wellbeing. This improves his productivity and performance since it will go along with his satisfaction. Such employees are also loyal to the company's cause. In contrast the employee who looks for extrinsic motivation becomes greedy in anticipation and looks for alternatives to promote his own wellbeing. Two academic articles have been put up for review. Seijts, G.H., Latham, G.P., Tasa, K. & Latham, B.W. (2004) in their article "Goal setting and goal orientation: An integration of two different yet related literatures" published in the Academy of Management Journal suggest that goal orientation and goal setting are two different fields that are unfortunately considered as one composite by most authors. In their view this does not augur well in establishing that motivation and devotion are the causative elements of better performance by employees. They argue that goal setting does not take into consideration the level of preparedness or personality of the employee who is expected to benefit out of it and in turn the company does not gain in terms of better productivity. In their view goal orientation paves the way for better understanding of the goals set and help to eventually realize the same to benefit both the employee as well as the organization. They have gone on to state that self-efficacy and quest for information act as a go-between the effect of a learning goal on performance. In their final view they confirm that their results were based on a single industry that was service oriented. For this they have relied on empirical research and have applied the same with their well explained theories. Two of the authors - Latham and Latham- have written profusely on the subject in various other publications and have covered the subject widely. On the other hand Marsden, D. (2004) has relied on the case studies of non-profit companies, to write "The role of performance-related pay in renegotiation the "effort bargain".' published in the Industrial & Labor Relations Review. His research of mostly state owned or controlled companies led him to the conclusion that although rewards and schemes that result from goal setting have been quite successful, the motivation of the participants was not a contributory factor in the end result. This appears contradictory but the author has rather convincingly proven his point in case using the empirical evidence with subjective questioning that brought out this fact. He has correctly diagnosed that the leaders and managers are under the wrong impression that their performance related schemes have borne results out of motivation despite the results being according to their expectations. He however is not reluctant to state that the out come of performance related pay has resulted in higher productivity due more to the smart use of the management ploy. Indeed it appears that this scheme has been rather well exploited by the employees and they have been able to use it as a tool to negotiate better deals for themselves. While the managements have been convinced that performance related pay has improved the productivity in services, the real fact is that the employees have craftily used this as a lever to