Employee Motivation & Emotional Aspects: A Case Study Analysis Example

Introduction

Case studies are ideal instances to understand the motivation and emotional behavior of human beings. Case studies aid in explaining, predicting, and applying the motivation theories and the emotional aspects learned in the classroom to real-life situations. This paper aims to evaluate a situation in the case study and demonstrate the application of the motivation and emotional aspects to solving the challenges experienced by the sample population. Employees can become lukewarm if the management fails to recognize their efforts; however, much they work towards meeting the organization's goals. The work of a sales representative is demanding, and to meet the monthly sales quota shows that effort one has invested in the company's success. Employees are motivated to work both intrinsically and extrinsically. However, the large company fails to recognize the sales representative's efforts despite meeting the monthly sales quota. The management finds it normal and tells her that everything is fine as long as she meets or surpasses the monthly quota. In addition to the sales representative, other employees are also not motivated to work. As a result, the job turnover among other employees at the company is very high, as depicted by the 90% calls that fail to produce a sell (Reeve, 2015, p. 457).

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Proposed Intervention

Problems are better addressed using suitable interventions that offer the best solutions.

The sales representative is already intrinsically motivated but needs the extrinsic motivation to sustain intrinsic motivation. The sales representative lacks the drive to sustain her hope, confidence, optimism, and interest for lack of extrinsic motivation, whenever faced with frequent failure and potential burnout. Several suggestions have been made on the various interventions that can address the lack of motivation in human beings. According to Reeve, there are four states of the art interventions: cultivating compassion, promoting emotion knowledge, increasing a growth mindset, and supporting psychological need satisfaction (Reeve, 2015, pp. 501 - 510).

Rather than trying to introduce punitive punishment measures to the salesperson for lack of enthusiasm and fellow employees for their failure to institute good rapport, the management needs to design an intervention that offers highly responsive relationships that makes them feel satisfied working for the organization. According to Reeve (2015), a motivational intervention becomes more effective if its focus is on supporting people's motivation and not improving the outcome like the large company is trying to do. The company is only concerned with the sales representative meeting the sales target quota. The management should develop an intervention that makes the sales representative and colleague employees feel appreciated, and care about their outcomes. Hence, such intervention becomes productive while supporting the employee’s motivation to work and further improve the outcomes. Such a system focuses on the system rather than the goal, as pointed out by James Clear.

In this regard, the intervention to address the challenge faced by the sales representative will be the supporting psychological need satisfaction intervention. The intervention is based on the self-determination theory. Based on the case study's practical problem, the sales representative and colleague employees have not had their three psychological needs, namely relatedness, competence, and need for autonomy achieved. Cross-cultural research has indicated that human beings need engagement, well-being, motivation, and healthy development (Gagne et al., 2014). The sales representative needs fewer turnover intentions, less stress to yield greater work performance, which is achieved when the needs are satisfied.

The sales representative already possesses the required skills as the core competency in carrying the sales work. However, the sales representative needs recognition and teamwork to meet the autonomy and relatedness of psychological needs. Autonomy requires the understanding that human beings become empowered when they develop a sense of choice and endorsement in carrying out a task (Deci & Ryan, 2008). In this regard, the recognition will be critical in creating a feeling and a sense of endorsement for the tasks carried out in the company and for attaining the sales quota. All the psychological needs are based on the self-determination theory, which seeks to enhance the intrinsic motivation to work in a company. Hence, the theory and the intervention will be critical in answering the questions, (1) how do people decide what goals to set, and (2) how does this sometimes improve motivation and sometimes diminish well-being.

Motivational State

The motivational state for the sales representative is best described using the self-determination theory. With the impediment being a lack of motivation and the inclination towards employee turnover, the sales representative's mindset needs to be diverted to be more oriented towards the organization's goals and be satisfied with the tasks she performs for the company. The sales representative's self-determination does not tell that they are incompetent; rather, she has the necessary skills to carry out the job, but the work conditions, satisfaction, and motivation are lacking. When the representative needs to become satisfied, the work problems will come to an end and become motivated and improve self-determination. While it focuses on self-determination and personal effort, it is a company affair since it will have to recognize the employee's efforts. Once the efforts are recognized, the zeal to work better and feel satisfied with the job will increase, leading to increased outcomes and reduced employee turnover. In this regard, the company will indirectly address its outcomes by directly addressing the employees' personal needs.

