Literature review on motivation and reward theories

Motivation

Companies might obtain enormous benefits and enhance their performance by motivating employees appropriately. Motivated staff are likely to work harder in a shorter period of time. The supervision is also required less. As a result, the cost of labour is likely to reduce significantly. While the motivated workers retain the stronger loyalty, make fewer mistakes, and impact positively on customers, the unmotivated employees, on the other hand, usually express poor performance, or tend to change jobs occasionally ().

Motivation is defined as personal interest which forces “the direction, intensity, and persistence of voluntary behaviour” (textbook pg 170). In other word, people who are motivated will voluntarily spent a particular amount of time and efforts to achieve the organisational goals. Therefore, the main concern of motivation theories is how to stimulate and retain “goal-directed behaviour” (Latham, Locket 1979, Goal setting).

There are many different theoretical approaches to motivation at work, however, the prevalent studies are broken down into three categories, internal, external, and process.

The first group is based on internal factors, specifically the employees’ need, focusing on individual variables as motivators to influence behaviour. Need based theories suggest that an individual’s motivation is initiated once there are unsatisfied needs. However, if the needs are achieved, a balance restoration would be shaped and motivation might be reduced or disappeared. Maslow (1954) categorised needs into five hierarchical groups, which the first and lowest need is physiological, or basic demands such as food, water, and shelter. Each need from the lowest must be satisfied first before move on to the next level. The high needs become the primary motivators which drive people to