Sunday, December 4, 2022

The Importance of Employee Motivation during the Pandemic.

 

The study of employee motivation began in the 1920s with the Hawthorne Studies and continues to this day as researchers attempt to find out motivating factors and practical tools for employees to reach their full potential (Jensen 2018).

During the past couple of years, many companies failed due to the COVID–19 pandemic, economic instability, and employee retentions. Human life was affected with uncertainty of life and unemployment. Many employers struggled to find either the balance to retain the right employees for the rightful jobs or to keep existing employees motivated in the field of work.

As an example the Aviation industry went through many losses due to the travel restrictions made by many countries around the globe. As a result, many major airlines started laying off staff to survive in the business and retain market share since airlines experienced a decrease in capacity of roughly 60–80% (Josephs, 2020). Many airlines also had to investigate ways of motivating their existing staff despite pay cuts and restrictions to stay among the preferred choice of travel with some very limited airlines in operation.



According to Adikaram, Naotunna, Priyankara (2021) on "Battling COVID-19 with human resource management bundling" it is discussed that employers had to deal with Layoff Survivor Syndrome with the existing employees during the pandemic to keep them motivated amid many other employees losing their jobs (Kim, 2003). It is key that employers must take necessary steps for the company’s growth and stability and retain employees, as it is where the motivated lot turn out to be capable to operate through tougher work environments with lesser staff and more workload maintaining an incline in productivity and generating profits for the company (Navaneetha & Bhaskar, 2018).

 

 

REFERENCES

Adikaram, A.S., Naotunna, N.P.G.S.I. and Priyankara, (2021), Battling COVID-19 with human resource management bundling. Employee Relations, 43(6) 1269-1289. Available from https://doi.org/10.1108/ER-08-2020-0390  [Accessed on 10.11.2022].

Jensen, J. (2018), Employee Motivation: A Leadership ImperativeInternational Journal of Business Administration, 9(2), 93-98. Available from https://www.sciedupress.com/journal/index.php/ijba/article/view/13158 [ Accessed on 15.11.2022]

Josephs. L. (2020), American Airlines cutting international summer schedule by 60% as coronavirus drives down demand. CNBC News, 2 April Available at: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/02/coronavirus-update-american-airlines-cuts-summer-international-flights-by-60percent-as-demand-suffers.html (2020), Accessed 29.11.2022.

Kim, W. (2003), Economic crisis, downsizing and layoff survivor's syndrome., Journal of Contemporary Asia, 33(4) 449-464. Available from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00472330380000281  [Accessed on 10.11.2022]

Navaneetha, T and Bhaskar, K. (2018), A Study on Employee Motivation at Workplace with Reference to BSNL, Kadapa, International Journal of Engineering Technologies, and Management Research, 113. Available from https://zenodo.org/record/1255343    [Accessed on 13.11.2022]

12 comments:

  1. Timely topic Deyan! People went through a lot of hardships during last few years so motivation is a must these days. Additionally, motivational theories have attempted to shed some light on the psychology behind motivation and how managers can decipher the various needs of their employees. Common between the theories explored from Maslow, Herzberg, Argyris, and Deci & Ryan is the idea that employees have varying levels of needs that will drive behavior, but high level psychological needs are what ultimately motivates us to achieve our full potential and what achieves long term results in employee engagement. If lower level needs are not met, focus cannot move upward; therefore, given the extensive impacts COVID has had on our lives, all needs should be considered (Sinkowski, 2021).

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    1. Agreed Manula, I chose this topic cos I too was a personal victim of job loss during the Pandemic. It’s very important as management to motivate people around, specially when they are dealing with so much in their personal lives and the only thing that they want is a peaceful surrounding to work with. Also out of all the functions a manager performs, motivating employees is arguably the most complex. This is because what motivates employees is constantly changing (Bowen and Radhakrishna, 1991).

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  2. According to Woods et al (2004), job satisfaction can be achieved when an employee becomes one with the organization, performs to the best of their ability and shows commitment; moreover, job satisfaction and performance are positively influenced by rewards

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    1. • Yes, I too agree with the citing. working with motivated staff makes a big difference rather than working with negativity. According to Celik (1999), Job satisfaction is the positive psychology and endogeneity that occurs as a result of an individual's work experiences.

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  3. A good blog article Diyan. The pay was not ranked as one of the most important motivational factors by Kovach (1987). On the other hand, the full appreciation of work done was not ranked as one of the most important motivational factors by Harpaz (1990). Therefore, motivational factors like employee pay and interesting work differ according to the context and individuals. Thus, identifying the motivational factors of the employees would make the line manager’s task of employee engagement easier.

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    1. @afzal, yes according to Chen (2008), The emotional state, behavior, attitudes, and preferences of individuals towards their jobs constitute the infrastructure related to job satisfaction.

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  4. Good blog article Deyan, Furthermore, as per Stoker, Garretsen, & Lammers (2021), they investigated how the COVID-19 crisis affected changes in leadership behaviors and found that home offices had an impact on perceived manager quality and productivity at various organizational levels. Agarwal et al. (2020) stated that the importance of COVID 19 leadership to an organization during these period and the ‘effective leadership, or best practices in terms of COVID-19, are communicate frequently with team members in mutually agreed-upon medium, clarify roles and processes to perform tasks and appropriately train employees on using the preferred communications platform (e.g., Zoom, Microso)’

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    1. Thanks for the important citing Romeda, yes I too agree that the leadership role and behavior should be more supportive towards the employees considering the fact that everyone was working with fear of job losses. According to Alfalih (2021), the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on the regime and rhythm of work is coming, the task of employees in management is to retain their staff in a positive setting and provide motivation.

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  5. Good article Deyan. Organizational behavior which has a distinctive featuring of models and theories pertains to motivation. The development and growth of employees are significantly focused. As for Maslow, Alderfer, McClelland, Hackman and Hertzberg; the growth is most influential and intrinsic motivator for individuals that exploit the potential of employees. It is found that an undeniable link exists among employee motivation and their satisfaction with the jobs and to organizational commitment (Chen et al., 2004).

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    1. Yes Thilini, The Covid-19 outbreak in China is a worldwide well-being threat (Wang et al., 2020). Ryan and Deci (2000), stated that intrinsic motivation is defined as doing an activity for inherent satisfaction rather than for some separable consequence, as well as doing something because it is inherently enjoyable or interesting.

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  6. Agreed your content Deyan And furthermore Panagiotakopoulos (2013) concluded that factors affecting staff motivation at a period where the financial rewards are kept to the least leads to stimulate employee performance. So, management personnel's responsibility to motivate their employees to work as per the expectation to enhance the organization's performance. Similarly Dysvik and Kuvaas (2010) concluded that intrinsic motivation was the strongest predictor of turnover intention and relationship between mastery-approach goals and turnover intention WA Managers need to understand the flow of motivation from an organizational perspective, it helps them create a culture where employees always get motivated to do better [2].

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  7. Thank you for the input Nimesha, also • Zhang et al. (2016), stated that theory and empirical results can help in exploring the relationship between types of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and work performance and Intrinsic motivation causes an increase in employee performance.

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The Importance of Employee Motivation during the Pandemic.

  The study of employee motivation began in the 1920s with the Hawthorne Studies and continues to this day as researchers attempt to find ou...