Question

According to recent studies, the top contributors to job satisfaction are: Respectful treatment of employees, Trust in management, Good communication between employees and management, and Compensation The first three of those have to deal with trust, respect, and communication. What is an action that you could take to build trust, respect, and/or communication within your organization to improve job satisfaction for your employees? Why would that help? When it comes to designing a compensation system, would you lean more towards using the expectancy theory or the equity theory? Why?

Answer 1

The action that I would take to build trust, respect, and/or communication within an organization to improve job satisfaction for employees is as follows:

Starting initiatives like Employee Speak- In the Employee speak initiatives, all employees have a voice in the organization. They can openly share their ideas, issues, etc under this initiative where they would be heard positively. Such an initiative makes employees feel they are trusted, respected and given importance in the organization. There is also direct communication between employees and senior management which helps to improve employee-management relations and employee motivation.

When designing a compensation system, I would prefer using Expectancy theory. Under the Expectancy theory, employees perform based on their expectations for rewards. So, if an employee knows that he or she would get a particular reward by performing well, he or she would be motivated to work hard and put up a good performance. Rewards under this theory are totally based on employee's personal efforts and performance and are not related to other's efforts or performance. Therefore, I believe the Expectancy theory is a more fair theory to keep employees motivated.

In the Equity theory, employees compare their rewards with others. If they feel they have been fairly rewarded in comparison to others' efforts and rewards,  they feel motivated. I believe this is not very fair to employees, because it is not always prudent to compare employees' efforts and rewards. Employees may be involved in different kinds of roles and responsibilities, which may require very different levels of effort. Comparing such efforts and performances may not be the right thing to do.