In today’s competitive world, employees are engrossed in carving their niche and exceed the company’s expectations. Furthermore, factors like demanding deadlines, work pressure, continuous aspiration to steer the race, and a strive to maintain work-personal life balance collectively make the situation more challenging.
To cope up with all these endless hassles, Motivation acts as an engine or driving force for teams/employees to keep going (Alexandru, 2019). A team might possess the desired skills and expertise; however, they cannot yield great results unless they feel motivated and empowered. Motivated teams make an invincible workforce which is directly proportional to the company’s success and profitability.
In my view, motivation plays a pivotal role in building an effective and prolific team at work. Commitment is proliferated when a motivated team comes in force as it leads to impeccable accomplishments and outperformance. Motivation can be intrinsic (internal), which means engaging in an act as it is driven from within based on your desire, however, extrinsic (external) motivation involves a behavior to engage in an activity with an urge to get a reward or to circumvent an unfavorable situation or a punishment (Langton, Robbins, Judge, 2019).
The teams which are intrinsically motivated find the task in hand interesting and derive contentment out of it. To add on, intrinsically motivated teams are more likely to outperform and climb the ladder of success. External motivators however which include financial or tangible outcomes like-Rewards, Recognition, pay raise, etc. also are crucial especially for those who prefer material compensation, and hence there must be a sustainable balance between both types of motivations in a team.
Social recognition is an ideal way to inspire workers, however, cash rewards should also be embraced to motivate individuals and team performance (Alexandru, 2019). To quote a real-life example of Motivation, I worked in Citibank and led a rationalization project that reduced cross-dependency in units, increasing the customer query resolution rate by enabling empowerment and straight through process improvement opportunities.
This was done by reviewing the existing service to identify areas for improvement and re-engineered processes to enhance the customer experience. I had an intrinsic motivator here as I was always keen to challenge the status quo and identify process changes, furthermore when this Project was awarded the project of the year which provided me recognition and reward amount too. This acted as an extrinsic motivation also which made us cherish our success for a long time and kept me going.
Motivation (2013) reported that every organization might have different strategies to motivate their employees. Even if we talk about the world’s largest technology company Apple, it considers Maslow’s Theory to motivate its employees. Per Maslow’s Theory, basic human needs must be prioritized in a strict sequence of the pyramid. Apple fulfilled the most basic psychological need by fixing an average salary which is optimal for survival and distributed free I-phones to satisfy their esteem needs. This motivational strategy has truly benefited Apple to motivate employees to be creative and responsible at work.