WORKPLACE MOTIVATIONAssignment Overview
As in some of the other assignments in this course, you will draw upon your personal experience for this Module 2 Case Assignment about Workplace Motivation.
For the assignment, you will consider the topic of employee motivation for a diverse group of employees who represent different ethnicities, religions, ages, and genders. There are many ways to impact employee motivation, such as with job enrichment or rotation, work-life balance, flexible work hours, job sharing, telecommuting, employee recognition and empowerment, and financial incentives. When determining which of these to use to motivate a diverse group of employees, one must consider that every person is motivated in different ways and with different tools. For instance, your company may set up a comfortable place where employees of different faiths can do their daily ablutions or prayers.
You will prepare a presentation that proposes options for employees to vote on adopting at your own workplace, keeping in mind the demographics of the employee pool as different people require different motivators. You can use the list already provided, but if you do, please add more of your own ideas to the list. Talk with your own HR manager about what they feel is wanted by the employees where you work. (You will select 5 of these topics to put into this PowerPoint presentation.)
For an overview of some important current issues regarding workplace motivation, such as telecommuting and working remotely, and the different things employees consider to be valued motivators, read the following articles:
Aleksić-Glišović, M., Jerotijević, G., & Jerotijević, Z. (2019). Modern approaches to employee motivation. Ekonomika, 65(2), 121-133. doi:10.5937/ekonomika1902121A
Bhatti, O. K., Aslam, U. S., Hassan, A., & Sulaiman, M. (2016). Employee motivation: An Islamic perspective. Humanomics, 32(1), 33-47.
Elvie, M. (2019). The influence of organizational culture, compensation and interpersonal communication in employee performance through work motivation as mediation. International Review of Management and Marketing, 9(5), 133-140.
Judge, T. A., Zapata, C. P. (2014, July 21). The person–situation debate revisited: Effect of situation strength and trait activation on the validity of the big five personality traits in predicting job performance. The Academy of Management Journal, 58(4). Available in the Trident Online Library.
Makololo, M. E. (2012). The impact of broad based black economic empowerment employee share schemes [Doctoral Dissertation, Gordon Institute of Business Science. University of Pretoria]. Thesis and Dissertation database, 21334375. http://hdl.handle.net/2263/23722
Organizational behavior. (2017). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing Edition. http://open.lib.umn.edu/organizationalbehavior/. CC BY-NC-SA License.
Read the following sections in Chapter 5:Section 5.2 Need-based theories of motivationSection 5.3 Process-based theories
Read the following sections in Chapter 6:Section 6.3 Motivating Employees through Goal SettingSection 6.5 Motivating Employees through Performance Incentives
Samsudin, N. H. (2019, September 20). The method of managing employee motivation in Islam: Analysis on reward methods. The European Proceedings of Social & Behavioral Sciences. The Second International Conference on Humanities. Future Academy. https://doi.org/10.15405/epsbs.2019.09.20 Open Access through CC NC 4.0.
Case Assignment
In the background materials, you read about some very traditional theories of motivation such as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory. You also learned about how people of other ethnicities or religions are motivated in the workplace. Now you will connect those theories to identifying appropriate motivational tools for the following four employees who each represent a different ethnic group where you work:
Adara, a 26-year-old married mother who is of the Muslim faith and was born in Detroit, Michigan, but moved away and became a valued employee three years ago. She has an associate degree in accounting and is also going to school to earn a bachelor’s degree in accounting.
Ivy, a single 22-year-old African American, a recent college graduate with a bachelor’s degree in marketing, has been with the company for just three months. She is the company’s social media marketing assistant.
Maria, a 30-year-old single mother originally from Puerto Rico, has been with the company for five years. She works as an administrative assistant and is going to school online to earn a degree in business administration.
Richard, a white 45-year-old man who has been with the company for 16 years is the Director of Finance.
Consider a time at work when you felt highly motivated. Think about exactly what motivates you personally. Can you apply Maslow’s and Herzberg’s theories to yourself? Now, think about what these four named employees might want or need to motivate them, again applying Maslow’s or Herzberg’s theories. Be sure to conduct some research in the library and read the background readings about what motivates different employee groups.
