Differences of employee motivation in a public and private business

Discuss how private organizations differ from public organizations in terms of motivational tools. Recall that private organizations have the incentive of financial bonuses that are difficult for criminal justice agencies to generate.

The video demonstrated that individuals are primarily interested in challenge, mastery, self-direction and making a contribution. For more standard and routine tasks standard forms of motivation will work. Here, higher pay will get better results as the tasks are structured and routine. However, for tasks that require a large amount of cognitive ability, higher pay does not equate to higher productivity and motivation. Instead, according to the video, it leads to lower performance. As a result, motivational techniques will need to vary in order to drive performance within an organization. This can vary between both public and private organizations. Private organizations have much more flexibility to motivate employees as they tend to have a profit motive. These profits can then be deployed within the business to help challenge employees. The video notes an Australian software company that gives its employees 24 hours to work on any project they like so long as they share the results. This policy would lower profitability for the day but ultimately has resulted in newer products, innovations and bug fixes. Public organizations are much more rigid and have much more bureaucracy. This ultimately does not allows individuals to be challenges or motivated properly as their work may not be implemented in a proper manner. Government organizations and other public entities often have large amounts of bureaucracy that stifles creativity and innovation within the organization. This ultimately lowers motivation and the ability to use motivational tools as quickly as private companies. Likewise, there is often lower incentive to do so as these organizations are not motivated by profit and instead have an entrenched funding source in the United States taxpayer. As a result, the need for continual process improvement is stifled within the organization (Bernstein, 1997).