Personal & Situational Factors As Predictors of Managerial Motivation (Contributed Article‪)‬

Introduction In the Indian business schools, teaching of organisational behaviour is seldom backed by empirical research. Instead, the teachers almost entirely rely on textbooks and theories/hypotheses developed in the West. That is why Maslow's theory of need hierarchy and Herzberg's two-factor theory of motivation, among others, continue to hold sway in the field of teaching of OB in India. Without in any way questioning the profound nature of these and other such theories, it is our contention that many of these Western theories still remain to be validated in the Indian context. The exploratory study on which this paper is based is a modest attempt to test the validity in the Indian context of one of the widely accepted theories which maintains that individual Behaviour (B) is a function of a combination of Personal (P) and Situational (S) factors. [B= f(P+S)]. Using managerial motivation as a measure of behaviour we have tried to identify the relative importance of employee needs and organisational climate in predicting behaviour. Empirical data for this investigation consists of responses of 88 managerial employees belonging to two manufacturing organisations from the same industry and located in the same state of Eastern India.