Page 38 - Build a Culture of Employee Engagement with the Principles

9
The Workplace “Carrot-on-a-Stick”

getting full credit for one’s accomplishments. People are less
likely to share information, cooperate, or display discretionary
effort unless doing so directly increases their perceived value to
the organization. Breakdown in teamwork is well explained by
Maslow’s model. If you want people to function more cohesively
as a team, they must feel secure in their jobs.
Since the 1950s there have been a number of significant
developments in the field of human motivation and a plethora
of theories to explain and impact human behavior in the work-
place, including Albert Bandura’s Self-Efficacy Theory, Douglas
McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y, Victor Vroom’s Expectancy
Theory, Frederick Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory, Martin Fish-
bein’s Expectancy-Value Theory, Edwin Locke’s Goal-Setting
Theory, and John Adams’s Equity Theory. Each of these has con-
tributed significantly to our understanding of employee motiva-
tion and productivity in the workplace. Collectively, this body
of research provides overwhelming evidence that employees are
motivated by their thoughts, feelings, and beliefs and that what
was effective at motivating Skinner’s lab animals to work for
food pellets is too simplistic to fully explain the complexities of
human motivation. Skinner lost the empirical tug-of-war. Given
all this, it is difficult to understand why our primary approach
to motivating employees continues to be reward and recognition
programs based on the principles of operant conditioning. It just
doesn’t make sense.

Motivation in the Workplace Today

The workplace and its employees are very different today than
they were prior to the second half of the twentieth century. One
of the biggest changes is employees’ expectations and their rela-
tionship to their work. Managers, leaders, and human resources