Effective motivation and reward management

Effective motivation and reward management

Effective motivation and reward management

A critical analysis of the role of motivation and reward management during my management experience at BJNWDS

Introduction

Motivation is an internal drive to satisfy one's unsatisfied needs (Higgins, 1994) and is commonly used in management of enterprises to make employees energetic for creating profits for company. This paper focuses on critically analysing the issues related to work motivation and reward management based on my management experiences at BJNWDS. The analysis of issues is supported through drawing upon a wide range of theories and concepts related to work motivation.

BJNWDS is one of the branch stores of Hong Kong Department Store Group with a total of six hundred and eighty employees. I had worked in the merchandise department of BJNWDS for five years, and handled operations like introducing new brand and establishing the cooperation relations, managing suppliers and their stores in BJNWDS, analysing counters inventory and to improve the whole shop sales turnover.

Analysis

By the end of 2007, BJNWDS spent a lot of money building a recreation room in which its employees can play billiard, ping pang, chess and card games after their working time in order to enhance their identity to the company, reduce the working stress and thereby increase the employees' productivity. The motive behind this decision was to provide employees a better opportunity to improve their interpersonal relationships via communicating with others. According to Herzberg et. al, (1959), some factors like interpersonal relations, working conditions and salary are hygiene factors, and dissatisfaction could be prevented by improvements in hygiene factors. In Maslow's Hierarchy of Need Theory (1998), Love/Belonging Needs is the need that people in an organisation or team want the right of admittance, affection, or communication. BJNWDS adopted the way of building a recreation room would like to satisfy the social needs of its people. However, there is no one in merchandise department who had ever been to that recreation room. The reason is that the merchandise department is the most important department of the company and it is a high pressure department, as the responsibility of this department directly link to the company's sale and image. The employees in merchandise department worked very hard, they worked for longer hours, being in a collectivist environment work for group goals (Hofstede, 2001). The only thing they want to do after their whole day busy works is having a good rest. It is obvious that the way of building recreation room to motivate employees did not succeed as the real needs of the staff were not considered. This tells us that one of the key to effectively motivate the staff is to find out their actual needs.

In terms of the needs of employees, the management and their staff work together every day. Whether they really understand what their employees' needs are or not? Although many managers are very confident about it, as a matter of fact, there exist a gap between the needs in managers' mind and needs of ...