The Importance of Pay in Employee Motivation: Discrepancies between What People Say and What They Do? by Sara L. Rynes, Berry Gerhart, and Kathleen A. Minette
Thesis Statement
This paper states that there are many motivators for workers and the most important one is money paid to the workers. The articles in the human resources journals prepared for mostly for human resources professionals claim that the money paid to the workers as a motivator is exaggerated and other motivators also should be taken into account. This paper claims that the HR professionals underestimate the power of the money paid to the workers as a motivator.
The HR professionals claim that the surveys applied to the workers to analyze the motivators for the workers do not have a background of social and individual behavior patters. To be able to comprehend close to perfect how workers are motivated, we should monitor their social values and social behavioral patterns, thus we can see if the surveys are right. The workers respond to the monetary variables effectively and they do not say what they really think according to them.
However, this paper claims that the workers truly responds to money more effectively, and depending on the money they receive, they can build their social life and other things in life and that motivates them. Basically, the authors claim that the amount of wage is directly related to the social status or one of the main determinant of the social status and this social status actually influence the other motivators for the workers.
The paper provides the thesis statements of the other papers as a table. In this table, we see some papers claim that other motivators other than money has more importance and the money’s place in the rankings for the motivators are not on top. They claim there exist other motivators which enable the workers to engage with their works.
Some other papers mentioned in the table indicate that money has a strong influence on the workers’ motivation. These papers are giving some metric studies. For example, Locke et al. (1980) claim that the individual pay incentive are contributing to the workers’ productivity by 30%.
Critique to the Paper
This paper uses other articles’ results to get their results and all other papers are using different survey settings or other metric measures to analyze the workers’ motivation. Therefore, basically the information base they use does not have a unity. To provide a better information resource base for a study like that, the authors should prepare their own survey or comparable information base to develop. The results taken from other papers are confusing because of this. Another writer, by comparing the same results, might reach a result stating that money is an exaggerated motivator or any other result statement.
This weakness of the paper might be resulting due to that this paper is a kind of literature review. To develop this paper, the authors should do more and develop their own research setting.
On the other hand, the authors claim that the articles in the journals which are mostly read by the HR professionals are for that money is exaggerated, however, there is no certain proof for this. Because these articles are also using scientific methods and to be able to prove that they are wrong, we need to see more certain proofs. For example, these articles are using a methodology which sounds like creating more organic ways to falsification other papers claim of money is very influential. They monitor other motivators and they evaluate the relations between motivators. The authors might be right that these articles do not try to connect their results for the other motivators with the money.
In our modern time, many workplaces are facing some troubles pertaining to workers’ motivations and the HR practitioners, If a new research project could be designed to inspect the cross analysis among different motivators and money, then this research could provide us certain remarks, proper projections and better results.
Generally, the article’s statement is addressing an important weakness in the field and by providing more detailed analysis will help this research field development. Money is very important motivator and the case of the new recruits in the companies is giving a strong belief for this claim (Naido, and Santos, 2011). When a person applies to a company to work, the first thing he or she cares is the wage offered. After making an agreement on this, then other conditions are mostly discussed accordingly.
The new research should develop an organic framework which should include all the social, psychological and individual motivators, because they have interactions between them. For example, social status of a work provides a more secure life for the workers socially, and by gaining these advantages thanks to the social status of the work will help the workers develop themselves (Nohria, Groysberg, and Lee, 2008).
Socially supported works might bring better opportunities to the workers. Every country and even every region has a different cultural setting and if local culture is supporting a work, then the workers in this industry will have better career opportunities (Burton, 2012). In the developing countries, we observe that some works are degraded and even a worker becomes very successful at this business and makes a lot of money, there is no other alternatives for this worker; and when this industry faces a crisis, we observe that many workers from this industry stays unemployed for a long time.
A More Developed Research Subject
Motivation is important to make a worker believe in some factors: 1) He will develop himself by working for this workplace, 2) The goal of the company indicates him that he will be useful at work and he will be able to develop himself accordingly, 3) Organization, human resources management, wage and promotion policies, other relevant applications at workplace support the first two factors.
Motivation works has some dimensions: Workers’ characteristics, workers’ education and experience background, compatibility of workers with the works at workplace, workplace conditions, managers’ attitudes towards workers, and some other factors. A successful motivation program should be able to create a model inclusive of all these dimensions and it should start its activities from inviting workers to apply to jobs at this workplace. The relations and the interactions between these dimensions and factors should be able to be presented in the model in details as much as possible. Subsequently, model should explain how this organization functions and how motivation program might affect these functions. In another word, the mechanism of workplace is to be explained. Also a risk management approach should be developed in case of an irregularity which is not covered in the model; therefore any unexpected development can be handled proactively or on time.
A motivation study should be able to develop the model mentioned in the previous paragraph and a proper evaluation model should be developed accordingly. A well developed evaluation model will help researchers have more efficient results.
Another contribution of developing a model for workplace and its mechanism might be making easy to follow irregularities at workplace. Irregularities are inevitable breaks at work and it may occur at any workplace. If a workplace is having a lot of irregularities, then motivating people would be much harder and the workers probably would accept for a work place with higher wages or with other benefits to be provided for workers.
Subsequently, there are many other conditions to be checked to understand better how motivation programs work at workplace and each of them should be evaluated in line with the processes at workplace. Human resource management, irregularity management, leadership at work, attitude towards worker by managers, workplace physical conditions, wage differentiation policies, promotion policies and all other workplace conditions and places might affect the motivation programs. A scientist who is interested in analyzing motivators at workplace should be able to create ways of collecting information in line with all the factors, processes and mechanism at workplace.
Another thing in science, a scientist should be watching the unexplained parts of the case. Many models used in the articles mostly cannot explain fully and we need more details to explain the unexplained parts. Consequently, all articles should be mentioning how much they explain and what to do explain more. Even the reason might be a mistake in research methodology or a simple statistical mistake, and an article should be able give some controls that readers of this article can follow steps and see how a paper is developed.
References
Burton, Kelly. (2012). A Study of Motivation: How to Get Your Employees Moving.
SPEA Honors Thesis, Indiana University.
Naido, D., and Santos, P. (2011). Social Networks and Wages in South Africa. The University of Sydney.
Nohria, N., Groysberg, B., and Lee, L.-E. (2008). Employee Motivation: A Powerful
New Model. Harvard Business Review.
