Motivation in the Workplace

Essay from the year 2002 in the subject Leadership and Human Resources - Miscellaneous, grade: 1,3 (A), Frankfurt School of Finance & Management (-), language: English, abstract: "e;Motivation is the process of stimulation an individual to takeaction that will accomplish a desired goal. (Barron s; 236) Theword motivation comes from the Latin word movere , which means tomove or to urge. There are numerous definitions of motivation, whichis logical, because there are many different personalities that aremotivated through different factors, as well as there exist variousmotivation theories and programs. Motivation is getting moreimportant every day since the competition in the workplace isincreasing on a daily basis as well as the unemployment rate. Management has to find an effective way of motivate not onlythemselves, but more to motivate their employees, thereforemanagement has to take into account theories and has to consider thedifferences in personality of its workforce, to imply a successfulmotivation program. The first theorist, which has to be taken into account, wasFrederick W Taylor (1856 1915) who believed that only throughmaximal worker productivity economic prosperity could be achievedwhich in turn would be the product of making employees moreefficient. Taylor is also known as the Father of scientificmanagement ; he called this approach the Scientific Management andhis beliefs were that only a management scientist would be able toachieve this efficiency of the worker. Furthermore Taylor did nothave trust in employees, in his opinion, workers start lackingefficiency as soon as there is not such a management scientist. Hisaim was to achieve maximum efficiency and to reach this goal hecreated a process called job fractionation. By observing differentworkers at different jobs he measured the amount of time a workerneeded to finish a task and then looked at each job and itsconstituent tasks (=basic work units), he used these measurements tocreate time and motion studies. [...]