Pay as Motivator Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Pay as Motivator - Essay Example Skinner's reinforcement theory (1953) is perhaps the foundation for every study on the matter. By stating that behaviour can be shaped, changed, or maintained through positive and negative reinforcement, he implied that people can be made to behave in certain ways using levers of motivation. Later studies merely attempted to find what those levers were. Maslow (1954) proposed five levers he called human needs, with the lowest being physiological, and self-actualisation the highest; in between are the safety, social, and esteem needs. He said meeting these needs is the motivational key, which leads others to ask: if pay helps meet each of these needs, why is it that even highly-paid CEOs continue to milk their corporate cow, sometimes fatally Pay does not seem to give the complete answer. Perhaps Herzberg (1959) had an answer in his hygiene and motivational factors. He argued that a worker would be satisfied if the motivation factors are met, but not if hygiene factors are unmet. However, hygiene factors do not necessarily lead to job satisfaction. And like these other content theories, MacGregor's (1960) simplistic categorisation of employees does not fully explain the behaviour of greedy managers who used to be honest. An interesting trilogy of process theories (Adams, 1963; Vroom, 1964; Porter and Lawler, 1968) goes beyond the tangible and crosses the line into the realm of the mystical. Balance (Adams's Equity Theory), values and beliefs (the expectancy and instrumentality of Vroom), and intrinsic/extrinsic motivation (Porter and Lawler) point out that money is important, but there are others of greater value that managers need to know about workers so they can trigger the right behaviour. Fifteen years (1953-1968) of research concluded that to motivate others, one has to find out why people do the things they do. And now, some four decades later, as researchers continue investigating the human psyche in search of answers, the list of motivational levers just keeps on getting longer. Pay has never been near the top of the list, superseded by more important ones like job security, the loftiness of goals, and the meaningfulness of work (Ambrose and Kulik, 1999; Gagne and Deci, 2005). Are these findings supported by empirical evidence in the real world of the workplace We find out by looking at two well-known U.K. companies: The Royal Mail Holdings plc, a government-owned firm, and J. Sainsbury plc, the publicly listed owner of the third largest supermarket chain in the U.K. Both companies, just getting out of a serious business crisis, offer us a good look at the "pay as motivator" issue by considering the behaviour of managers and workers. We may find some evidence of how our motivation beast really looks like, discover whether the theories are right and, if not, gain some practical lessons from this exercise. The Reality: Hard Facts The Royal Mail Experience The Royal Mail is a 370-year old organisation that began when King Charles I introduced the postal services in Britain (Steven-Jones, 2004, p. 8-9). It was a government monopoly until the passage of the Postal Services Act of 2000 that liberalised the U.K. postal services market. The law was the culmination of several factors, but what triggered it was an event that took place three decades earlier, when in 1971 postal workers staged a six-week strike that threatened to cripple the