What are the theories of motivation? How to apply various theories in enterprise management in combination with practice.

Motivation is the most important, basic and difficult function in modern management, which is determined by the information problems involved in people-oriented management and motivation. With the rapid development of management, information economics and institutional economics, modern incentive theory has made a series of breakthrough progress and become an exciting frontier of modern management theory and practice.

What is incentive? American management scientists Barzen and Steiner define motivation as follows: "All the conditions, hopes, wishes and motivations we strive for in our hearts constitute an incentive to people. -It is an internal state of human activities. " All human behaviors are caused by some kind of motivation. Motivation is a mental state, which stimulates, promotes and strengthens people's actions.

The existing motivation theories are mainly studied from the perspectives of psychology and organizational behavior. Motivation is considered to realize the will of the organization through high-level efforts, which are conditional on meeting some personal needs and motives. Therefore, the popular management incentive theory can be divided into two categories. One is the motivation theory that pays attention to people's psychological needs and motivations, including Murray's demand theory, McLelland's achievement motivation theory, Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory, Adever's ERG theory, Frederick? Herzberg's two-factor theory. The other is the theory of incentive process, which takes the dynamic system of interaction between human psychological process and behavioral process as the research object. This theory looks at incentives from a systematic and dynamic perspective, mainly including frum, Porter and Lawler's expectation theory, Adams' fairness theory and Michael? Ross's attribution theory and trajectory control theory, Skinner's reinforcement theory.

Compared with the theoretical system of incentive content, the theoretical system of incentive process is a great progress from a systematic and dynamic point of view, but it is still based on people's psychological characteristics and behavioral characteristics based on it. However, people's psychological needs are difficult to observe, evaluate and measure and belong to internal variables; At the same time, psychological characteristics must vary from person to person, from time to time, from thing to thing, and are in dynamic change, so the repeatability of various incentive methods is poor and difficult to grasp; Thirdly, with people's adaptability to incentive conditions, any incentive factor will become a healthy factor, which will lead to a serious conflict between the scarcity of incentive resources and the rigidity of incentive factors (such as wages and bonuses) in management organizations, making management incentives difficult to last. Therefore, motivation is often considered to belong to the category of management art and leadership art, and it is a daunting task.

Grasping the characteristics of incentives is the premise of effective use of incentives. At present, in the actual incentive operation, different incentive measures should be taken according to time, place and person to achieve different effects.

1. "Incentive is the core of management", and salary incentive is a commonly used incentive method in enterprises at present, because it is easier for enterprise managers to control and measure the use effect compared with internal incentives.

1. 1 The so-called effective salary incentive is only relative to the traditional use of external material factors such as wages and money to urge employees to complete enterprise work goals. More from the perspective of respecting employees' ability, desire, personal decision-making and independent choice, so as to better create an atmosphere of "integration" of employees' personal interests and corporate interests. An effective salary incentive consists of the following elements:

1. 1. 1.

The post skill wage system is the innovation of the post wage system, which forms a wage system that emphasizes personal knowledge and skills and promotes employees to achieve wage growth through the improvement of personal quality. Different from the post salary system, the post undertaker's salary is determined simply according to the characteristics of the post itself, while the job content undertaken by the post undertaker and the degree of ability to play when completing the work are regarded as the key factors of salary. Under this salary system, the company's attraction to employees with high knowledge level and strong ability is greatly enhanced, and the possibility of such employees leaving the company is reduced; On the other hand, it can also motivate employees to continuously improve their own abilities and ultimately make greater contributions to the enterprise.

1. 1.2. Flexible bonus system

As a part of salary, the main purpose of bonus is to encourage employees to make extra contributions to the company compared with salary. However, the bonuses of most domestic enterprises have lost the meaning of reward to a considerable extent and become fixed additional wages. After studying the advantages and disadvantages of bonus payment, General Electric Company of the United States established the bonus system. In order to reflect the flexibility of bonus payment, it especially followed the following principles:

(1) Cut the umbilical cord between the bonus and the right. Ge canceled the old practice of linking the bonus amount with the position, which made the bonus payment divorced from the position, gave people more opportunities to increase their remuneration without improving their positions, and made the bonus really play a role in encouraging the advanced, preventing the top leaders from relaxing their work and getting something for nothing.

(2) the reversibility of the bonus. If the bonus is not fixed, otherwise employees will take it for granted, and the "bonus" will be reduced to "extra salary" and will not play the role of bonus. GE will adjust the bonus amount at any time according to the changes of employees' performance, so as to give employees a sense of accomplishment and crisis, thus urging employees to do their jobs well and make unremitting efforts for a long time.

1. 1.3. Self-service welfare system

A perfect welfare system is very important for attracting and retaining employees, and it is also an important symbol of the soundness of the company's human resources system. Well-designed welfare programs can not only bring convenience to employees, relieve worries and increase loyalty to the company, but also save personal income tax expenses and improve the company's social prestige.

On the premise of fairness, the benefits enjoyed by employees are closely related to job performance. Different departments have different performance appraisal systems, and the results of employees' regular performance appraisal determine the level gap of benefits, with the aim of encouraging employees to compete for strength and eliminate the disadvantages of average benefits from the system.

For enterprises, welfare is a huge expense (it can account for more than 30% of the total wages in foreign companies), but for employees, its incentive effect is not great, and some employees are even ungrateful. The best way is to provide employees with personalized welfare policies. Innovating in the setting of employee benefits, changing the situation that employees have no right to decide their own benefits before, and giving employees a certain choice. For example, employees can freely choose whether to buy a car or buy a house by accumulating the special loan amount for car purchase. Once employees have a say in their own welfare forms to a certain extent, their job satisfaction and loyalty to the company will be improved, and the efficiency of the company's use of funds for welfare expenditure will also be improved.

