The Role of Motivation on Employees' Work Attitudes in an Organisation

Introduction

1.1 Background Of The Study

The demand for workers in any establishment is derived types as the workers are demanded in any establishment not for their sake but for the sake of the services they will render to the establishment. This implies that workers are employed because of the contributions they would make to the establishments where they are employed. This therefore means that there is a certain level of expectation on the part of the employer on the employee with regards to his performance or his output. Many a time, if workers are allowed to be on their own and without anything to ginger them up to perform, they go below the expected level of what was required of them.

This is obvious because of the conflicting emotional forces within each individuals that affect his personality and his behaviours. Sigmund Freud (1932) concluded this by stating that “most emotional problems (of individual) stem from a conflict between the person’s conscious self and his or her needs, desires and wishes”. Freud was concerned with the forces that motivate all human beings and with the conflict that arise between a person’s instinctive urges and the rules of establishment.

Given the emotional forces within a person or an employee which turns out to affects the employee’s behaviour or performance at work, it then becomes necessary for every establishment to put in place a mechanism that will induce or enhance the maintenance of certain desired behaviours or performance on the part of employees. This is where motivation is considered as a tool for the actualization of such a goal. Motivation therefore, has a role to play in the attainment of a desired attitudes or performance of workers in any establishment.

As Nwachukwu (2007), puts it “motivation is the emerging force that induces or compels and maintains behaviours”.

Motivation will erode the conflicting variables in men or workers that would have caused them never to exhibit the desired attitudes in their places of work, as it is directed towards the meeting of the workers’ needs, desired or wishes. This enhances their productivity in their places of works. Motivation can come in two perspectives, one being in a positive form and which has to do with rewards given to workers and which ginger them up to put in their best and the other being of a negative form which has to do with a punitive measure for the purpose of bringing out a desired behavioural pattern from an individual, expected to result in an improved productivity.

According to C.C Nwachukwu, (2007) to motivate an employee, management must create real or imagined needs for the employee to aspire to and it could be a desire to achieve through promotion, increase in wages, or increase organizational favour’s such as company’s cars with chanffeur. Imagined needs of a staff could be an aspiration to have coffee at 10 am, which is the entitlement of successful executives, to have a secretary, have someone carry his brief-case upstairs, have someone run into the office at the sound of a bell or visitors fill papers before they enter into his offices.

However, workers happiness for work and eagerness to do their works depend on the level of motivations which satisfied their needs, values and expectations which give rise to high productivity. But not motivations that gives rise to defensives behaviour which its outcomes gives poor equality workmanship and low productivity.

Akpa (2004) is of the opinion that for an organization to be at rest, he thinks that what to do to inspire workers to work with zeal so as to create good will and to attain increased productivity is to create a good working environment in terms of comfortable offices, good ventilation, safety gadgets and commissions, bonus and other monetary packages and provides a working system of regular promotion and recognition.

A worker’s worth is often measured exclusively by his or her usefulness to his employer and which of course is synonymous with the production level of an establishment or an organization. Therefore it becomes incumbent upon the management of any organization to put a motivational process in place so as to motivate its workers to attain the organization desired target of production for the substances of the business of the organization.

The focus of this work is on the role of motivation on employees attitude on organization. The case study for this work is the Akwa Ibom State water company, a state public corporation which was created in 1970 as Cross River State water Board and had the backing for its establishment by the state edict on 9 of May, 1988.

It became Akwa Ibom water Board following the creation of Akwa Ibom State out of then Cross River State. Later named Akwa Ibom State company, and it is located along Dominic Utuk Avenue in Uyo and was incorporated in February 2000 as a limited liability company. It was saddled with the main aims of producing, storing, distributing and moderating water supply to all arrears of the State. The company has five departments namely:

The marketing/sales, accounting, production, operational and Transport departments.

STATEMENT OF PROBLEM

As stated earlier, labour has a derived demand, meaning that labour is demanded because of what it can do and not for its own sake.

