1. PowerPoint® Presentation by Jim Foley
Motivation and Work
PowerPoint® Presentation
by Jim Foley
© 2013 Worth Publishers

2. Module 34: Motivation at Work

3. It’s your job to learn about these topics:
Work success and satisfaction: finding FLOW
Industrial-Organizational Psychology: 3 subfields
Personnel Psychology: Selecting employees, Matching to a job, Appraising performance
Organizational Psychology: Building employee motivation, satisfaction, engagement
Managing well: Harnessing strengths, setting Goals, Leading
Human Factors Psychology: Designing the Human-technology and job interface
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4. Another Area of Motivation: Work
Why do we work…only for money and other incentives?
The income from work can indirectly satisfy the drive for food and shelter.
Some are driven by achievement motivation.
In rare cases, the goals and activities of work can feel like a calling, a fulfilling and socially useful activity. Some people may seek the optimal work experience called “flow.”
“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times … the best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”
From Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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feeling purposefully engaged, deeply immersed, and challenged

5. The Psychology of the Workplace:
Industrial- Organizational [I/O]Psychology
I/O psychology includes three different areas of focus
Personnel psychology:
hiring and evaluating
Organizational psychology:
management, supervision, leadership, and teamwork
Human factors psychology:
how workers interface with machines and the environment
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6. Personnel psychology:
hiring and evaluating
Selecting and placing employees
Training and developing employees
Appraising performance
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7. Selecting, Hiring and Placing Employees
Which employees will do the job well?
Personnel psychologists can help find the right person for the right job. This involves:
analyzing the content of the job to be filled.
developing tools and procedures for assessing potential employees, and for selecting the ones that fit the job.
helping to optimize worker placement and promotion.
Strengths refer to enduring qualities that can be productively applied.
Personnel psychologists such as Mary Tenopyr have done research to find which strengths predict success at various jobs.
This research can be used to develop procedures for selecting applicants that have the right strengths for a job.
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8. How do we select the right applicants?
aptitude tests
job knowledge tests
work samples
past job performance
To get the information which would predict future job performance, personnel psychologists recommend:
Still, employers rely on an informal interview to get a “feel” for the applicant.
Interviewers overestimate their ability to “read” people because of four errors:
valuing intentions rather than habits.
neglecting to recall bad “reads” such as past interviewees who failed or quit.
seeing interview behavior as a predictor of job behavior.
using prejudgments to interpret interviewee behavior.
The interviewer illusion/ fallacy
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Interviewer illusion/fallacy: You can ask students, “which common human thinking error does this slide topic remind you of?”
The concept that “Interviewers overestimate their ability...” is a classic case of the overconfidence error.
“How about error #2 above?” [Students might say the availability heuristic, hindsight bias, or confirmation bias, any of which could be justified (the availability heuristic fits best).
Error #3 is a type of error they probably haven’t learned about yet. It is known as the fundamental attribution error, that is, seeing the interviewee’s friendly behavior as a sign of his/her personality rather than as a function of the situation.
Error #4 is simply prejudice; if you like the interviewee, you may see an error as a sign of humility rather than as a disqualification.

9. The Structured Interview
A structured Interview is not just a conversation with general questions, but an objective, systematic strategy of assessing strengths (attitudes, behaviors, knowledge, and skills).
Example: testing how the applicant would handle a job- specific situation
The interviewer sticks to the uniform list of questions, and takes careful notes.
This makes the interview more valid and reliable as a way of managing candidates to positions.
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10. Training and Developing Employees
Personnel psychologists can help organizations develop improved and new talents and knowledge in their employees. This involves:
identifying which individual and organizational improvements would be useful.
designing and evaluating training programs.
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11. Appraising/Evaluating Performance
Tools for Performance Appraisal
Checklists of specific work behaviors observed
Graphic rating scales such as a five-point scale to rate the employee on frequency of a behavior or strength of a trait
Behavior scales; instead of using a numbered scale, each valued trait comes with a range of behaviors that best describes the employee
Personnel psychologists can help employers assess the performance and value of employees. This involves:
developing criteria for good performance.
comparing individual and organizational performance to these criteria.
Goal: employee improvement and retention, and helping determine salary and promotion
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Sleeps - Sits - Stands - Walks - Runs - Sprints
( c i r c l e o n e )

