Question

TzeMay was one of the first women engineering students at ABC University. She graduated in 1995 with a first class honours degree and immediately continued her studies with an MSc programme, gaining recognition for her work into environmentally friendly car engines, a largely untapped field in those days. On completion of her Masters degree she was offered a post as a research assistant where she could have developed her Masters research and worked towards her doctorate. However she decided that she needed to gain some commercial experience and joined Wallace-Price, a blue-chip engineering consultancy where, apart from a sponsored year out to study for an MBA in the United States of America, she has remained ever since.

Her tenacity and loyalty to Wallace-Price have paid off and she was made a partner in the firm, primarily responsible for bringing in work to the consultancy. With the promotion came various executive privileges including an annual salary of £80, 000, a chauffeur-driven car, free use of one of the company-owned London flats, a non-contributory pension scheme, various gold credit cards and first-class air travel. TzeMay herself would not describe these as benefits, however, but as necessities to enable her to do her job properly. In order to meet her business target of £2 million of work for Wallace-Price she spent forty weeks overseas, working an average of ninety hours a week.

She cannot remember the last time that she had a weekend when she was not entertaining clients or travelling but was totally free to indulge herself. During her time with Wallace-Price she has earned a reputation both as a formidable but honest negotiator and as an innovative engineer, often finding seemingly impossible solutions to problems. Known for her single-minded dedication to her job, she does not suffer fools gladly. She is frequently approached to work for rival firms with promises of even greater privileges and has been the subject of numerous magazine profiles, some concentrating on her work and reputation as a high flier but the majority focusing on her gender. Her fortieth birthday last year was spent alone in the Emergency Room of a Los Angeles hospital where she had been rushed with a suspected stomach ulcer. Deprived of her portable telephone, fax and computer she had little else to do but to reflect on her life thus far. On her return to health she was working her way through the pile of technical journals, which had accumulated during her absence and there she saw the advertisement for ABC University, an institution that had close links with her company and whose Professor of Engineering she knew well. Ignoring the instructions relating to applications she put through a telephone call to the ABC University.

Question 1 : Making reference to the appropriate theories of motivation, explain TzeMay‟s main motivating factors.

Answer 1

TzeMay's main motivating factors can aptly be captured under the broad theory of McClelland's Theory of Needs wherein McClelland says that human behavior is mainly affected by three types of needs and the extent to which they are satisfied will only serve to motivate him.

1. Need for achievement is the desire to excel, to achieve what one is potentially good at, to struggle for greater success. In the beginning we see how TzeMay using her cost-benefit analysis of opting for job and the opportunity cost of that was research assistant at ABC University. TzeMay felt that she requires some required some commercial experience only goes on to show how she is being ambitious even if that means sacrificing other potential options.
2. Need for power is the need to crave for more things and have more influence in the organization. TzeMay thanks to her exceptional work got promoted and enjoyed several benefits and perks but TzeMay fails to call them perks and calls them absolute minima for the works. This goes on to show how she craves for more to satisfy the need for power.
3. Need for affiliation is a desire to get yourself part of affiliated or relate with other persons or organizations. The same gets demonstrated when she dials on the professor of ABC University who she knows very well and the institution is enjoying great relationship with the company and tries to use the good offices for the same.

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