International Journal of Management and Commerce Innovations ISSN 2348-7585 (Online) Vol. 7, Issue 2, pp: (931-942), Month: October 2019 - March 2020, Available at: www.researchpublish.com
MOTIVATION: PRESENTATION OF THEORIES AND CRITICS FON TAMANDJONG Georges Ph.D. in Management (Human Resource Management) Tel: +237677385246 Email: tamindolo@yahoo.com Advance Institute of Public Management, Yaounde, Cameroon.
Abstract: Motivation is a very essential tool to keep employees focused on a particular activity or on effort or toward a particular direction. Understanding motivation and how it functions is very primordial, as well as it limits so as to guide managers on how to manage employees in terms of motivation The main aim of this paper was to bring out the theories of motivation at a first place and then bring out a critic of these theories progressively. The theories where presented and the critic given and these critic bring an opening for new thoughts as per the theories of motivation. Keywords: Motivation, Content Theories and Process-theories.
1. INTRODUCTION Anybody who is interested in understanding, predicting, or influencing human behaviour must start with the understanding of basic human motivation. Why do individuals behave the way they behave? The way people behave sometimes may be tied to their degree of motivation and satisfaction for their enterprises. So to know the ways how people can be motivated in an organisational setting is very important. The survey of literature of motivational theories suggest that, theories of motivation are basically grouped either according to the „nature of theories‟ or their „chronological appearance.‟ As per this work, these theories will be grouped into Content-theories (Maslow‟s Needs Hierarchy, Two Factor theory of Herzberg‟s, Theory X and Theory Y, Alderfer‟s ERG theory, and Needs theory of McClelland‟s) and „Process-theories‟ (Behaviour Modification, Cognitive Evaluation Theory, Job characteristics model, Goal Setting theory, Reinforcement theory, Expectancy theory, and Equity theory). In all the above cited theories we are going to point out the most prominent theories of motivation. We will acknowledge all this division of theories is across the literature.
2. CONTENT THEORIES Content theories focus on identifying the needs, drives and incentives/goals and their prioritisation by persons to get satisfaction (Luthans, 2005). Experts have long prepared diverse set of psychological, social, biological and higher level needs of people. Most of the scholars categorise the aforementioned needs into basic, secondary and superior level worker‟s needs, which must to be achieved if the worker wants to be motivated and satisfied. 2.1. Maslow’s Needs Hierarchy This is the most widely mentioned theory of motivation. Abraham Maslow presupposed that individuals have complex sets of strong needs and an individual‟s behaviour at certain times is usually determined by their strongest need (Weihrich & Koontz ,1999). Maslow developed his motivation model in 1943, after doing some clinical experience and he then formulated his hierarchical theory by asking the similar question, what is it that makes persons to behave the way they behave and made a list of answers from which he developed a pattern. He based his theory upon two assumptions. First, humans have various needs and they needs are diverse in nature going from the biological needs at the least level need;
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