Motivation in the Workplace

“Motivation is the process of stimulation an individual to take
action that will accomplish a desired goal.” (Barron’s; 236) The
word motivation comes from the Latin word ‘movere’, which means to
move or to urge. There are numerous definitions of motivation, which
is logical, because there are many different personalities that are
motivated through different factors, as well as there exist various
motivation theories and programs. Motivation is getting more
important every day since the competition in the workplace is
increasing on a daily basis as well as the unemployment rate.
Management has to find an effective way of motivate not only
themselves, but more to motivate their employees, therefore
management has to take into account theories and has to consider the
differences in personality of its workforce, to imply a successful
motivation program.
The first theorist, which has to be taken into account, was
Frederick W Taylor (1856 – 1915) who believed that only through
maximal worker productivity economic prosperity could be achieved
which in turn would be the product of making employees more
efficient. Taylor is also known as the “Father of scientific
management”; he called this approach the Scientific Management and
his beliefs were that only a management scientist would be able to
achieve this efficiency of the worker. Furthermore Taylor did not
have trust in employees, in his opinion, workers start lacking
efficiency as soon as there is not such a management scientist. His
aim was to achieve maximum efficiency and to reach this goal he
created a process called job fractionation. By observing different
workers at different jobs he measured the amount of time a worker
needed to finish a task and then looked at each job and its
constituent tasks (=basic work units), he used these measurements to
create time and motion studies. [...]