Calveta Dining Services: Motivation Theories for Change

Introduction: Calveta's Growth and Core Challenges

Calveta Dining Services is a profitable, family-owned food service company that provides meals to senior living facilities. The company has a strong organizational culture that focuses heavily on promoting from within and is dedicated to service, innovation, and profitable growth. Much of its success is attributed to five core values known as "Antonio's Way."

One significant problem facing Calveta is the loss of customer accounts. In previous years, account retention had not been an issue. Recently, however, accounts have been lost primarily due to changes in account managers. Since Calveta prides itself on being customer-oriented, losing these accounts undermines its core values. Calveta would like to retain existing accounts while continuing to attract new ones.

Calveta strongly believes in developing its employees and grooming them for promotion. Its interviewing process helps identify not only the most qualified candidates but also those with ambition and growth potential. However, promoting account managers results in customers losing their primary point of contact with the company. Customers want to keep the same account manager, while the company wants to promote that person — a tension that places real strain on the organization. Calveta must find a way to fulfill employees' motivational needs while also satisfying the needs of its customers.

Vroom's Expectancy Theory and Employee Motivation

One foundational theory holds that performance is a function of ability and motivation: employee effort leads to performance, and performance leads to rewards (Vroom, 1964). Under this framework, rewards can be either positive or negative. A positive reward increases employee motivation, while a negative reward diminishes it. Victor Vroom developed his Expectancy Theory in the 1960s, outlining four core assumptions. First, when people join an organization, they bring expectations shaped by their needs, motivations, and past experiences, and those expectations influence how they respond to the organization (Lunenburg, 2011). Second, individuals behave according to conscious choice. Third, people have different ideas about what they want from an organization. Fourth, employees will choose among available alternatives and select the one that offers them the greatest personal benefit (Lunenburg, 2011).

Building on these assumptions, Vroom proposed that effort leads to expectancy, which leads to performance. Performance leads to instrumentality — the belief that performance will be rewarded (Lunenburg, 2011). Different rewards appeal to different employees. Valence refers to the strength of an employee's preference for a particular reward: if obtaining the reward is highly attractive, valence is high; if the employee is indifferent, valence is zero. Vroom's theory defines motivation as the product of expectancy, instrumentality, and valence (Lunenburg, 2011).

This theory offers managers practical guidance on how to motivate employees. It assumes that people enter an organization with preconceived ideas of what they hope to achieve, that they exercise free will in choosing their behaviors, and that the perceived value of a potential reward shapes how they act. In the case of Calveta, employees are offered promotions as a reward for hard work and dedication. These promotions are attractive due to the company's generous bonus structure — in some cases, manager bonuses account for up to 60% of their salary. Because underachievement is not tolerated, advancement is all but expected.

Abraham Maslow contended that employees have five levels of needs: physiological, safety, social, ego, and self-actualizing. These needs are arranged in a pyramid, with physiological needs at the base, followed by safety, social, and ego needs, and self-actualization at the top (Maslow, 1943). Under this theory, lower-level needs must be satisfied before higher-level needs become motivating (Lunenburg, 2011).

Maslow believed that all people are capable of self-actualization and identified several characteristics of self-actualized individuals, including the ability to tolerate uncertainty, acceptance of themselves and others, spontaneity in thought and action, an unusual sense of humor, and high creativity (McLeod, 2007). He further identified behaviors that lead to self-actualization: trying new things, being honest, experiencing life with openness, listening to one's inner voice, taking responsibility, and working hard (McLeod, 2007).

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and Herzberg's Two-Factor Theory

Applying Maslow's hierarchy to Calveta, the company appears to meet the majority of its employees' needs. Physiological needs are met outside the workplace. Safety needs — particularly employment security — are addressed through the company's low turnover rate. Belonging needs are fulfilled by the organization's family-type atmosphere. Esteem needs are met through growth opportunities, support, and encouragement to succeed. The extent to which employees have achieved self-actualization remains unclear.

Psychologist Frederick Herzberg proposed a complementary theory of motivation. He identified factors such as company policy, supervision, interpersonal relations, working conditions, and salary as hygiene factors rather than true motivators. The presence of these factors does not motivate employees or create job satisfaction, but their absence can cause dissatisfaction (Gawel, 1997). Herzberg found that five factors drive job satisfaction: achievement, recognition, the work itself, responsibility, and advancement (Gawel, 1997). He called these satisfiers, arguing that they enrich a person's job and have a long-term positive effect on performance, while hygiene factors produce only short-term changes that quickly revert to baseline (Gawel, 1997). In short, satisfaction drives performance (Smith, 2008).

Calveta provides the majority of these satisfiers. The company pushes employees to achieve; recognition is built into its HR program through constant feedback and training, embodied by the motto "Keep them learning. Keep them growing." Advancement is commonplace throughout the organization. These factors appear to have a positive effect on job satisfaction: ninety percent of survey respondents reported being satisfied or very satisfied as employees of the organization.

Lyman Porter and Edward Lawler developed their own model of the relationship between employees and organizations, beginning with Vroom's Expectancy Theory and expanding it to consider variables such as effort, performance, and satisfaction (Luthans, 2010). They agreed that Vroom's treatment of rewards was correct but incomplete.

Porter and Lawler divided rewards into two categories: intrinsic and extrinsic (Porter, 1968). Intrinsic motivation is internal, involving the performance of a task simply because it is enjoyable. Extrinsic motivators are external and include rewards such as pay increases, bonuses, or promotions (Gagné & Deci, 2005). Porter and Lawler argued that job satisfaction derives from earning both types of rewards and advocated structuring the work environment so that performance is rewarded both intrinsically and extrinsically (Gagné & Deci, 2005). Making a job more interesting and tying rewards such as raises directly to work performance, they proposed, leads to higher job satisfaction. Because intrinsic and extrinsic motivators are additive, combining both produces overall satisfaction (Gagné & Deci, 2005).