Managing employees is cited as being the biggest problem to small business owners. This is because employers very often don't know how to handle employees. Effectively managing employees is a skill acquired through training and practice. Many books have been written on the subject, and courses are regularly offered through educational institutions.
Motivation theories were developed or built upon the "human relations" findings. The new focus for motivation theory was on the search for satisfaction of human needs. This new approach swept through management thinking in the 1950's.
Maslow (1954) offered his "needs hierarchy" according to which human beings have their needs arranged in a hierarchy such that they are motivated to
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Their initial work in the 1920's found that workers (in a Philadelphia textile mill) who were given extra breaks and subsidized meals at work did improve their productivity; and when these extra rewards were taken away their effort fell back (see Mayo 1949). The research team then set up a major series of studies at the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company which continued for ten years. Their aim was to study the effects of a range of fatigue-inducing factors such as levels of lighting, temperature, frequency of breaks, etc. in combination with an incentive payment by results system.
If this research had produced the results expected at the outset, we would have had a prescription for high productivity based on lighting levels, temperature, frequency of meal breaks, health levels, etc. In some of their experiments the working environment was changed drastically to assess how this influenced productivity, but the results were a surprise at the time. There was a steady improvement in productivity throughout all the changes, even for instance when the lighting intensity was raised in imperceptible stages over a long period to a very bright intensity and then gradually reduced to that of a moonlit night. In their attempts to ensure that no other variables intervened in their experiments, the researchers had unwittingly changed one of the most important variables of all. They had
Psychologist Abraham H. Maslow is the developer of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The theory covers human behavior in terms of basic requirements for survival and growth (Cengage, 2002). The theory was developed in the early 1960’s. During this time psychology was taken over by two different views. One side was the human behavior and the other one was the behaviorist. Maslow explained that psychoanalysts had not accomplished the task to consider the behavior of healthy humans. He also mentioned that many subjective experiences that related with human behaviors were being ignored by behaviorist. In the beginning Maslow examined motivations and experience of many healthy individuals. He recognized that there are many requirements in this theory that are important for human survival and to help motivate individuals. He conceptualized different human needs as a pyramid with five levels in
Abraham Maslow’s theory, Theory of Hierarchy Needs, is a motivational theory in psychology that has a tier model of the five things a human needs. Maslow stated that people are motivated to achieve certain needs and that some needs take precedence over others. The five stages, from bottom to top, include Physiological needs( food, water, warmth, and rest), the second stage: Safety Needs ( security and safety), third stage: Belongingness and love needs ( intimate relationships and friends), the fourth stage: Esteem Needs (prestige and feeling of accomplishment), and finally the last stage: Self-actualization ( achieving one’s full potential, including creative potential). The five stage model can be divided into
Abraham Maslow is a psychologist who had developed the Hierarchy of needs model in 1940-50s, and the Hierarchy needs theory is still being used to day and for understanding the human motivation. In his hierarchy he believes that people are motivated to achieve certain needs. And when a human had fulfilled a person would seek to fulfil the next one. Maslow’s hierarchy needs is concerning the responsibility of service providers to provide a
From these experiments, the final core conclusions that the researchers reached were that the experimental variables such as incentive payment had little effect, while that the unmeasured quality of human relations of workers to management and peer group was responsible for most output improvement (Gale, 2004).
Amazingly, productivity rapidly raised in the first 24 hours. The study concluded that for maximum productivity, the best worker had to be chosen to perform that task and had to be provided with training for efficient work. Every worker and his output had to be closely monitored and he had to be rewarded for greater productivity. Taylor also wanted to reduce conflicts between managers and workers by convincing them that they would benefit mutually from a rise in productivity, as this would favour society and the organisation as a whole.
Basically, a series of studies on the productivity of workers introduced several deliberate various conditions (pay, light levels, rest breaks etc.), but each change resulted on average over time in productivity rising, including eventually a return to the original conditions. This was true
"Work" is a positive thing for many people. To some people, it may be described as a place to escape from the kids, or even a time consumption thing for a single or retired person, but most importantly it is what we do in order to provide for our families and ourselves. Work is something that we all will experience at one time or another during our lives.
Elton Mayo started these experiments by examining the physical and environmental influences of the workplace (e.g. brightness of lights, humidity) and later, moved into the psychological aspects (e.g. breaks, group pressure, working hours, managerial leadership) and their impact on employee motivation as it applies to productivity.
In 1924 the National Research Council funded a study to see if workers would become more productive with different levels of lighting in the factory. The researchers hypothesized that increasing factors such as meal periods would increase productivity and dimming the lights would decrease
In the beginning of 20th century, when the industrialization started taking over, a number of organizational experiments took a place. They were consisted by The Hawthorne studies, they are still relevant in nowadays organizational management. The first of the experiments was “The illumination experiment” taken in 1924-1927 by A Western Electric Company. The observation during the experiment “explored the relationship between the quality of illumination and efficiency”, the lighting was only one of the factors affecting productivity of workers. (Huczynski, A., Buchanan, D., 2013)
Their role should be simple and well-defined, leaving little to no leeway on their methods or how fast they do their task. If they couldn’t keep up with the established pace, they were often fired and replaced with an unskilled laborer that could. Taylor summed up slacking on the job to the result of one of three things. The worker could be worried that if production increases, there won’t be as much of a need for workers, the management and rewards system in place could be ineffective, or the performance was generally governed by rule of thumb and therefore didn’t have any particular standards to live up to. Ideally, Scientific Management solved all three of these potential issues, instead encouraging better work ethics in the workers.
The scientific management theory have an assumption that workers are lazy, not smart in analyzing tasks, only prefers simplified work and only works for money (Miller & Form, 1964). According to Taylor (2004), workers are unable figure out the most efficient way in doing work. Therefore, they are thought as replaceable working parts like a machine in the production line and can be trained to specialize in a certain procedure in the production. They are assumed to adopt the Protestant work ethic, working for long hours and not taking any breaks. Whenever a worker or a ‘part’ failed to perform its tasks, they
It involves a series of investigations that tap into the importance of work behavior and attitudes of a variety of physical, economic, and social variables (Carey 1967). To prove this theories right, an investigation comprising of five stages were conducted throughout 1927 to 1932 where the main purpose was to find out the factors affecting productivity. This includes the Illumination study,
The Illumination experiments(to determine the effects of changes in illumination on productivity) were the initial ones. Here, even though the lighting was changed i.e. increased and decreased, the productivity always increased. Also when the lights were dimmed until it was to dark in the factory, the productivity
The Hawthorne studies were initiated in 1924 by the management of the Hawthorne plant of the Western Electric Company in Chicago (Levitt & List 2011). The Studies are referred to as the “behavior modifying effects of being the subject of social investigation” (Wickstorm & Bendix 2000). The leading man behind the experiments Elton Mayo developed the study to make further inquiry into what factors affect productivity in the workplace. Ever since the studies were conducted between 1927 and 1933 (Wickstorm & Bendix 2000) there has been much speculation of whether or not these results should be used to make a fundamental change in the development of management in society. This essay will cover the various aspects of management that has been