"Managers who rely only on pay to motivate their employees to higher levels of job performance will always be disappointed n the results". Critically evaluate this statement.

For Maslow, pay is the lowest in all of the motivators. He believes you move up the scale towards self-motivation. However, his theory has been met by much criticism. It can be seen as “patronising and elitist in terms of the values it expresses.”  People can achieve complete self-motivation from activities they do outside of work i.e. childcare, for these employees they can have reached a higher order before satisfying the lower ones. It is also practically impossible to generalise everyone’s strengths and weaknesses as each person is an individual. The theory is also often contradicted by research such as the study by Hall and Nougain. (1968) In reality the theory is “too simplified and imprecise to be used successfully as a way of influencing employee motivation.” It does however, give a good general view as Schwartz (1983) quoted “it makes an important contribution as a descriptive scheme.”

Herzberg on the other hand distinguished between Motivators and Hygiene factors. Motivators include achievement, responsibility and chance of promotion. People would want to work to better themselves – relatively similar to Maslow’s higher orders. Hygiene factors are the issues surrounding an employee whilst they work that “help avoid dissatisfaction with work.” These include status, work conditions and quality of personnel management. What sets Herzberg apart from Maslow is the fact that he looks at how job design can be a potentially motivating factor. Herzberg would suggest that what truly motivates is intrinsic factors such as  achievement rather than pay. This goes towards explaining why some managers who rely on pay may be disappointed – it’s not what makes a job enjoyable.

Despite these two theorists agreeing with the above statement Taylor is one content theorist more inclined to disagree. He favoured using incentive wage plans and was seen to continually achieve consistently good results. However, in the article Why Incentive Plans Cannot Work by Alfie Kohn he goes into innumerable detail about the disadvantage of using payment as a motivator. He explains that rewards can work, they will motivate people to strive for the reward. Employees will become accustomed to working for the sole reason of a reward as a  teleological result. Kohn explains how rewards can even go as far to punish employees. By “not receiving a reward one had expected to receive is also indistinguishable from being punished.” Teamwork is also at a loss where rewards are offered as people are working for individual gain. Elton Mayo explored with the Hawthorne Effect that working in groups can itself be a motivator; this is counter productive when reward comes into the equation. Workers will be competing with each other for the reward seeing each other as competition which could make relations strained. Despite, this pay rewards can be a good incentive in short term projects where a team will all work for the reward. This will motivate them to work together to achieve their objectives. Kohn stresses that rewards can work in the short term but not in the long term where workers will become reliant.

Vroom had an expectancy theory that people worked for two factors. One being how attractive the outcome is and secondly the level of expectation that the action will produce the hoped-for outcome. Vroom believed that following this theory, managers should evaluate their employees and provide them with goals which are both achievable and realistic. There are however, exceptions to this rule e.g. Nurses. They work exceptionally hard in an area where pay is certainly not a motivator as economic rewards are low. Their reward is working to make people better and this is enough incentive for them.

The effect of performance related pay is a mystery. In certain circumstances workers will be achieving high productivity but with poor quality. Staff can also be highly motivated but perform badly. These two factors suggest that using pay as encouragement is not always going to work, then again, the Marriott Case Study is a good example of where pay was not exceptionally high yet workers were highly motivated and their hard work showed in their performance.

In conclusion, the essay has shown circumstances where pay works as a motivator and where it fails. The overwhelming feeling is that pay is fine as a short term motivator but when it is used continually workers can become reliant and it can put pressure on employee relations as well as encouraging them to work purely for economic reward. Managers will not always be disappointed with results as explained but there are other ways to motivate which have shown to produce continually good results such as job enrichment and making employees feel as though they genuinely matter. In my opinion, managers who use pay incentives can achieve good results but from reading the articles as evidence my advice would be to use them sparingly.

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