Question

You are the newly hired manager at The Great Nile Retail Store. The corporation has hundreds of brick & mortar locations across the United States, with thousands of employees. Your specific location employs dozens of employees. You sell pretty much everything, organized neatly into multiple departments, with eye-catching merchandise displays that contain the trendiest retail products.

Upon starting at your location, you learn that you have a good group of people working for you, but there have been consistent problems with motivation. Employees just don’t seem to “go the distance.” They do just barely what’s expected of them, and not one thing more.

Given the extremely competitive retail environment, and the fact that “Amazon” is crushing the competition, you decide you must change how employees behave. It’s clear that you’ll need them to do amazing things to remain competitive in this environment!

Prepare a response to the following questions:

1. Identify one motivation theory we discussed in class that you could use as the basis of your action to take. Discuss and develop a working definition of that theory.
2. Using the theory you chose as your basis, describe how you would go about motivating employees. What actions would you take to create a motivating work environment for your staff?

Answer 1

Ans- The motivation theory implied here is Expectancy theory.

Expectancy theory suggests that an individual would behave or act in a particular way because they are motivated to select that behavior over others in anticipation or expectation of a reward that is associated with a particular behavior.

This theory has three elements. - Expectancy, Valence, Instrumentality.

Here in the case the employees are performing bare minimum, what is expected out of them because they do not have motivation to work better or raising the standard of performance, because since a long while they were unable to associated any benefit which the can associate with higher expected behavior.

They have zero motivation to go extra mile for the organization, because they know there is no acknowledgement monetary or non-monetary benefit, so there is lack of competition among employees for rewards and other social needs.

As a manager, I would motivate my team by giving them a workable goal and what standards of performance is demanded for this.

I would do this as a manager to bring back motivation in the workplace and also the employees

A standard of fair performance in the work day will be directly linked to the rewards, they might get if they are participating. various completions will be organized for the team for winning and develop a competitive attitude to accelerate the performance.

A protocol for suggestive jobs and also rewards associated with them will be told to the employees. Training and assessments will be conducted to give right job to right person. During training the employees will understand that the performance needs to at par for rewards and recognition.

If reward and recognition system will be told during training so employees have a clear view of valance, expectancy and instrumentality  

The staff will have team sessions for better communication which help in creating positive envoriment.at work.

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