Self-determination theory is significant in making the intrinsic motivation of the employees sustainable and eliminates employee turnover. Self-determination theory believes that human beings are by nature, curious and will always ask for a chance to make choices autonomously. Autonomy is grounded on the intrinsic motivation where individuals gain motivation to carry out tasks on the inherent enjoyment of the work without being attached to the payment they receive. However, due to the situations and the individual differences that hinder self-determination, autonomy, competency, and relatedness are three major ways to enhance intrinsic motivation. As social beings, human beings interact with one another to demonstrate connectedness and care.

Testable Hypothesis

The hypothesis will be tested to understand the achievements that the sales representative at the organization gains at the end of the intervention. Lack of motivation and the inclination towards employee turnover are the greatest challenges facing the sales representative and all the employees working at the company.

The hypothesis's testing will be achieved through the use of a pre-post-test experimental survey design that will have two groups. There will be an experimental group and a control group. The intervention will be administered to one group while to the other; no intervention will be administered. Based on this, the experimental group will be recognized for meeting the sales monthly quota and engaged in teamwork to work collaboratively in improving the target sales. On the contrary, the control group will not be recognized or allowed to work in teamwork but left with no intervention.

First, the sales representatives will be recruited and assigned randomly to various groups and then asked to give their views on the best motivational strategy to recognize their efforts. Giving the employees a chance to give their views is an autonomous strategy that involves the workers in decision-making and hence appreciates their contributions to the company's success. Such a strategy creates satisfaction and motivation to keep working tiredly to meet the company’s goals. The intervention program will then run for three months to see how they behave after recognizing the remarkable work of meeting their sales target quota. It will also entail evaluating how they behave when assigned to various teams to work collaboratively to achieve their expected outcomes. Each team will be given a target to achieve, in addition to the personal target quota.

At the beginning of the intervention, the two groups will be evaluated to determine their present state. After the three months, the two groups will again be monitored to evaluate the difference if the recognition-teamwork-based intervention works perfectly in motivating the sales representative to work better and lead to an improvement in the company's outcome. The participants will be expected to fill survey questionnaires for self-appraisal and to argument the evaluation conducted by the management. Besides, the questionnaires will help reduce selection bias and check the effectiveness and validity of the recognition-teamwork intervention (Reeve, 2015).

Evidence to Support Hypothesis

This section supports that self–determination leads to satisfaction and motivation through the creation of autonomy, relatedness, and competency. In this regard, the section addresses how autonomy and relatedness affect the self–determination of the sales representative to gain satisfaction and hence work towards improving their sales outcomes.

Self–determination is based on the premise that some activities improve or satisfy or thwart human needs (Vansteenkiste et al., 2020). Hence, while some experiences decrease the feelings of competency and satisfaction, others enhance relatedness, and others build up greater confidence. The social environment is very important since they help create need satisfaction, personal development, and well-being. Hence, need satisfaction is the primary priority of human beings since it has a great impact on their well-being. In all human functioning levels, the psychological needs must be satisfied without which little achieved is guaranteed. The environment highly affects human beings' behavior, which is demonstrated through a metaphor illustrated by Deci and Flaste in 1995. When an avocado is put in a pot of earth, it starts to grow and later becomes a tree. Although it grows because it is the nature of avocados to grow, the growth occurs when water, sun, and the right temperatures are present; otherwise, no growth takes place. While the elements mentioned above do not make the avocado grow, they support elements and nutrients that make development possible. As a result, they are necessary for the avocado's natural growth (Deci & Flaste, 1995).

References

Deci, E. L., & Flaste, R. (1995). Why we do what we do: The dynamics of personal autonomy. New York: A Grosset Putnam book.

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2008). Facilitating Optimal Motivation and Psychological Well-Being Across Life's Domains. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne 49, 14-23.

Gagné, M., Forest, J., Vansteenkiste, M., Crevier-Braud, L., van den Broeck, A., & Aspeli, A. et al. (2014). The Multidimensional Work Motivation Scale: Validation evidence in seven languages and nine countries. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 24(2), 178-196. https://doi.org/10.1080/1359432x.2013.877892Reeve J. (2015) Understanding motivation and emotion (6th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.

Vansteenkiste, M., Ryan, R.M. & Soenens, B. (2020). Basic psychological need theory: Advancements, critical themes, and future directions. Motiv Emot 44, 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-019-09818-1

Williams, G. C., Halvari, H., Niemiec, C. P., Sørebø, Ø., Olafsen, A. H., & Westbye, C. (2014). Mana...