A Study on Employee Motivation in Selected Commercial Banks

Transcription

1 A HRD Study Practices on Employee in Motivation... Contemporary Industries Published by Global Vision Publishing House Editors 131 P. Surjith Kumar N. Panchanatham A Study on Employee Motivation in Selected Commercial Banks M. Kavitha* and M. Dhanabhakyam** Motivation refers to the forces either within or external to a person that produce enthusiasm and persistence to pursue a certain course of action. Employee motivation affects productivity, and part of a manager s job is to channel motivation towards the accomplishment of both personal and organisational goals. This paper seeks to investigate the role played by rewards in the process of motivating employees. The study explored factors determining rewards, their impact on employee motivation and activities to influence the commercial banks for a consideration of a more systematic and structured approach to acknowledge employees efforts which would in turn increase high performance culture in commercial banks. The study also attempted to examine the employee motivation in commercial banks. The study revealed multiple factors affecting employee work motivation and performance which have got their own unique approach, significance and contribution towards motivation and performance that make higher and maximise organisational progress. The results indicate that there is a statistical significant relationship between all of the independent variables with dependent variable employee work motivation. The present study revealed that * Research Scholar, Dept of Commerce, Bharathiar University, Coimbatore ** Assistant Professor, Dept. of Commerce, Bharathiar University, Coimbatore

2 132 HRD Practices in Contemporary Industries management can make use of different strategies and policies to motivate employees in work settings, but different plans, strategies and policies would have a different motivational impact on different people. Introduction A milestone in the successes of an organization is to fulfill the continuous changing needs of organisation and employees, heavy responsibility falls on top management to develop strong relationship between them. Organizations expect employees to follow the rules and regulations, work according to the standards set for them; the employees expect good working conditions, fair pay, security and involvement in decisions. These expectations of both parties vary from organisation to organisation. For organisations to address these expectations, an understanding of employees motivation is required. It is generally assumed that employees come across human resource policies through the behaviour their managers plan and explain to them through their management skills they have. Problem with understanding, consistency confidence, capabilities are raised and it is common opinion that line managers needed more to train and support themselves if they were to carry out their reward through the responsibilities of their duties such as performance management or effective recognition. The managers have be responsible for both to commit to the reward strategy and capable of implementing it. Rewards professional can come up with new demanding policies but the responsibilities fall on the line managers to implement them. The familiar view that people leave managers, not organisations, suggests that the organisations concerned, were subjected to failure for holding managers responsible to understand their role in motivating people and to manage performance as effectively as they might manage. The biggest challenges for HR are to push line managers to manage and develop people. Commercial banks are physical structures maintained by human resources that enable the delivery of good service. The process of delivering quality service is the individual motivation of all employees whether professional, skilled or unskilled. With increase in growth

3 A Study on Employee Motivation of the service industry the commercial banks at present struggle for employees possessing the capabilities of quality service. Research finds that it is a challenge for management today to motivate employees in commercial banks to provide quality services as it has been observed that there is tough competition among the above state area to provide best services to satisfy the needs of their customers. The commercial banks play important role in worldwide economy and their employees are the best sources of delivering good services to their customers. Excellent services provided and offered by employees can create a positive perception and ever lasting image in the eyes of banks customers. The individual motivation of a commercial bank employee plays a major role in achieving high level satisfaction among its customers. One of the major functions of human resource manager is to enhance and maintain employees work motivation. HRM s function is to assist the general manager or line management in keeping the employees satisfied with their jobs by providing motivation of different kinds. The dissatisfaction is conditioned with performance. If employees are not satisfied, they will not perform well to expected standards. Workplace dissatisfaction and poor performance may lead to high employee turnover in an organisation particularly in a less developed and developing countries where there is little scope of opportunities for people to join other organisations but it may affect employee s performance badly. Motivation Motivation is the driving force which causes us to achieve goals. Motivation is said to be intrinsic or extrinsic. The term is generally used for humans but, theoretically it can also be used to describe the causes for animal behavior as well. According to various theories, motivation may be rooted in a basic need to minimise physical pain and maximise pleasure, or it may include specific needs such as eating and resting, or a desired object, goal, state of being, ideal, or it may be attributed to less-apparent reasons such as altruism, selfishness, morality, or avoiding mortality. Conceptually, motivation should not be confused with either volition or optimism. Motivation is related to, but distinct from, emotion.

4 134 HRD Practices in Contemporary Industries The most widely accepted explanations of motivation have been propounded by Victor Vroom. His theory is commonly known as expectancy theory. The theory argues that the strength of a tendency to act in a specific way depends on the strength of an expectation that the act will be followed by a given outcome and on the attractiveness of that outcome to the individual to make this simple, expectancy theory says that an employee can be motivated to perform better when their is a belief that the better performance will lead to good performance appraisal and that this shall result into realization of personal goal in form of some reward. Therefore an employee is: Motivation = Valence Expectancy The theory focuses on three things: Efforts and performance relationship Performance and reward relationship Rewards and personal goal relationship This leads us to a conclusion that: Valance *Expectancy Motivation Action Results The Porter and Lawler Model Satisfaction in form of Rewards Lyman W. Porter and Edward E. Lawler developed a more complete version of motivation depending upon expectancy theory.

