per-sonality and attitudes?
Internet Exercise:
Assessing Your
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154 Part Two Cognitive Processes of Organizational Behavior
10 most admired firms in America. Why? Part of it is a reflection of Wynn’s own personality. He is eternally opti-mistic and wants his people to be the same. Wynn’s strat-egy is to keep everybody happy. If anyone is not, Wynn’s employees are to fix it. As he tells his people, “If you see a hotel guest with the tiniest frown on her face, don’t ask a supervisor, take care of it. Erase the charge, send the din-ner back, don’t charge for the room.” In addition, Wynn sponsors elaborate parties to honor staffers who have kept the most customers happy. At one recent party for a Vietnamese woman who was being honored as employee
of the year, Wynn brought in George and Barbara Bush to congratulate the lady. It cost a lot of money for the party, but, as Wynn puts it, “It’s an investment.”
1. Why do employees at firms such as Apple Computer work so hard and put in such long hours?
2. How would you describe Wayne Huizenga in terms of the self-concept, specifically self-esteem?
3. Why is job satisfaction and organizational commit-ment so high at Mirage Resorts? How does Steve Wynn manage to keep his employees so happy?
Organizational Behavior Case: Same Accident, Different Perceptions
According to the police report, on July 9 at 1:27 P.M., bus number 3763 was involved in a minor noninjury accident. Upon arriving at the scene of the accident, police were unable to locate the driver of the bus.
Because the bus was barely drivable, the passengers were transferred to a backup bus, and the damaged bus was returned to the city bus garage for repair.
The newly hired general manager, Aaron Moore, has been going over the police report and two addi-tional reports. One of the addiaddi-tional reports was sub-mitted by Jennifer Tye, the transportation director for the City Transit Authority (CTA), and the other came directly from the driver in the accident, Michael Meyer. According to Tye, although Mike has been an above-average driver for almost eight years, his per-formance has taken a drastic nosedive during the past 15 months. Always one to join the other drivers for an afterwork drink or two, Mike recently has been sus-pected of drinking on the job. Furthermore, according to Tye’s report, Mike was seen having a beer in a tavern located less than two blocks from the CTA terminal at around 3 P.M. on the day of the accident. Tye’s report concludes by citing two sections of the CTA Transportation Agreement. Section 18a specifıcally forbids the drinking of alcoholic beverages by any CTA employee while on duty. Section 26f prohibits drivers from leaving their buses unattended for any reason. Violation of either of the two sections results in
automatic dismissal of the employee involved. Tye rec-ommends immediate dismissal.
According to the driver, Michael Meyer, however, the facts are quite different. Mike claims that in attempting to miss a bicycle rider he swerved and struck a tree, causing minor damage to the bus. Mike had been talking with the dispatcher when he was forced to drop his phone receiver in order to miss the bicycle. Because the receiver broke open on impact, Mike was forced to walk four blocks to the nearest phone to report the accident. As soon as he reported the accident to the company, Mike also called the union to tell them about it. Mike reports that when he returned to the scene of the accident, his bus was gone. Uncertain of what to do and a little frightened, he decided to return to the CTA terminal. Because it was over a five-mile walk and because his shift had already ended at 3 P.M., Mike stopped in for a quick beer just before get-ting back to the terminal.
1. Why are the two reports submitted by Jennifer and Mike so different? Did Jennifer and Mike have dif-ferent perceptions of the same incident?
2. What additional information would you need if you were in Aaron Moore’s position? How can he clarify his own perception of the incident?
3. Given the information presented above, how would you recommend resolving this problem?
Chapter 5 Personality, Perception, and Employee Attitudes 155
Good people—valuable employees—quit their jobs every day. Usually, they leave for better positions else-where. Take Ken, an experienced underwriter in a north-eastern insurance company, who scribbled the following remarks on his exit interview questionnaire:
This job isn’t right for me. I like to have more input on decisions that affect me—more of a chance to show what I can do. I don’t get enough feedback to tell if I’m doing a good job or not, and the company keeps people in the dark about where it’s headed.
Basically, I feel like an interchangeable part most of the time.
In answer to the question about whether the company could have done anything to keep him, Ken replied sim-ply, “Probably not.”
Why do so many promising employees leave their jobs? And why do so many others stay on but perform at minimal levels for lack of better alternatives? One of the main reasons—Ken’s reason—can be all but invisible, because it’s so common in so many organizations: a sys-temwide failure to keep good people.
Corporations should be concerned about employ-ees like Ken. By investing in human capital, they may
actually help reduce turnover, protect training invest-ments, increase productivity, improve quality, and reap the benefits of innovative thinking and teamwork.
Human resource professionals and managers can con-tribute to corporate success by encouraging employees’
empowerment, security, identity, “connectedness,” and competence. How? By recognizing the essential compo-nents of keeping their best people and by understanding what enhances and diminishes those components.
Ken doubts that his company will ever change, but other organizations are taking positive steps to focus on and enhance employee retention. As a result, they’re reducing turnover, improving quality, increasing pro-ductivity, and protecting their training investments.
1. Do you think that Ken’s self-esteem had anything to do with his leaving the firm?
2. What do you think were Ken’s satisfaction with and commitment to the job and firm he is leaving? How does this relate to the research on the determinants and outcomes of satisfaction and commitment?
3. What lesson can this company learn from the case of Ken? What can and should it now do?
Organizational Behavior Case: Ken Leaves the Company
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Chapter Six
Motivational Needs, Processes, and
Applications
Learning Objectives
• Define the motivation process.
• Identify the primary and secondary needs.
• Discuss the major theories of work motivation.
• Present the motivational application of job design.
• Describe the motivational application of goal setting.
Motivation is a basic psychological process. Few would deny that it is the most important focus in the micro approach to organizational behavior. In fact, a data-based comprehen-sive analysis concluded that “America’s competitiveness problems appear to be largely motivational in nature.”1Many people equate the causes of behavior with motivation; how-ever, as evidenced in this book, the causes of organizational behavior are much broader and more complex than can be explained by motivation alone.
Along with many other psychological constructs, motivation is presented here as a very important process in understanding behavior. Motivation interacts with and acts in con-junction with other mediating processes and the environment. It must also be remembered that, like the other cognitive processes, motivation cannot be seen. All that can be seen is behavior. Motivation is a hypothetical construct that is used to help explain behavior; it should not be equated with behavior. In fact, while recognizing the “central role of motiva-tion,” many of today’s organizational behavior theorists “think it is important for the field to reemphasize behavior.”2
This chapter first presents motivation as a basic psychological process. The more applied aspects of motivation on job design and goal setting are covered in the last part of the chapter. The first section of this chapter clarifies the meaning of motivation by defining the relationship among its various parts. The need–drive–incentive cycle is defined and analyzed. The next section is devoted to an overview of the various types of needs, or motives: both primary and secondary. The next section of the chapter pre-sents both the historical and more complex contemporary theories of work motivation.
Finally, the two major motivation applications of job design and goal setting are given attention.
Chapter 6 Motivational Needs, Processes, and Applications 157