Page 255 - Introduction to Business

CHAPTER 7 Motivating and Leading Employees 229

EXHIBIT 7.1
How Leadership and Motivation Impact Corporate Goals

Corporate
Leadership Motivation Performance
goals
• Understand • Competitive • Job satisfaction • Customer
customer needs wages • Productivity satisfaction
• Motivate • Employee increases • Corporate
employees benefits profitability
• Manage change • Work
in a global and environment
IT environment and rules
• Maximize
profits ethically
Good leadership will help motivate employees to keep customers satisfied.

Serving customers well can provide job satisfaction to employees and at the
same time enable firms to enhance their competitive edge and profits in the global
marketplace. Thus customers, employees, shareholders, and society are all well
served. The key requirement is ethical leadership that can serve customer needs
well while placing high priority on employee job satisfaction and motivation, which
are the focus of this chapter.
Culture and ethics play an extremely important role in explaining both
employee motivation and managerial leadership. Corporate leaders have long
wrestled with the challenge of managing culturally diverse employees without
dampening job satisfaction, motivation, customer service, and corporate objec-
tives. Employee job satisfaction strategies, employee motivation, and leadership
styles vary with culture and over time within any particular culture. Firms that deal
with a culturally diverse workforce should be aware that employee incentives must
reflect cultural differences to be successful, and managers should not use a “one
size fits all” approach to motivate employees or to lead firms.
In this chapter, you will come to understand what motivation is and why it is so
important to keep employees motivated. You will be exposed to the major tradi-
tional and contemporary motivation theories and learn how firms try to enhance
employee satisfaction. Also, you will learn some fundamentals of leadership and
the reasons why some business leaders succeed while others fail.

What Is Motivation?

LEARNING OBJECTIVE 1
Explain what motivation is and the importance of keeping employees motivated.

Most students want to finish college as soon as possible so that they can pursue
their goals of obtaining a decent job, a new car, a house, and a family. A motive is a motive A specific need or desire that
specific need or desire that arouses an individual and directs his or her behavior arouses an individual and directs his or
her behavior toward achieving a goal
toward achieving a goal. Motives are triggered by some external stimulus or inter-
nal feeling. When a stimulus induces goal-directed behavior in an individual, we
say that the stimulus has motivated that person. You may come across some class-
mates who are really not interested in their studies. They like to goof around and
may take a decade to graduate. These students lack motivation, or the drive to motivation The drive to achieve a goal
achieve a goal in life. Psychologists generally divide drive into two categories, in life

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