Motivation
Brief Summary of Results
Motivation can be defined as the set of factors that cause people to behave in certain ways. Different people are motivated towards different things. What is motivating to a person may be de-motivating to others and vice versa. Employee motivation leads to higher productivity and better results at the workplace. I have also mentioned a brief account of my own professional experience when I was made the sales head of my company. I motivated not only myself to achieve the organizational goals but my team members also who in turn gave their best performance.
Motivating forces have always existed in our world. What motivates a person maybe demotivating for others. What maybe demotivating for an individual maybe a motivator for others. We have witnessed acts of dramatic motivation throughout our society. We have seen acts of brothers and sisters growing up in the same household with the same parents achieve the opposite of whatever their siblings obtain (Long, 2012).
A big question that comes to mind is that how we discern the true motivating forces within each individual? The closest answer to this question could be that motivation is a continuous process that occurs in a person’s brains, on a daily basis. The chief motivator for every person lies in his/her inner thoughts. One is motivated throughout the day to accomplish tasks or complete activities (Long, 2012).
When a person gets de-motivated or unorganized in his/her work all they need is a new viewpoint to get motivated again. There appears to be three main steps a person can use to get refocused when attempting to regain motivation. They are:
- Second, develop all the actions that will take a person to the top. Start at the finishing point and work backwards to the starting line.
- The last step is needed to ensure that one feels sufficiently motivated and inspired to follow through and sustain motivation. This can be harder or easier than one thinks it to be, depending on the task or motivation.
A positive mental attitude is something people cannot acquire in any manner whatsoever except by building on it, step by step, through one’s conscious decisions. Motivation is a way of refreshing one’s perspective on negative thoughts to uplift an impatient mind by feeding it with energetic and enthusiastic thoughts of upcoming success.
Now, let me talk about motivation in a real world scenario. I am going to describe about motivation in my own professional career and how it helped me to not only cope in difficult situations but actually perform better.
I was named the new head of the sales department. The results in the department had been slowly decreasing and this decrease was crippling the company’s ability to improve and expand. I was given a quick overview of the problem before officially making me in charge. I was told that basically the sales force was failing to meet expectations. Sales needed to improve fast or I was to fire the current employees and hire a new team. It was certainly not an easy task ahead of me.
Well, firstly I understood the fact that motivation and power, through examples would result in success. I was aware of the previous sales manager’s success and failures. I knew that the problem stemmed less from the sales force and more from a lack of leadership. I quickly improved the morale of the team by acting in a way I desired others to act. I let them knew that I would never ask more of them then I did of myself. I showed up early, worked with focus and intent and stayed late. I set an example and the employees followed my lead.
In only a few weeks, the sales force looked like a completely new group of people. They were excited about their work, about their goals and about their future. Results quickly improved and they were on their way to break company records. While many would have replaced the existing problem with a new set of faces, I realized what the sales department was missing. It was a new way of thinking. Employees did not change, their expectations changed.
In the book titled “Essentials of Organizational Behavior”, motivation is described as the process that accounts for an individual’s intensity, direction and persistence of effort toward attaining a goal. Although general motivation is concerned with effort toward any goal, I’ll narrow the focus to organizational goals in order to reflect interest in work-related behavior. The three key elements in this definition are intensity, direction and persistence. Intensity is concerned with how hard a person tries. This is the element mot of focus on when we discuss motivation. However, high intensity is unlikely to lead to a favorable job. We have to consider the quality of effort as well as intensity. Effort that is directed toward and consistent with the organizational goals is the kind of effort we should be seeking. Finally, motivation has a persistence dimension i.e. it measures how long a person can maintain effort (Schwartz, 2001).
Under the circumstances one may be curious to know the role of positive motivation? Daniel Goldman describes motivation as the marshaling of feelings of enthusiasm, zeal and confidence in achievement. He says that studies of Olympic athletes, world-class musicians and chess grand masters find their unifying trait is the ability to motivate them to pursue relentless training routines. With a steady rise in the degree of excellence required to be a top-class performer, these rigorous training routines now increasingly must begin in childhood (Wickwer, 2009).
At the1992 Olympics, twelve year old members of the Chinese diving team had put in as many total lifetime practice dives as had members of the American team, who were in their early twenties. The Chinese divers started their rigorous training at the age of just four. Similarly, the best violin virtuosos of the twentieth century began studying their instrument at around age five. International chess champions started on the game at an average of seven, while those who rose to early national prominence started at age ten (Wickwer, 2009).
Conclusion
References
Goleman, D. (2009). Working With Emotional Intelligence. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Long, R. (2012). Motivation. London: Routledge.
Schwartz, A., E. (2001). Motivation: Linking Performance to Goals. Waverly: Andrew E Schwartz.
Wickwer, D. (2009). Motivation: An Interactive Guide. Bloomington: AuthorHouse.
