Employee Motivation Business Organizational Leader

Question: Describe the Employee Motivation for Business Organizational Leader. Answer: In this competitive era, organizational leaders have realized that motivation is a key driver of employee productivity and the organization can achieve its goals and objectives only when employees are committed and motivated. It is important that the employer should focus to motivate the employees through various intrinsic and extrinsic manners. An example would be if the changes affected the employees in a positive way, by the means of salary increase or promotions. The employees will then benefit from the changes being implemented successfully. When an organization is able to include all stakeholders in the strategic planning and leaves room for self-improvement the employees are able to see whats in it for them (Lazaroiu, 2015). Such rewards are good ways of motivating and rewarding employees after successful changes have been implemented. The implementation process of the strategic plan must be flexible enough and inclusive of all stakeholders. This in turn will motivate the empl oyees to invest in the company and consider the rewards that will be offered. For employees to feel motivated, it is important that they should be able to relate themselves to organization. It can happen if they can understand the organization mission and vision and they can align their personal goal and mission with the organizational goals and objectives. Employers can do this if they can provide a platform where employees can feel themselves associated with the organization and leadership. The Maslow theory of motivation suggests that different employees have different levels of motivation (Maslow, 2015). The managers and leaders of Target should realize the difference between the trigger points of motivation of employees at different levels. The employers must realize that the motivation trigger of a factory worker at Target may not be same as the motivation trigger of a sales executive of Target. It is important to mention that leaders also play a key role in motivation. The presence of a leader cannot be replaced. Therefore, being available becomes crucial when team members know that their leader is not absent nor missing in action. Leadership continuously reaches out to his or her team in order to update, but also to go beyond that to general queries about life, day, and social life. It can be said that employers or leaders should focus to empower employees to motivate them. Empowerment in it-self can be fortified by encouraging creativity and adaptiveness. The dev elopment of groups that can share ideas across the functionality of the organization will be the inspiration of adaptively and innovation leading to collaboration. Therefore the building of good positive and communicative relationships within self-motivated groups will stand a better chance of success towards collaboration and efficiency of the organization. The employers can also use Herzberg motivation theory to keep employees motivated. Herzberg's findings revealed that certain characteristics of a job are consistently related to job satisfaction, while different factors are associated with job dissatisfaction. These factors can be shown as: The characteristics associated with job dissatisfaction are called hygiene factors. When these have been adequately addressed, people will not be dissatisfied nor will they be satisfied. Therefore, it is important that the employers should focus on both sets of factors to keep employees motivated. The employers should also realize that there could also be certain internal factors of motivation. People choose to be self-employed motivated by different factors, such as the need to create a sustainable income, allowing innovation to grow freely or achieving a work-life balance.As Smith Shields (2013) emphasized organizational structures and organizational designs need to be aligned with the organization's purpose and goals. Defining metrics and incorporating metrics as part of a managers and a followers accountability plan creates transparency between managers and followers in an organizational design. The monitoring of metrics ensures the organizational design is effective. The reward can be a motivator to achieve the results set out through the organizational design. Manzoor (2012) analyzed the motivations of the individual to determine that people were most productive when they were satisfied they were making a difference and happy in their work. The Belbin theory is an important theory of motivation in team role. The senior execuives and leaders of Target could also use this theory to keep employees motivated. The Belbin theory advocates that in a team setting, people should be clearly aware of their role. The effective demarcation of the team roles would enable the team to perform better. With this theory, the leaders of Walmart should define the clear role for different employees spread across various teams in the organization. It is important that the Belbin theory should be established as a culture at Target and this culture should cascade from top management to mid level management and from mid-level management to low level employees. According to Kepp (2014), Adapting to changes in the environment is important to managerial and organizational success. Managers must be able to make decisions contingent on current circumstances (Para. 4). Particularly in todays global and technologically innovative world, circumstances can change very quickly. Organizations must have managers on board who can quickly adapt to these changing circumstances and who can make quick decisions based on what is happening at that moment. The best way to achieve this is to have a contingency plan. A manager should be prepared for as many scenarios as possible, and have solutions in place in the event the scenario comes to fruition. Elliger, Watkins, and Bostrom (1999) also indicates that helping employees to broaden their comfortability with decision making is significant because it helps them to see things differently, from a different perspective, and transforms their ability to utilizing different viewing lenses moving forward. The goal i s to be able to promote from within since current personnel are familiar with the current culture and environment. This added benefit might require less training and time spent in guidance at the next level and the focus can be shifted too much needed areas. It is important that the employers should focus to create a culture where employees can feel self-motivated. In an organizational setting, different employees would have different needs and it is the responsibility of employers to understand the need of employees. It would be correct to say that understanding the need of employees is the first step to keep employees motivated. Another key driver of employee motivation is communication. Cerasoli (2014) argued that effective communication at workplace would also keep employees motivated. It is important that employers should establish both formal and informal communication channels to keep an open dialogue with employees. Target is a large organization and the organization has managers at various levels. It is important that the leaders and managers should be able to communicate the organizational values to mid level managers and low-level employees. Brown (2016) talks about managers using facilitative learning to stimulate and encoura ge subordinates to be able to think and act as if they were managers, and need to make decisions in simulated situation. One benefit to this type of behavior and atmosphere is that it gives employees on all levels, the courage to act and make day-to-day decisions on the spot given the severity of the situation. Managers simply provide support and constructive feedback on the thought process and outcomes of the situations, stimulating growth from reflections on subordinates. There could be some employees that would feel motivated by the obvious factors like salary, compensation and rewards. At the same time, there could be some employees that would feel motivated by the factors like workplace condition, support from managers, etc. The employers should focus on all the different ways and parameters to keep employees motivated. It would be correct to say that employee motivation is an internal thing. However, employers can certainly create a culture where employees can work with high m otivation levels. Therefore, it is important that the leaders of Target should focus to create such culture. References Cerasoli, C.P., Nicklin, J.M. and Ford, M.T., 2014. Intrinsic motivation and extrinsic incentives jointly predict performance: A 40-year meta-analysis.Psychological Bulletin,140(4), p.980. Devito, L., Brown, A., Bannister, B., Cianci, M. and Mujtaba, B., 2016. Employee Motivation based on the Hierarchy of Needs, Expectancy and the Two-Factor Theories Applied with Higher Education Employees.International Journal of Advances in Management, Economics and Entrepreneurship,3(1), p.20. Ellinger, A. D., Watkins, K. E., Bostrom, R. P. (1999). Managers as Facilitators of Learning in Learning Organizations. Human Resource Development Quarterly, 10(2), 105-124. Kepp, K. (2014). Theories About Organizational Structure. Houston Chronicle. 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