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Top1. Introduction
A considerable number of organizations use motivation theories or strategies in different forms to improve employee performance in the workplace. Some of them use incentive pay such as bonus, compensation and salary increase. Others use recognition reward such as employee of the month and upgrading employees. Dessler (2019) states that improving company performance depends on selecting the right people, using the right motivation procedures, apprising, and developing employees. Furthermore, motivation concepts took a significant attention in the project environment such as in team building, leadership concepts and communication management. However, employer and employee must be aware that the motivation concepts are related to physiological, sociology and cultural aspects.
1.1 Motivation Background
Bassett and Lloyd (2005) indicate that the research in the mid twentieth century had two main views of motivation which are related to external and internal stimulation. The first view explained that employees or people were seen to be lazy and shy to work. Also, they need to be motivated by using external stimulation. The second view considered that people could be motivated for their own sake such as monetary benefits and social recognitions where these benefits were classified as internal stimulation. Since that time, several motivation theories were established. According to Jones & Moawad (2014), one of the motivation theories that was established in 1950s is hierarchy of needs theory. The hierarchy of needs theory was widely used in literature and used as a reference for papers and books worldwide. Other motivation theories that are important are expectancy theory, equity theory, ERG theory, two factors theory and the job characteristics model. These models will be explained and discussed in this study and how they are related to the project environment.
1.2 Study Originality
Even though the literature has studied the motivations theories, the literature has not paid attention in addressing the motivation issues and proposing critical solutions for these issues in project environment. This study emphases in addressing three motivations issues that have severe negative impact to the project if they are not solved. The main issues are related to cultural factors, social factors, and the pace of life issues in motivation theories.
1.3 Main Contributions
The main contribution for this study is to make the employer aware about the issues of the motivation theories and how the employer could solve these issues. Human resources will perform better in creating HR policies that are related to motivating employees such as financial reward and non-financial rewards. Also, leaders will contribute to the firm’s success by motivating the subordinates in the workplace such as building the right career path for subordinates which will help to meet the subordinate satisfaction. Thereby, happy employee will be more motivated to have high performance which will help the company to meet its project objectives.
The reminder of this paper is planned to have 6 sections: section 2 presents motivation literature review; section 3 shows the process of the research methodology; section 4 shows the result; section 5 provides discussion of the results; and section 6 presents the conclusion which includes the study limitations and future research.
2. Literature Review
2.1 Motivation Definition
For this study, we selected the best definition of motivation that is related to project management. Motivation could be defined simply as any internal process in an organization which directs, energizes as well as sustains employee’s behavior (Reeve, 2016). Employee’s behavior in terms of motivation could be classified to initiation, direction, intensity, and extension of behavior crossways time (Wright, 2016).