Motivational Challenges

Motivation seems to be a simple function of management in books, but in practice it is more challenging. The reasons for motivation being challenging job are as follows:

• One of the main reasons of motivation being a challenging job is due to the changing workforce. The employees become a part of their organization with various needs and expectations. Different employees have different beliefs, attitudes, values, backgrounds and thinking. But all the organizations are not aware of the diversity in their workforce and thus are not aware and clear about different ways of motivating their diverse workforce.
• Employees motives cannot be seen, they can only be presumed. Suppose, there are two employees in a team showing varying performance despite being of same age group, having same educational qualifications and same work experience. The reason being what motivates one employee may not seem motivating to other.
• Motivation of employees becomes challenging especially when the organizations have considerably changed the job role of the employees, or have lessened the hierarchy levels of hierarchy, or have chucked out a significant number of employees in the name of down-sizing or right-sizing. Certain firms have chosen to hire and fire and paying for performance strategies nearly giving up motivational efforts. These strategies are unsuccessful in making an individual overreach himself.
• The vigorous nature of needs also pose challenge to a manager in motivating his subordinates. This is because an employee at a certain point of time has diverse needs and expectations. Also, these needs and expectations keep on changing and might also clash with each other. For instance-the employees who spend extra time at work for meeting their needs for accomplishment might discover that the extra time spent by them clash with their social neds and with the need for affiliation.