Accounting and business administration 1

Needs for Achievement, Affiliation, and Power

MPsychologist David McClelland extensively researched the needs for achievement, affiliation, and power. The need for achievement is the extent to which an individual has a strong desire to perform challenging tasks well and to meet personal standards for excellence. People with a high need for achievement often set clear goals for themselves and like to receive performance feedback.

The need for affiliation is the extent to which an individual is concerned about establishing and maintaining good interpersonal relations, being liked, and having the people around him get along with each other.

The need for power is the extent to which an individual desires to control or influence others. Although each of these needs is present in each of us to some degree, their importance in the workplace depends on the position one occupies. For example, high needs for achievement and power are assets for first-line and middle managers, and a high need for power is especially important for upper managers.

Equity

A step further can be taken by considering how managers can ensure that organizational members focus their inputs in the direction of high performance and the achievement of organizational goals. A goal is what a person is trying to accomplish through their efforts and behaviors. This theory suggests that to stimulate high motivation and performance, goals must be specific (quantitative) and difficult (hard but not impossible).

Learning theories:

The basic premise of these theories as applied to organizations is that managers can increase employee motivation and performance by how they link the outcomes that employees receive to the performance of desired behaviors and the attainment of goals. Thus, learning theory focuses on the linkage between performance and outcomes in the motivation equation. Learning results from practice or experience.

Operant conditioning theory:

According to this theory, people learn to perform behaviors that lead to desired consequences and learn not to perform behaviors that lead

By its consequences; one way for managers to curtail the performance of dysfunctional behaviors is to eliminate whatever is reinforcing the behaviors. This process is called extinction.

Punishment: Sometimes managers cannot rely on extinction to eliminate dysfunctional behaviors because they do not have control over whatever is reinforcing the behavior or because they cannot afford the time needed for extinction to work. In such cases managers often rely on punishment, which is administering an undesired or negative consequences to subordinates when they perform the dysfunctional behavior. Punishment used by organizations include verbal reprimands, pay cuts, temporary suspensions, demotions and firings. Punishments, however, can have some unintended side effects, like resentment, loss of self-respect, and a desire of retaliation, and should be used only when necessary. To avoid unintended side effects, managers should keep in mind these guidelines:

• Downplay the emotional element involved in performance

- Try to punish dysfunctional behaviors as soon as they occur. Be certain that organizational members know exactly why they are being punished.

- Try to avoid punishing someone in front of others - respect and lower esteem in the eyes of coworkers.

Organizational behavior modification:

When managers systematically apply operant conditioning techniques to promote the performance of organizationally functional behaviors and discourage them, they are engaging in organizational behavior modification. This technique has been successfully used to improve productivity, efficiency, attendance, punctuality, safe work practices, customer service, and other important behaviors in a wide variety of organizations. This technique is composed of 5 steps:

1. Identify an important behavior.
2. Measure the frequency with which the behavior is occurring.
3. Determine if people know whether they should be performing the behavior and what consequences they receive when they do it.
4. Develop and

apply a strategy entailing the use of positive reinforcement, punishment, or extinction.

655. Measure the frequency of the behavior again, and determine if the problem is solved.

Social learning theory:

This theory proposes that motivation results not only from direct experience of rewards and conditioning, but also from observing other people performing a behavior and being reinforced for doing so (vicarious learning), and how people can be motivated to control their behavior themselves (self-reinforcement) and affect motivation (self-efficacy).

Vicarious learning:

Often called observational learning, occurs when a person (the learner) becomes motivated to perform a behavior by watching another person (the model) performing the behavior and being positively reinforced for doing so. This technique is a powerful source of motivation on many jobs in which people learn to perform functional behaviors by watching others.

Self-reinforcement:

Although managers are often the providers of reinforcement in organizations,

must be high for motivation to be high.

Need theories: people should be able to satisfy their needs by performing at a high level.

Equity theory: outcomes such as pay should be distributed in proportion to inputs.

Goal-setting theory: outcomes such as pay should be linked to the attainment of goals.

Learning theories: the distribution of outcomes, such as pay, should be contingent on the performance of organizationally functional behaviors.

As these theories suggest, to promote high motivation, managers must base the distribution of pay to organizational members on performance levels so that high performers receive more pay. A compensation plan basing pay on performance is often called a merit pay plan.

Salary increase or bonus?

Managers can distribute merit pay to people in the form of a salary increase or a bonus on top of regular salaries. Although the dollar amounts of a salary increase and of a bonus might be the same, bonuses tend to have more motivational impact. In addition to

Salary increase and bonus, managers and executives are sometimes granted employee stock options, that are financial instruments that have a certain price, during a certain period of time, or under certain conditions.

ORGANIZATIONAL CONTROL (Ch. 11)

Controlling is the process whereby managers monitor and regulate how efficiently and effectively an organization and its members are performing the activities necessary to achieve organizational goals. Control, however, does not mean just reacting to events after they have occurred. It also means keeping an organization on track, anticipating events that might occur, and then changing the organization to respond to whatever opportunities or threats have been identified.

Control systems and IT:

Control systems are formal target-setting, monitoring, evaluation, and feedback systems that structure are working effectively and efficiently. Effective control systems alert managers when something is going wrong and give them time to respond to opportunities and threats.

An effective control system has three characteristics: it is flexible enough to allow managers to respond as necessary to unexpected events; it provides accurate information about organizational performance; it gives managers information in a timely manner because making decisions on the basis of outdated information is a recipe for failure.

New forms of IT have revolutionized control systems because they facilitate the flow of accurate and timely information up and down the organizational hierarchy and between functions and divisions.

Control and information systems are developed to measure performance at each stage in the process of transforming inputs into finished goods and services.

At the input stage, managers use feedforward control to anticipate problems before they arise so problems do not occur later during the conversion process. For example, by giving stringent product specifications to suppliers in advance, an organization can