At work, you are offered the opportunity to develop a PowerPoint presentation that introduces employees to tools your company may adopt to increase employee motivation.
You have come up with 5 tools that you feel will motivate the employees to complete their work in a satisfactory manner, leading to meeting organizational goals. You will apply at least two tools to each of the four named employees and explain why those tools were chosen as motivational tools.
Your presentation should cover the following:
- What are 5 tools managers and organizations use to motivate their employees? Include a short discussion of which of the two theories (Maslow or Herzberg, or both) addresses each tool on the appropriate slides’ notes page.
- What can employees do to motivate themselves?
- What motivates you to complete your own work and are you motivated according to Maslow’s or Herzberg’s theory?
- What two tools do you identify as appropriate to each of the four employees, Adara, Ivy, Maria, and Richard? Why did you select those? Are they connected to the motivational theory of Maslow, Herzberg, or both?
Your presentation must contain at least 12 slides (cover slide, five slides for the five tools, one slide for self-motivation, a slide for each of the four named employees, and reference list) but you can have more. Use in-text citations and a reference list, with at least two high-quality scholarly references for support. High-quality references are academically peer-reviewed journals or textbooks and are found in the Trident Online Library. The citations can be inserted onto the notes pages rather than on the actual slides.
Note 1: A URL (website address) is NOT a reference. A reference always contains four parts: author, publication date, article title, and the source of the article. Sometimes there is no author, but the APA manual tells you what you can put in place of the author’s name instead. The source for a high-quality peer-reviewed journal article is the journal. When you find an article in the Library, look for the ” icon and click on it then select the APA format from the drop-down list and you can then copy/paste the reference onto your reference list. You may have to clean it up some because they are not always input into the database correctly.
Note 2: People today do not want to sit and watch a presentation with tons of words on the slides. They want to see no more than “5 words and a picture” and the picture must be of real people. Feel free to format your presentation with minimal words or however you can get your information across to the employees with the greatest impact. A simple way to come up with headings is to take the assignment’s questions and shorten them to a few words. For instance, I would format the questions in this assignment into the following headings:
5 Tools and Motivation Theory
Self-Motivation
My Motivators According to Maslow or Herzberg
Adara’s Motivators
Ivy’s Motivators
Maria’s Motivators
Richard’s Motivators
A great reason to change the questions into short headings is because if everyone puts the same questions in their papers, their originality score will be falsely high. Rewording the questions helps you to avoid getting a high originality score.
Upload your assignment to the Case 2 Dropbox. Be sure to review your TurnItIn Originality report. If the score is over 15%, you may not be writing in your own words and you will need to contact your professor and arrange to revise and resubmit your assignment. Changes cannot be made to the submission, however, if it has already been graded by your professor. Always check your originality score after submitting your papers. If your score is above 15% take a look at the originality report to see where you forgot to cite your sources. If you copied something from a source, always surround all copied material with quotation marks. Also, the citation for all quotes must include the page number on which you found the quote. These are two areas where most students get dinged on their score.
Assignment Expectations
The Case papers in this course will be evaluated using the criteria as stated in the Case rubric. The following is a review of the rubric criteria:
- Assignment Requirements: Does the paper directly address all aspects of the assignment? Have the assignment instructions been followed closely?
- Critical Thinking: Does the paper demonstrate a college level of analysis, in which information derived from multiple sources has been critically evaluated and synthesized in the formulation of a logical set of conclusions? Does the paper demonstrate that the student has read, understood, and can apply the background materials for the module?
- Writing and Assignment Organization: Is the essay logical, well organized and well written? Are the grammar, spelling, and vocabulary appropriate for college-level work? Are section headings included? Are paraphrasing and synthesis of concepts the primary means of responding, or is justification/support instead conveyed through excessive use of direct quotations?
- Use of Sources and Mechanics: Does the paper demonstrate that the student has read, understood, and can apply the background materials for the module? If required, has the student demonstrated effective research, as evidenced by student’s use of relevant and quality sources? Does the student demonstrate understanding of a consistent (e.g., APA) style of referencing, by inclusion of proper citations (for paraphrased text and direct quotations) as appropriate? Are appropriate sources from the background material included? Have all sources cited in the paper been included on the References page?
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