Every organization demand for labour in anticipation of what the labour will contribute to the organization towards accomplishing its goal. Where the workers are efficient and effective, the goals of the organization are achieved and if they are not committed to their works, the organization can never attain its expected height. In a way commitment of workers to their works depends largely on the organization’s ability the meet the needs of the workers. Thus, and according to Edem 1987, there is “a relationship between the satisfaction by organization of the needs of the workers and the workers productivity which is borne out of commitment to work.

Therefore, it is assumed that workers will perform satisfactorily if their needs are met and this is based on Bernard-Simon theory of motivation on H. G. Hicks (1985) which asserts that “various needs arouse and direct the behaviour of the organism toward the satisfaction of those needs”. What ever-thing that is put in place to direct the behaviour of a person and makes him to be focused and concentrate on his or assignment is seen as a motivation. The issue of motivation and the performance of workers therefore call for the following questions:

1. What is the place of motivation in the efficiency and effectiveness of workers?
2. How can workers in an organization be motivated for a greater performance
3. Does motivation have the capacity to subdue the personality characteristics embedded in workers with regards to their attitude to work?
4. What are the differences between the performance of a worker that is motivated and the one not motivated?

These and other questions of the nature above is what the work will attempt to answer in the course of this research.

1.2 Objectives Of The Study

The main objectives of this study are:

1. To ascertain the effect of motivation in the attitudes of staff of Akwa Ibom State Water Company to work.
2. To assess the areas that could be employed to motivate workers for a desired level of performance.
3. To examine whether motivation can erode an in-built lazy (poor) attitude of a worker to work.
4. To ascertain the differences in performance between motivated staff and the ones not motivated.

1.3 Significance Of The Study

At the conclusion of this research on the role of motivation on employee’s work attitudes in Akwa Ibom State Water Company will be highlighted. This will then assist in concluding if motivation has any effect on employee’s attitudes to work, through the comparing of the attitudes of workers that are motivated to the attitudes of workers that are not motivated.

This piece of work will bring to light the role of motivation in general productivity in Akaw Ibom State Water Company and which of course, will guide other organizations in deciding either to motivational their staff or not.

Finally, it is believed that this piece of work will surely add to the wealth of knowledge of the academia and the reading public and above all, serve as a valuable research tool for future researchers who are researching on the same on related issues.

1.4 Research Questions

The questions that were generated under the statement of the Research problems are used for Research Questions and they are as follow:

1. How does motivation affect the efficiency and effectiveness of workers in an organization?
2. In what ways can workers in an organization like the Akwa Ibom Water Company be motivated to promote productivity?
3. Does motivation have the capacity to change the poor attitude of a worker Irrespective of the nature of a worker?
4. Is there any difference in performance of a motivated worker and a worker not motivated?

1.5 Research Hypotheses

Hypotheses are viewed by Obasi (2002)”as tentative statements which are opened to confirmation or rejection when exposed to empirical verification”.

In this research, the following hypotheses are used.

1. There is no significance relationship between motivation and efficiency and the effectiveness of workers.
2. There is no significance relationship between motivation and the general productivity in an organization.
3. There is no significance relationship between motivation and the attitudes of workers to work.
4. There is no significance relationship difference between the performance of motivated workers and workers not motivated

1.6 Scope/Limitation Of The Study

The Scope of this research work falls within the operational framework of the Akwa Ibom State Water Company with regards to effect of motivation on the general productivity level of the organization under study.

1.7 Definition Of Terms

Terms that are the pivot of this work are spelt out and define here accordingly:

Motivation

According to the Domestic Theory of Motivation on which is seen today as “an ancient idea sees motivation as a tool that is directed primarily towards the gaining of pleasure and avoiding of pain”. According to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English, motivation is seen as “a process through which an incentive is given to someone and the essence of that is to promote or encourage a person in whatever thing he is embarking upon”.

Organisation

Using the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, the word organization is seen as a group such a club or business that has been formed for a particular purpose”.

Nwachukwu in his book Management Theory and Practice-defines organization as “a process of coordinating individual effort to accomplish a common objective” He sees it as “a group of people bound together to provide unity of action for the achievement of a pre-determined objective”.

Productivity

According to Samuelson, productivity “denotes the ration of output to a weighted average of inputs”.

The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English sees production as “the rate at which goods are produced and the amount produced compared with the work, time and money needed to produce the goods.”