Project Overview

Team Motivation

In order to define and identify the role of managing teams in the organizational context, it is important to first identify what a team is.  A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable, according to Professor Ken Wendeln from IUPUI. Managing a team and getting a team to work together is a process, not a goal.  The process is to build a team with members who trust each other, express their feelings openly, work through conflicts, support one another, share information freely, and hold common objectives; these are characteristics of an effective team (Wendeln). It is also necessary to have strong leadership to motivate and encourage the team members to work towards their common goals.  Motivating teams to perform well is the process in which leaders, as well as team members, use to build the characteristics of an effective team.

Why is Team Motivation Important?

The objective of any financial incentive is to motivate employees and improve individual and/or company performance.  Incentive systems only work if they can motivate employees to work harder.  What needs to be determined is what employees value; Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense by Pfeffer and Sutton notes “In data collected from surveys over a 25-year period, respondents to the General Social Survey rated “important work” that “gives a feeling of accomplishment” as the most important aspect of their jobs, with pay typically ranking third.”  Employees want to contribute to the organizations performance.  It is not only important to understand what will motivate employees, but even more crucial to determine what can demotivate employees.  Looking at Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, we can determine where employee motivation occurs; survival, safety/security, and social/belonging must be present before motivation can occur.  

Source: Google Images 

Application and Issues Motivating Employees

The Incentive Research Foundation says three motivational variables must be present for any incentive to be successful in Incentives, Motivation, and Workplace Performance: Research & Best Practices; 1) utility: is the incentivized task worth the effort? 2) control: does the employee has the ability to earn the award if he/she chooses? and 3) goals: are the goals are both specific and challenging?  Motivating teams may be more difficult than individual employees.  One common issue on team projects is “social loafing,” which is when a team member does not pull his/her weight of work on a project. With large groups, sometimes there are not enough tasks for everyone in the team to complete which causes social loafing.  This is why it is important to keep the size of a team appropriate and clearly define goals and tasks early on.  A misconception on team work is that the people who speak the most have the most influence on projects, when often times, those who guide the conversation contribute and influence the project equally. Therefore, recognition often times does not get distributed properly.  Hierarchies are a challenge on teams; contributions from those with more seniority or power are overweighted, or more trusted, than that of lower status even when low status employees might have data or research to support their contributions. Given these challenges, it is important for managers and leaders to know and understand what it takes to motivate teams so that every member puts forth equal work, as well as feel as they are key contributors to the team.