Motivation theory in organizational psychology: machine, scientist, and intentional perspectives

Organizational Psychology - Motivation

Landy and Conte (2013) define industrial-organizational psychology as "the application of psychological principles, theory, and research to the work setting" (p. 7). A prominent line of research in industrial-organizational psychology is the study of worker motivation. Over many decades, as management theory has developed, several philosophical and psychological strands have emerged, and are often referred to as: 1) Person as machine; 2) person as scientist, and 3) person as intentional.

Person as Machine

Theory X managers are known to take "the carrot and the stick" approach to supervision since they believe that people work only for the monetary compensation, which means that coercion, threat, and punitive measures must be used to extract efficient workplace effort from employees. Manifestations of Theory X management include high levels of mistrust between employees and employers, and a tendency of management to blame workers for inefficiencies or mistakes rather than looking at other sources of a problem, such as policies, operations, or inadequate systems -- such as employee training.

Taylorism falls in this category since the overriding belief of those who practice a Tayloristic style of management is that workers have no incentive to figure out how to conduct their job responsibilities and tasks in the most efficient way, and that workers will perform repetitive work at the slowest possible rate just short of that which results in managerial discipline. That is, the self-serving orientation of workers results in the creation of inefficient workplaces and systems that serve the employees more than they do the company bottom line.

Person as Intentional

Theories that fall into this category have humanistic underpinnings. Abraham Maslow's work on motivation and a hierarchy of needs -- the satisfaction of which leads to self-actualization -- is perhaps the most popularized of the intentional theories. Maslow's work is based on a belief in the intrinsic value of work when the match between the worker and the work is an excellent fit, when the work has been selected by the worker due to association with natural talent or curiosity, and that engagement in the work leads to a creative flow that is highly satisfying and generative. The strength-based management work of Gallop can be seen to fit in this category as well as in the "person as scientist" category (Buckingham and Clifton, 2001). In large part, this is an artifact of the time frame in which the Gallop research has occurred -- that is, having come on the heels of seminal research from experts such as Amitai Etzioni and Noam Chomsky -- and on the enormous size of the population that participated in the Gallop research over many years.

Frederick Herzberg developed a two-factor theory that parallels Maslow's theories along some dimensions. But interestingly, rather than treat worker satisfaction and dissatisfaction as two extremes of a continuum, Herzberg segregated variables that result in satisfaction at work and variables that contribute to dissatisfaction. In other words, the conventional set of benefits granted workers and a workplace that is safe and reasonably comfortable contributes to satisfaction at work. The flip side is that an absence of opportunities for creativity, achievement and recognition on the job will ultimately lead to dissatisfaction.

Conclusion

The level of micromanagement at my previous place of employment leads me to believe that management was very much a proponent of Theory X, although the managers would never articulate this. Nor, I suspect, do they recognize their own propensity to mistrust employees. The core administrators all hail from jobs at a single organization in which they fought with a workers' union to eliminate a wide swath of people whose work they did not value. There is in this group of administrators a sense that they are the only ones who work hard and autonomously -- and that they know better than everyone else what needs to be done. Their self-aggrandizement is brash and offensive.

In retrospect, it is evident that this former employer failed to see motivation as the multilevel phenomenon that it is (Kanfer, 2009. Contributions to employee motivation are made at the individual, group, organizational level -- and the inherent cultural variables at each of the group and organization can be pivotal (Kanfer, 2009). Had these administrators done a better job of articulating and integrating the content, context, and change within and across these levels, I am convinced they would have evoked superior performance from the employees (Kanfer, 2009).