Motivation in leadership through Achievement Motivation Theory
MM3151 Managerial Leadership
Introduction
Motivation is the willingness to exert high levels of effort towards a goal, provided the effort made also satisfied some individual need. (Keenan K., 1995, e.g. 60)
Everyone at least once asked themselves: “What I am doing now?”, “Where will it bring me?”, “How can it help me to reach my target?”. These questions have always accompanied me and help to understand what I want and what is my goal. We have a motivation from the childhood, for example, to get sweets or toys: every child love candies, chocolates, toys, and parents motivate us by saying: “Study hard, get a high mark and I will buy you everything
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Each of us has their own needs and wants (these motives is the first step of motivation), which makes us tick. To be quite frank, if we do the things wrong these ticks will not bring to us benefits, in that way we need a leader who guides us to the right way.
Leadership is the ability of an individual to influence, motivate, and enable others to contribute toward the effectiveness and success of the organization. (House et al, 1999, pg. 184) And the leader is a person who has this ability.
Leadership and motivation directly interconnected, there are complimented each other. As John Adair mentioned in his book “Leadership and Motivation” that it is difficult to think of a leader who does not motivate each other (Adair J., 206, pg. 7).
Mostly people think, a charisma is the only thing of the real leader that attracts people to follow him, nevertheless the leader can not energize them without inspiration and motivation. If there are no inspiration so for what people are going to follow him? The leaders inspire followers by involving people in the work, supporting them and guiding to the way achieve the
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Many different motivation theories have been created and dissected over the past century in an attempt to understand human behaviour and answer the question: “what creates the force needed to do things we want to do?”
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What is motivation? According to text, motivation is defined as a set of factors that activate, direct, and maintain behavior, usually toward a certain goal. Motivation is the energy that makes us do things: this is a result of our individual needs being satisfied so that we have inspiration to complete the mission. These needs vary from person to person as everybody has their individual needs to motivate themselves. Depending on how motivated we are, it may further determine the effort we put into our work and therefore increase the standard of the productivity. There have been a wide variety of theories about motivation developed over the years. Several are drive-reduction theory, arousal theory, psychosocial (both incentive and cognitive) theory, and Maslow’s H...
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"Motivation: The psychological feature that arouses an organism to action towards a desired goal, the reason for that action.”
To inspire and influence others, a leader must possess many skills and abilities. As motivational speaker Peter Northouse, states, “a leader should be strong, but not rude; be kind, but not weak; be bold, but not bully; be thoughtful, but not lazy; be humble, but not timid; be proud, but not arrogant” (Northouse, 2013) Moving an entire group of individuals toward a singular goal is a considerable undertaking. Without effective communication skills and a clear vision of what needs to be accomplished, one will feel like they are trying to herd cats rather than leading.
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According to Spector (2012), motivation is “an internal state that induces a person to engage in particular behaviors” (p. 188). From one perspective, it involves three components: direction, intensity, and persistence. Direction is “the choice of specific behaviors from a larger number of possible behaviors” (p. 188). Intensity refers to “the amount of effort a person expends on doing a task” (p. 188). Persistence can be defined as, “the continuing engagement in a behavior over time” (p. 188).
Robbins and Judge define motivation by means of three elements. The first element is defined as being the process that account for an individual’s intensity which is concerned with how hard a person tries. The second element is direction that benefits the organization and the third element is persistence which is a measure of how long a person can maintain effort. Motivation is also driven by certain situations that vary between individuals and within individuals, at different times. (Robbins & Judge, 2007, p.186) These elements should not only be expected from employees but from managers as well.
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Motivation is crucial to any organization. Consequently, many leaders have attempted to describe the essence of motivation. Dr. Bartel (2016) describes motivation as, “The human force that initiates, guides and sustains goal-oriented behaviors. It is what causes humankind to act to fulfill desired goals.” In other words, motivation is the force within a person that compels
According to Greenberg (1999), motivation is defined “as a process of arousing, directing and maintaining behavior towards a goal.” Where “directing” refers to the selection of a particular behavior; and ‘maintenance” refers to the inclination to behave with consistency in that manner until the desired outcome is met.