How Does Employee Motivation Impact Organizational Performance?

Business owners aim to build a business model with a workforce trained to serve customers in different ways. Employees who give their best performance will positively affect organizational performance. Employees who give less than their best create gaps in performance for the organization. Your business can benefit from a management team that motivates employees to increase overall business performance.

Humans are driven by four basic needs, and they are a combination of natural needs and social needs. Humans want to acquire, to form bonds with individuals and groups, to comprehend and to defend themselves against outside threats. Because these drives form the basis of each employee's motivation, it is a challenge for managers to determine how to best motivate employees.

The most successful approach is when a company can appeal to all four drives of human motivation at once, according to a Harvard Business Review article in 2008. Researchers concluded that addressing an employee's drive to bond has the biggest effect on employee commitment. Also, they decided that addressing an employee's drive to comprehend is most significantly connected to employee engagement. This can be seen in how managers set goals for their work. They can create team projects, assign employees tasks they find engaging, offer incentives for goal completion and ensure that the group receives credit for its work.

Employee empowerment and recognition will increase employee motivation, according to an article in the "European Journal of Business and Management." The authors found a positive relationship between employee motivation and organizational effectiveness. There are many explanations for how employee motivation results in better performance. Generally, if they are motivated, they will direct attention to work tasks and achieve positive returns, such as finding value and social status in their job and deriving satisfaction from task completion. If all managers can motivate workers to their tasks, they can increase organizational performance.

Smaller companies must compete with larger companies in the war for talent. Larger companies can bring higher salaries to bear in this struggle. You can harness the positive effects of employee motivation on organizational performance by using your business resources to create ideal working conditions for all employees, including talented individuals who prefer working for a smaller company. To keep your talent, give employees flexible working conditions, greater authority in serving customers and opportunities to implement their ideas for business improvement.