Motivation And Emotions In The Workplace

Motivation and Emotions

Throughout our lives, we will experience several factors that motivate us and affect our emotions. Business work environments experience different challenges to motivate employees and to handle their emotions. Even though I am still early in my career, I have experienced several instances on how my job has affected my motivation and my emotions. Thorough research has been completed and continues to be studied to gain perspective on how to manage motivation and emotions in the workplace. Organizational behavior and Biblical principles provide practical application on how managers and employees can administer motivations and emotions.

Motivation

Motivation describes the reasoning of which a person decides the direction,

External motivation is the retrieval of a reward; such as recognition, money, or a promotion (Kinicki & Fugate, 2018). Transitioning these terms to the workplace, businesses find motivation as a key concept to analyze because it helps to keep employees engaged in their roles. A study that analyzed motivational factors in businesses have found that employees that are not motivated in their careers often seek work in other locations. Therefore, businesses strive to find the factors that motivates their employees for job satisfaction and tenure (Rozman, Treven, & Cancer, 2017). David McClelland is a psychologist that developed the Acquired Needs Theory. McClelland's belief is that humans are not born with needs, but they are acquired as we go on with our daily lives. He grouped human needs in three categories: need for achievement, need for affiliation, and the need for power. The need for achievement is the desire to excel, overcome obstacles, and solve problems. The need for affiliation includes the desire to maintain social relationships and be linked among members of a group. Finally, the need for power includes the desire to influence others by coaching and teaching (Kinicki & Fugate, 2018).

Since we are a national company, we work with clients in all fifty states. This proposes challenges because there are both federal and state rules that we need to know and incorporate in the client's site to ensure that it meets regulations. There were times when employees felt negative emotions about our jobs because of the level of complexity and the numerous tasks that are required to ensure payroll ran on time. To channel these emotions, our department has created new teams to take on different responsibilities of the implementation, so all tasks are not completed by one person. This relates to the organizational behavior term, flourishing, which is defined by the use of positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and achievement. These attributes have formulated the organizational behavior acronym of PERMA (Kinicki & Fugate, 2018). With our new support teams, we have relationships formulating among team members, the achievement of completing new tasks, and most importantly, positive emotions because each member is taking on a task they feel the most comfortable in. Since the change, management has recognized that each team has had more pride in their work and positive emotions have flourished. This relates to the scripture of in 2 Peter that states, "Therefore, my brothers and sisters, make every effort