Build a Team

This Unit Standard introduces the junior manager to the concept of motivationand is intended for junior managers of organisations.

Businesses with motivated workers seem to outperform those without. Research has shown that motivated teams of people outperform other teams by far, no matter how qualified the other teams are. Research has found that about 75% of a team or company’s success will come from motivation and attitude, not from technical skills or knowledge.
If people are not motivated, it is highly unlikely that they will use their skills and talents to their best ability and this will undoubtedly impact negatively on the business’s bottom line.
Motivation is the key to performance improvement – there is an old saying that you can take a horse to water but you can’t make it drink; it will only drink if it’s thirsty – so too with people. They will do what they want to do or are motivated to do. Whether it is excelling on the workshop floor or in the boardroom they must be motivated or driven to it, either by themselves or through external stimuli.

The word motivation is derived from the Latin word movere, which means ‘to move’. Therefore, a motive is a state of mind that moves one to act. We can also say that motivation is the desire to achieve a goal, or behave in a certain way to attain something.

Motivation in the workplace is defined by Robbins as “the willingness to exert high levels of effort toward organisational goals, conditioned by the effort’s ability to satisfy some individual need.”
Motivated employees are therefore in a state of tension. To relieve this tension, they exert effort. The greater the tension they experience, the higher the level of effort they exert. If this effort successfully leads to the satisfaction of the need, tension is reduced.
When someone is motivated, s/he puts in a lot of effort, but unless that effort is channelled in a direction that benefits the organisation, all that hard work is unlikely to lead to satisfactory job performance outcomes. Quality of effort is therefore just as important as intensity of effort. That is why it is important that effort is directed towards, and is consistent with, the organisation’s goals.
As team leaders, we are interested in work behaviour, so we want this tension reduction effort of our team members to be directed towards company goals. Therefore, our definition of a motivated employee is one whose individual needs are compatible and consistent with the company’s goals.
Where this is not the case, we have workers exerting high levels of effort that actually counteract the interests of the company; for example, some workers regularly spend a lot of time talking with friends at work in order to satisfy their social needs. This takes a great deal of effort, but it definitely is not consistent with company goals, as it is being unproductively directed.

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