The Motivation Challenge- The manager views on motivation and motivating

Abstract

Motivation as a phenomenon has always been interesting to me; I already focused on the subject on my Candidates thesis. The lack of motivation in their subordinates is a problem that all the managers, no matter what is the field they work in, have to most likely face at some point of their careers. In numerous studies over the years it has been found that psychological work conditions affect the work of an employee a lot, much more than the other factors such as physical conditions.

15 people who have or have had subordinates during their careers were interviewed. They were all from different fields of work and they were interviewed anonymously. All of them were presented with the same questions to find out their attitudes and opinions on the motivating of the employees and on motivation itself.

In this research the method of the study was semi-structured interviews, thus this research is qualitative. The theories used in this research were the ones concerning motivation and the ones that fall under the alignment of organizational humanism. The theories in question were chosen, because nowadays it seems to be more common to focus on an individual in the managing than to focus strictly on the results the individual makes. I came up with the questions used in the interviews based on these theories.

With these interviews I wanted to find out whether the managers interviewed shared the thoughts of organizational humanism and managed their subordinates according to these theories. In the empirical part I compare the answers with the theories chosen for this research.