Employee Enthusiasm and Motivation in the Workplace - Assignment Example

The paper "Employee Enthusiasm and Motivation in the Workplace" is a great example of an assignment on management.
How can a manager create enthusiasm in their employees and how can they use it to improve performance? What can they do or not dampen it?
Employee enthusiasm is described as the status in which the employee morale is derived from the satisfaction of the three main needs of workers and results in a considerable competitive advantage for the companies having commitment and leadership strength to manage actual long-term results (Meltzer et al, 2005). From the definition, employee enthusiasm is not simply an attitude or a feeling; it is a state of motivation propelling people into action. It is an intuition that offers the workers something to accomplish and it is devoted to fulfilling the promises to the employees through tracking down what they are doing. Generally, enthusiastic employees produce significant results than what the job requires (Clement, 2005). 

It is the responsibility of the management to use the employee’s enthusiasm to improve performance. Various management actions can reduce employee enthusiasm. First, employee enthusiasm can be reduced by the failure of the management to manage the lowest performers. Most of the policies in companies are geared towards those employees that are not great performers. Thus, the management is found in a situation in which they generalize the behavior of these non-performers to every worker. This makes the overall working environment oppressive for the workers reducing their natural enthusiasm. Secondly, most managers fail to appreciate and get concerned about their employees and this quickly diminishes their natural enthusiasm. Lastly, the management must not be very quick to respond to severe business situations with employee layoffs. It is not very wise to dismiss employees in times of economic difficulties (Henson, 2005). In respect of these facts, I agree with the student that managers should not restrict themselves to using one tool to motivate their entire staff since this may only work against some employees’ motivation or morale.

How have you seen motivation used in the workplace to increase performance OR how have you seen lack of motivation decrease performance in the workplace?
Research shows that motivation and performance go hand in hand; that is, increased motivation increases the performance of the company. Motivation in the employer’s perspective is a method in which the employer arouses the cooperation of the individual employees. The modern approach to motivation is based on the notion that increasing the amount of effort and time that a person devotes to a particular task (that is, task motivation) will lead to increased organizational productivity and increased individual performance. The following model can describe the role of motivation in performance: Performance = (Motivation × Ability) – Situational Constraints (Conte and Landy, 2009). The student’s response follows this model roughly. Their team’s good performance was a factor of the motivation (through reward/incentive), ability and ability to overcome budget constraints.
In agreement with the student’s post, motivation is used a lot in the workplace. I have seen motivation being used in the workplace and it greatly increased the performance of both the employees and the company. One way in which I saw motivation being used is assigning each employee tasks they could complete. This ensured that the employees had the confidence of completing the task in time and with less effort. The management also made sure that there were minimal obstructions during work time. It was very rare to see an employee being given other duties in the middle of what he or she was doing. Read More