WORKPLACE MOTIVATION AND MORALE

Workplace Motivation and Morale

Workplace Motivation and Morale

Introduction

One way for organizations to become more innovative is to capitalize on their employees' ability to get motivated. As Katz (1964, p. 132) puts it: “an organization that depends solely upon its blueprints of prescribed behaviour is a very fragile social system”. Work has become more knowledge-based and less rigidly defined. In this context, employees can help to improve business performance through their ability to generate ideas and use these as building blocks for new and better products, services and work processes. Many practitioners and academics now endorse the view that individual motivation helps to attain organizational success (Van de Ven, 1986; Amabile, 1988; Axtell et al., 2000; Smith, 2002; Unsworth and Parker, 2003). In order to realize a continuous flow of motivations, employees need to be both willing and able to get motivated. Individual motivation is central to several well-known management principles, including total quality management (McLoughlin and Harris, 1997; Ehigie and Akpan, 2004), continuous improvement schemes (Boer and Gieskes, 1998), Kaizen (Imai, 1986), corporate venturing (Elfring, 2003), and organizational learning (Senge, 1990). Here, we address how leaders may influence individual motivation.

The current study aims to provide more insight into the role of leaders in individual motivation. It uses a combination of in-depth interviews and literature research to explore what particular leader behaviours are likely to enhance employees' innovative behaviour. The study is being conducted in knowledge-intensive service firms (e.g. engineering, IT, architecture, consultancy, market research). Knowledge-intensive service firms constitute an ever-increasing share of the business population and add significantly to economic development (Anxo and Storrie, 2001). Compared to other sectors, knowledge-intensive services have an intangible, heterogeneous and perishable nature (Hislop, 2005). Such firms have a strong need for continuous minor improvements and additions to their current product offerings, making employees' innovative behaviour very important within this context.

Literature Review

Motivation theorists often describe the motivation process as being composed of two main phases: initiation and implementation (Zaltman et al., 1973; Axtell et al., 2000). The division between the two phases is believed to be the point at which the idea is first adopted; i.e. the point at which the decision to implement the motivation is made. The first stage ends with the production of an idea, while the second stage ends as soon as the idea is implemented (King and Anderson, 2002).

Many studies focus mainly on the creative or idea generation stage of motivation (Mumford, 2000; McAdam and McClelland, 2002). However, motivation also includes the implementation of ideas. Here, we define innovative behaviour as behaviour directed towards the initiation and application (within a work role, group or organization) of new and useful ideas, processes, products or procedures (Farr and Ford, 1990). Thus, defined, innovative behaviour can be seen as a multi-dimensional, overarching construct that captures all behaviours through which employees can contribute to the motivation process. In the current paper, our focus is on two core innovative behaviours that reflect the two-stage process: idea generation and application ...