Motivation and Its Impact on Job Performance

In the study of human behavior, motivation is a basic psychological process, like perception and learning. On the other hand, it must be remembered that motivation should not be thought as the only explanation of behavior. Many people equate the causes of perception and learning, it is presented here as being a very important process in understanding behavior. It interacts with and acts in conjunction with other psychological process and personality. Motivation cannot be seen. All that can be seen is behavior. Many believe that the key to improve performance and productivity in any area/endeavor is motivation rather than ability. The challenge for today management is to administer motivational programs and variables, which will encourage employees to improve their work performance. INTRODUCTION: The study of motivation can be traced back to the writing of the ancient Greek Philosophers. More than twenty-three centuries ago, they presented “hedonism” as an explanation of human motivation. Hedonism as that a person seeks out comfort and pleasure and avoids discomfort and pain. Early psychological thought was also influenced by hedonismpsychologists in the 1800s and even in the early 1900s, assumed that humans consciously and rationally strive for hedonistic pleasure and avoidance of pains. William James, in his classic “Principles of Psychology”, he gave recognitions to two additional important historical concepts in the study of motivation: instincts and unconscious motivation. In his social psychology book of (1908), he defined an Instinct as “an innate disposition which determines the organism to perceive or to pay attention to any object..... and to act or have an ampulse to action which finds expression in a specific mode of behavior.” Implicit in James’s emphasis on instincts is the whole question of unconscious motivation. However, it was Sigmund Freud, not James, who openly recognized the importance of unconscious and made it a part of the study of human motivation. The existence of unconscious motivation implies that human are not consciously aware of all their desires. The presence of an unconscious explains why people cannot always verbalize their motivation to attain certain goals or even tell what their goals are. Freud uncovered this phenomenon while analyzing his clinical patients. “He found that in many ways a person is like an iceberg: only a small part is conscious and visible, while the rest is beneath the surface. This below-the-surface concept is the unconscious motivation.” In contrast to their rejection of instincts, many contemporary psychologists accept the existence and importance of the unconscious. On the other hand, for the most part they do not agree with Freud’s explanation of the unconscious. Like James, Freud attempted to equate unconscious motives with instincts. He felt that the unconscious motives are primarily sexual and aggressive in nature and, even though unconscious. They greatly influence everyday behavior. He pointed out that these motives are revealed in dreams, slips of speech (the so-called Freudian slip), and lapses of memory. The Early Drive Theories of motivation evolved from the dissatisfaction with the instinctual view of motivation. Clark Hull, (1884-1952) was finally able to synthesize the preceding thinking into a scientifically based theory of motivation. Hull proposed that motivation was a product of drive times habit (Effort = Drives X Habits X Incentives). Hull‘s theory generated a tremendous amount of research in the 1940s and 1950s. Unfortunately, most of this research was conducted on rats in the laboratory and few generalizations to human motivation are possible. Hull’s students did extend the original concepts, but it is now generally recognized that most of Hull’s concepts were wrong. Nevertheless, the scientific research tradition initiated by Hull and his followers, plus his emphasis on both the cognitive (drive and incentive) and learning (habit) aspects associated with motivation, are extremely important contributions to the modern study of motivation. Drives theory serves as a theoretical basis for the motivational cycle of