12. 360 Degree Feedback
Input from many sources can make an evaluation more honest, reliable, and complete.
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13. Leniency or Severity Errors:
Errors in Performance Appraisal
Halo Errors
Leniency or Severity Errors:
Recency Error:
When one’s overall impression of an employee biases the ratings of specific behaviors; good people can have weak areas
When one’s appraisal of an employee is too generous, or too harsh, on all evaluations
Focusing only on easily remembered recent incidents rather than on a full year of performance
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14. Personnel Psychologists’ Work
All of the below are potential areas of research and consultation for personnel psychologists.
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15. Organizational Psychology
Goals of Organizational Psychology Research
Organizational psychology: studying and consulting about how worker productivity and motivation is affected by different patterns of worker- management engagement, leadership, and teamwork
Maximizing worker motivation, satisfaction, and productivity
Understanding organizational structures and dynamics
Facilitating organizational change
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Improving teamwork and leadership

16. Grit: Motivation to Achieve and Self-Discipline to Succeed
Achievement in most fields of work may seem like a function of talent; however, Thomas Edison noted that, “genius is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration.”
Talent itself can be a result of perseverance. According to the “ten year rule,” it takes about ten years of hard work to become a skilled expert in a field.
Success in work is predicted more by self-discipline than by intelligence test scores.
Organizational psychologists work in part to maximize motivation and put it to use for employers.
Grit refers to a combination of desire for achievement and the ability/willingness to persist at hard work.
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Implication: this topic is in the organizational psychology section, but it can apply also to hiring decisions. Employers, when hiring, should look for “grit”, that is, an applicant’s evidence of self-discipline and motivation, more than current level of expertise.
Success in careers and organizations may be caused in part by people with grit, who stick to a goal when others would have quit.

17. Satisfaction & Engagement
Employees who are satisfied in an organization are likely to stay longer.
Employees who are more engaged (connected, passionate, and energetic) get more work done.
Because a happy worker is a productive worker, organizational psychologists study factors related to employee satisfaction, such as whether a worker:
feels that they personally matter to the organization and to other people.
feels a sense that effort pays off in the quality of the work and in rewards such as salary and benefits.
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18. Employee Engagement: Three Levels
Many employees are engaged (connected, passionate, and energetic about the companies/organizations they work for).
Organizational psychologists find that people are most engaged in work when they:
know what is expected of them.
have the materials they need to do the work.
have opportunities to excel.
feel fulfilled.
feel part of something important.
have opportunities to grow/develop in the job.
Some are not engaged; they show up and get tasks done but show little passion or energy.
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With some items, such as “feeling fulfilled,” it is not clear whether items on this list cause engagement, or vice versa, or whether engagement and fulfillment are two parts of the same experience.
Others are actively disengaged; they are unhappy, alienated, and not invested, even undermining what people are trying to accomplish.

19. Managing Employees Well
Identifying and harnessing employee talents
Setting specific goals
Task leadership
Social leadership
Being positive: A good coach
tries to offer players four or five positive
comments for every negative one.
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20. Utilizing Employee Strengths
Harnessing employee strengths includes:
selecting the right people.
learning about those people’s talents.
adjusting jobs to fit the talents.
developing talents into strengths, and then:
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This slide, like the text, covers two different models. The first few points are from Buckingham, and the flow chart is from Fleming. The models overlap just enough to weave them together.

21. Managing Well: Rewards and Goals
Effective managers reward good work behaviors and also reward people for achieving goals.
Useful goals:
are specific.
are challenging.
have immediate, short-term objectives.
can be stated as an action plan.
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22. Leadership Styles and Types Transformational leadership
Task leadership
Setting standards, organizing work, and focusing on completing goals
Social leadership
Building teams, encouraging participation in decisions, mediating conflicts, and building unity
Click to reveal a description of each.
Transformational leadership
Inspiring people to transcend self-interest to work for a collective vision

23. Human Factors: Work that Fits People
The psychology of human factors: taking the design of the body and the functioning of the mind into account when designing products and processes.
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24. Human Factors in Product Design
This measuring cup adjusts for a human factor.  When we hold a cup by the handle, our eyes are above the cup, so it’s hard to read the scales on the side. How does this cup adjust to the human factor?
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Instructor: this item is intended to show how designers take the human body into account when creating a product.

25. Human Factors in Work Processes
Pilots need instruments to judge altitude because human perception, unlike a bird’s, isn’t very good from up in the sky.
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Letting human perception guide a landing would result in a crash in this simulation.

26. Summary
Areas of human motivation include eating, sex, bonding/belonging, and work.
In each of these activities, there are internal drives and external rewards.
Understanding motivations is part of understanding the way people engage with the world.
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