Business theorists involving motivation for employees

Elton Mayo &

Fredrick Herzberg

Elton Mayo (1880 – 1949)

c Elton Mayo believed that workers are not just concerned with wages and salary but could be better motivated by managers interacting with their employees. He introduced the ‘Human Relation School of thought’, which focused on managers taking more of an interest in their employees and realizing that they’re also people with worthwhile opinions.

His Experiments

Mayo conducted a series of experiments in order to see how workers in different conditions.

These experiments were conducted in Hawthorne Valley of the Western Electric

Company in Chicago.

For the experiment he isolated two groups of women workers and studied the effect on their productivity levels of changing factors such as

lighting and working conditions.

Mayo expected to see the quality of work produced by the workers decline along with the

conditions, showing a positive correlation between conditions and work produced.

What Mayo saw surprised him, as he found that even though the working conditions got worse the levels of productivity remained the same or

got better.

From this Mayo concluded…

Motivation is best done by; interaction between workers and managers, greater manager

involvement in workers lives and working in groups or teams.

Fredrick Herzberg (1923 – he’s not dead yet)

Herzberg was a great believer in the Two-Factor Theory of Motivation. He argued like Mayo that there were certain factors in a business that could directly influence the work produced by employees through motivation.

However he also knew that there was many factors in business that could directly demotivate employees.

Motivators

Motivators are more concerned with the actual job itself. For instance how interesting the work is and how much opportunity it gives for extra

responsibility, recognition and promotion.

Hygiene Factors

These are factors that surround the working environment and the actual job. For example a worker will only turn up to work if they know that they’re going to be paid and working in a

safe environment. But these factors won’t make work harder once they’re there.

• Herzberg believed that businesses should motivate employees by adopting a democratic approach to management and by improving the nature and content of the actual job through certain methods. Some of the methods managers could use to achieve this are:

• Job enlargement – workers being given a greater variety of tasks to perform which should make the work more interesting. Cool… also ders bare job responsibility n’ting

• Job enrichment - involves workers being given a wider range of more complex, interesting and challenging tasks surrounding a complete unit of work. This should give a greater sense of achievement.

• Empowerment means delegating more power to employees to make their own decisions over areas of their working life.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o87s-2YtG4Y

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtYi4102OvU