Mgmt 501 Group Project: Motivation

Motivation

        Employee motivation is an important tool in Supply Chain Management. The goal of Supply Chain Management is to make sure each group along the supply chain is operating efficiently. This cannot be achieved without rewarding good behavior and motivating employees to increase their efficiency. There are some key tools that are used to motivate employees. For a long time financial incentives such as raises and bonuses have been used effectively to increase motivation among employees. But there are obvious downsides to only using these tools. There is a heavy cost with giving raises and bonuses. It can be hard to budget correctly for these types of costs as well.  There are some alternatives to financial incentives that can be used that have similar benefits. These types of incentives often come at a minor cost and can be easily implemented without negative consequences.

        Employee motivation is not only related to increased work performance but to other issues effecting organizations such as employee turnover rate, employee commitment, and mental health in the workplace (Meyer and Herscovitch, 2001; Richer, Blanchard and Vallerand, 2002; Locke 1997). Because of these other motivational benefits this is an important avenue of research in supply chain management. Employees that are motivated, mentally healthy, and committed are going to perform better and the ROI of non-cash incentives are very positive.

Non-Cash Incentives

        There are multiple types of non-cash incentives that work as a good alternative to cash incentives as an employee motivation technique. Non-cash incentives could be point systems, recognition systems such as certificates of achievement and trophies, and leaderboards. These types of systems can be used to award the top performers, provide a public measuring system to compare each employee’s work to. These tools have the advantage of explaining clearly what work is considered important and what is not. Another way that non-cash incentives help is by increasing the mental health of employees. Employees feel like their work is being noticed and that they are doing a good job. Non-cash incentives work on a system of rewarding good behavior. This has been a social motivation theory for a long time and is centered on the idea that positive reinforcement causes a link between good behaviors and rewards (Stajkovic & Luthans 2003). This motivates the employee to seek the reward by continuing the positive behavior. Other employees see the rewards that are given and desire those rewards or status and are motivated to do the positive behavior. More concisely, “human behaviour is controlled by its consequences within an effort-reward model” (Brun and Dugas 2008, p. 723).

Negative Consequences

        All motivational techniques hold some type of negative impact as well as a positive one. There are many ways that non-cash incentives can be seen as negatives. Incentivizing the wrong behaviors can be a great example of a negative effect of incentives. If your incentive program is not setup correctly you could be rewarding actions that have little effect on the work needing to be done. As the organization and work changes employees will need to change their work behavior too. By leaving outdated reward systems in place or by not creating systems correctly in the first place, you leave yourself open to issues. Rewarding useless or negative behaviors can make it difficult to motivate employees to do the valuable needed work.