5 A Study on Employee Motivation Value of rewards Effort Ability to do specific task Perception of task required Performance Accomplish ment Perceived Equitable rewards Satisfaction Intrinsic rewards Extrinsic rewards Perceived effort reward probability Actual performance in a job is primarily determined by the effort spent. But it is also affected by the person s ability to do the job and also by individual s perception of what the required task is. So performance is the responsible factor that leads to intrinsic as well as extrinsic rewards. These rewards, along with the equity of individuals, lead to satisfaction. Hence, satisfaction of the individual depends upon fairness of the reward. Importance of Motivation The achievements of individuals and organisational goals are independent process linked by employee work motivation. Individuals motivates themselves to satisfy their personal goals, therefore they invest and direct their efforts for the achievements of organisational objectives to meet with their personal goals also. It means that organisational goals are directly proportion to the personal goals of individuals. The manager s involvement is not so much important in the motivation of employees. The employees should motivate themselves to work hard. The major issue in all services organisations is the motivation of employees whether they are skilled or unskilled or professionals. Employee motivation is also a major issue for the

6 136 HRD Practices in Contemporary Industries commercial banks. It is a today s challenge for the management in this competitive world to motivate employees to offer efficient and good services that customers expect so for. The employees motivation, their enthusiastic and energetic behaviour towards task fulfillment play key role in successes of an organisation to benefit. One of the functions of human resource manager is related to ensure employees workplace motivation. The human resource manager s function should be to assist the general manager in keeping the employees satisfied with their jobs. Another goal in organisation is the goal for the services manager is to develop motivated employees and encourage their morale regarding their respective works. The employee work morale, such as supervisors, organisation and work environment can be defined in a sense that the employee has the feeling and be conscious about all aspects of the job. The performance is poor if the employee is not satisfied and happy. Workplace dissatisfaction often leads to employees poor performance. Employee Motivation Workers in any organisation need something to keep them working. Most times the salary of the employee is enough to keep him or her working for an organisation. However, sometimes just working for salary is not enough for employees to stay at an organisation. An employee must be motivated to work for a company or organisation. If no motivation is present in an employee, then that employee s quality of work or all work in general will deteriorate. When motivating an audience, you can use general motivational strategies or specific motivational appeals. General motivational strategies include soft sell versus hard sell and personality type. Soft sell strategies have logical appeals, emotional appeals, advice and praise. Hard sell strategies have barter, outnumbering, pressure and rank. Also, you can consider basing your strategy on your audience personality. Specific motivational appeals focus on provable facts, feelings, right and wrong, audience rewards and audience threats.

7 A Study on Employee Motivation Findings TABLE 1 Frequency distributions of respondents with respect to their Gender Gender Frequency Percentage Cumulative % Female Male Table 1 indicates the gender allocation of the sample of respondents from the selected commercial banks at which the research was conducted. As can be seen from the table, the majority of the sample (n = 158) or 94.6% was male, while the remaining 5.4% (n = 9) comprised of female respondents. TABLE 2 Frequency distributions of respondents with respect to marital status Marital status Frequency Percentage Cumulative % Single Married Table 2 indicates the marital status allocation of the sample of respondents from the selected commercial banks. As can be seen in table 2 that majority of the sample (58.7%) was married while 41% was single. TABLE 3 Frequency distributions of respondents with respect to age Age Frequency Percentage Cumulative % years years years years years above 45 years

8 138 HRD Practices in Contemporary Industries The age of the participants were divided into six groups, as table 3 show that majority of the sample (26.3%) were of age 31 to 35 followed by 22.8% who were from 45 & above, 18% were from 36 to 40, 12% were of age 41 to 45,and only 4.2% were of age 20 to 25. TABLE 4 Frequency distributions of respondents with respect to experience Experience Frequency Percentage Cumulative % less than 1 year year - 5 years years - 10 years years - 15 years years - 20 years years - or longer Frequency distribution of the respondents experience level is shown in table 4; it can be seen that most of the respondents experience level (43.1%) was 1 to 5 years followed by 23% who worked 21 years or longer. Results of the Work Motivation TABLE 5 Descriptive statistics of rewards and employee work motivation Variable Mean Standard Deviation Payment Promotion Recognition Benefits Employee Motivation Table 5 shows that the means for the payment, promotion, recognition and benefits ranged from a low of 2.87 to a high of

