Risk Analysis of Employee Motivation

Posted: August 25th, 2021

Risk Analysis of Employee Motivation

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Risk Analysis of Employee Motivation

            As the business landscape in many parts of the world becomes increasingly competitive, so does the need to motivate employees for the sake of improving organizational productivity. Through initiatives such as recognition, promotion, and retention, employees in many organizations have recorded improved motivation towards their work. With an enhanced motivation, however, comes sophisticated risks that businesses must adequately be prepared to deal with for purposes of not incurring unnecessary additional costs in the process of chasing increased productivity and profits. Identification and analysis of some of those risks is this paper’s focal point. Understanding of such risks is beneficial to policymakers in designing the relevant processes along which they can be guided while addressing them.

            According to Grenčíková, Guščinskienė, and Španková (2017), employee motivation has the potential risk of creating workplace conflicts and tension among the workmates. In many cases, employees who do not receive the same level of motivation, either through recognition or promotion, tend to feel resentful towards those who are motivated. As such, discords start emerging among them. For a typical management team in any company, it is usually a complicated task to dish out equal levels of motivation to every worker. However, all is not lost. Something can still be done to avoid or at the very least, minimize these conflicts and the extent to which they can interfere with the company’s productivity. For example, a company can focus on the already low performing employees and among them, identifying those that require the most motivation. When such employees are given the necessary motivation, they are bound to improve their performance, and thus, result in increased profits for the organizations they work for.

            Equally, with employee motivation comes the risk of workers just focusing on receiving workplace incentives rather than the quality of work itself (Grenčíková, Guščinskienė, and Španková, 2017). For such employees, once they attain the goals for which they are promised incentives, they tend not to push for increased limits. In these scenarios, employees are usually caught in the trap of wanting to get incentives with less focus on high-level performance that is pleasant to customers and clients. For example, in circumstances when the management team decides to reward its employees with monetary incentives of $700 for the first five corporate clients signed up, some of the employees will only focus on getting the first five corporate clients. What they may be oblivious to, however, is the fact that the management team might have drafted such a motivation for purposes of encouraging employees to push to get as many corporate clients as possible.

            For a while now, globalization continues gaining prominence at a first-rate. Due to globalization, multinational companies such as Coca Cola, Nokia, Huawei, and many others have established their presence in different countries around the world(Vlacsekova & Mura, 2017). The local citizens are better suited to run the business operations of such multinationals in each of the countries where they have a local presence since these citizens have a better understanding of the political, economic, and environmental conditions and trends of their home countries (Vlacsekova & Mura, 2017). As such, it is becoming a common occurrence for such multinationals to employ a workforce with a widely diversified cultural background. Motivating employees from different cultural background poses a considerable challenge for the management teams of most multinationals since such diversified employees hold varied perceptions on business leadership, geopolitics, language, and personal behaviors. Misplaced judgments of these cultural differences present most multinationals with the challenge of developing irrelevant incentive mechanisms. More so, such misunderstanding has another risk of causing such companies to fail to predict unfavorable business events in certain jurisdictions accurately.

References

Grenčíková, A., Guščinskienė, J., & Španková, J. (2017). THE ROLE OF LEADERSHIP IN MOTIVATING EMPLOYEES IN A TRADING COMPANY. Journal of Security & Sustainability Issues, 7(2).

Vlacsekova, D., & Mura, L. (2017). Effect of motivational tools on employee satisfaction in small and medium enterprises. Oeconomia Copernicana, 8(1), 111-130.