9 A Study on Employee Motivation Results of the descriptive statistics in terms of arithmetic mean and standard deviation show that staff in the sample are relatively motivated, the mean values for all the variables are relatively high. Above mean values of independent variables and dependent variables show that they are motivated by the payment, promotion, recognition and benefits they receive and mean value for benefits compared to other variables values shows that they are less motivated by the benefits they receive. Mean value for employee motivation is 3.77 which shows that employees of the commercial banks are motivated overall. Correlation The Pearson s Correlation Coefficient was computed for the purpose of determining the relationship between rewards and employee motivation in commercial banks. In order to find out the relationship between the different variables of rewards (Payment, promotion, recognition, benefits) with employee motivation. The relationship of independent variables with employee work Motivation were correlated and presented in Table 6. TABLE 6 Correlation of Payment, promotion, recognition and benefits with work motivation Employee Work Motivation Variable Pearson Correlation Significance Payment Promotion Recognition Benefits The results reported in the above table show that payment (r = 0.78, p < 0.01) is significantly related with employee work. It means that increase or decrease in payment will bring corresponding change in employee work motivation. Promotion variable of reward is also significantly related with employee motivation and play very

10 140 HRD Practices in Contemporary Industries important role in employee work motivation. As can be seen in above table (r =.86, p< 0.01). A statistical significant relationship was also observed between recognition and work motivation (r = 0.65, p <0.01). Result reported in the above table show that benefits is also significantly correlated with work motivation of employees (r = 0.74, p < 0.01), is significantly related with employee work motivation. The results reported in Table 4.1 show that all different variables of rewards namely payment, promotion, recognition and benefits are significantly related with employee work motivation in which means that if the reward offered to employees were to change, there would be a resultant change in work motivation. Analysis of Variance (Anova) Analysis of variance was applied to know whether there are differences in work motivation of employees based on the biographical characteristics of the sample. The analysis of variance F test is used to test the hypothesis that several group means are equal. However, the F-test or ANOVA is not able to tell us which means are different from which other means. TABLE 7 Differences in work motivation based on age Sum of df Mean F P value squares square Between ** groups Within groups Total From the above table, it is found out that there were significant differences among groups on.01 level (F=3.412, p <.01) on the basis of age. The significant ANOVA result indicates that there are differences in the means, but it does not tell us which means are different from which others.

11 A Study on Employee Motivation TABLE 8 Differences in work motivation based on experience Sum of df Mean F P value squares square Between ** groups Within groups Total ANOVA table8 indicates that there were significant differences among groups on.01 level (F=3.110, p <.01) on the basis of experience. Conclusion The research study has shown that management can make use of different tactics strategies and policies to motivate employees in work settings, but different tactics, strategies and policies would have a different motivational impact on diverse people. A motivation strategy may possibly have the power of enhancing motivation in one way and diminishing it in others. To make sure the success of motivational tools, it is important to consider the uniqueness of the situation and the diversity of the concerned group. It is the job of management to consider different alternatives according to situation. This study highlights various aspects necessary for motivating employees to improve their performance. It is observed that there is direct and positive relationship between rewards and employee work motivation. It means that reward is directly proportion to employee work motivation. The change in rewards offered to employees necessarily changes the work motivation and performance of employees. Better the rewards, the higher the levels of motivation and greater levels of employee performance. To specify the nature of reward, it is recommended for HR managers to highlight the suggestions received from the employees

12 142 HRD Practices in Contemporary Industries of commercial banks. According to employees, the rewards were not appropriate to their needs. The rewards received from the organisation were inadequate to their needs. Promotion process was observed to be very slow and the recognition was so informal that it was felt like unnecessary with no extrinsic forms. It was suggested that informal recognition should be changed to formal recognition. The employees also observed that rewards are generally awarded to the employees at one level rather than according to the performances of the individuals. Some of the employees had taken the slow rewards awarding activity in critical ways. It is observed that rewards should be awarded to deserving employees in no time. The prompt rewarding of employees may motivate them and improve their performance. The intended reward should be awarded in a kind of ceremony to an employee and announced appropriately to motivate others. The lack of communication was seen as main barrier in employee s motivation. It is suggested to communicate reward to employees in proper formal procedure on time, so that they can be better motivated. The low level employee s perceived the difference in salary, facilities, loans etc as de-motivating factor. The interviewers suggested that there should not be large remuneration gaps among the various levels of employees. The rewards should be equitable and performance linked. It was suggested that employment contract documentation should be implemented. The employees felt that rewards were not according to their expectations. It is recommended that rewards were not according to their expectations or in line with the commercial banking environment. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bhatti M.W, (2008). A Framework to Identify the Motivational Factors of Employees; A Case Study of Pakistan IT Industry. Heneman, R. L. (1992). Merit pay: linking pay increases to performance ratings. New York: Addison-Wesley. Howard. F, (1997). Keeping the best employees in the 90 s. Journal of Property Management, 62(3)20-25.

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