1.2 Pay attention to skills in salary payment

Different people should use different incentives. Companies with low wages, no matter how good the corporate culture is, are hard to retain people. For high-level talents, the salary is higher, but if they lack training and development opportunities, they are still unattractive.

Combining cash compensation with non-cash compensation can sometimes achieve unexpected results. The former includes wages, allowances, bonuses and "red envelopes". And the latter includes all insurance and welfare items provided by the enterprise for employees, physical objects, tours organized by the company, recreation and sports, etc. Some companies provide special benefits for employees' families, such as inviting their families to parties, giving special gifts, allowing employees to travel with their families and giving gifts to their children. Make employees feel particularly "face-saving". Two concert tickets and a box of cosmetics presented by the supervisor often excite employees.

Appropriately shortening the time interval of regular rewards and keeping the timeliness of incentives will help to achieve the best incentive effect. Frequent small-scale rewards will be more effective than large-scale rewards. Reduce regular rewards and increase irregular rewards, so that employees have more unexpected surprises and enhance the incentive effect.

1.3 Select a reward payment method.

Payment methods usually include on-time payment, piece-rate payment and performance payment. The most lack of incentive is timely payment, which is only reflected in a period of time before and after the annual salary increase, and it is difficult to last. But it also has obvious advantages: stable income, giving employees a sense of security, which is conducive to retaining and recruiting; Convenient implementation; Labor costs are easy to predict; We won't neglect quality by emphasizing output. Piece-by-piece salary has an obvious incentive effect on employees, but it is only suitable for posts with easy-to-measure output and clear quality standards, which is difficult for knowledge-based white-collar workers. In the IT industry, the most commonly used method is the combination of on-time payment and performance payment. It needs to set specific work objectives (indicators) in advance, and at the end of the assessment period or after the completion of the project, calculate the floating salary or extract the commission according to the actual work performance evaluation results. Performance pay is determined by team performance and individual performance. For senior positions, corporate profits are often linked to salary as an important performance indicator. Because salary is linked to quantifiable performance, it is more incentive and fair. This method needs to be supported by a reasonable goal setting method and a good performance evaluation system.

1.4 Pay attention to skills when communicating salary with employees.

Some companies spend a lot of money on employees' wages and benefits, but employees are indifferent. As a supervisor, I suggest you make a detailed explanation of your welfare expenses so that employees can understand the price paid by the company for them. Tell employees about your distribution philosophy. If you are sure that the company's salary is competitive, in order to convince employees, you might as well make your salary survey results public, or even let employees participate in the design and promotion of the salary scheme. Even if the company has to reduce its salary because of temporary difficulties, as long as you are honest and fair, and at the same time show your advantages beyond salary as much as possible, I believe employees will understand and help each other.

There is a subtle game relationship between employees and supervisors in salary adjustment. Employees naturally hope that the higher the salary, the better, and as a boss, they hope to reduce labor costs as much as possible. How to control salary and motivate employees in the game? One way is to lower employees' expectations of salary targets first, such as keeping a low profile on the expected salary range and range of employees. When employees find that their actual salary increase exceeds expectations, they will feel satisfied.

1.5 make good use of stock reward forms

In high-tech industry, stock option is a very attractive word. Many employees, especially senior employees, think that the salary level is not the main attraction, and the most important thing is whether the "employee stock ownership" system is implemented. Not only those companies listed overseas have implemented stock options, but even non-listed companies are exploring different forms of employee stock ownership. For non-listed companies, due to the lack of clear provisions in the current domestic laws, there are few successful cases that can be used for reference in realizing their own rights and interests, and they often look around for fear of legal obstacles to listing on the GEM in the future. Many companies talk too much. However, with the increasingly clear listing rules of GEM in China, this issuance method will be applied to practice more and more.

1.6 Be kind to senior staff and key staff.

In the case of limited salary, enterprises have to focus on retaining key employees and business backbones in order to develop. A famous American company adopts such a strategy in the annual salary adjustment after the performance decline: adopting the growth rate higher than the market average for senior employees, adopting the market average growth rate for middle-level employees and business backbones, and keeping the salary unchanged for ordinary employees. Their thinking is: 80% of the performance is completed by 20% of the elite, and a few backbones determine the development of the company. This method is particularly effective for some emerging high-tech companies or powerful companies.

"Increase profits first or raise wages first?" This question is very similar to "which came first, the egg or the chicken?" I suggest that the boss choose "salary increase first" if his funds can support a profit cycle. With scientific performance management, the company will enter a virtuous circle of "high salary, high efficiency and high benefit", achieve first-class career with first-class talents, and the company and employees will have an accelerated development.

Second, spiritual performance: the spiritual core of management

Incentives must cultivate employees' enterprising spirit in order to achieve remarkable benefits, which requires performance spirit.

The spirit of performance requires everyone to give full play to their strengths. The focus must be on a person's strengths-what he can do, not what he can't do.

To cultivate the spirit of performance, enterprises should put it into practice in the following four aspects:

1, the organization's focus must be on performance. For enterprises and everyone, the first requirement of organizational spirit is the performance of high standards. But performance does not mean "success every time", but an "average success rate", in which mistakes and even failures are allowed and must be allowed. What can't be allowed in grades is complacency and low standards.

2. The focus of the organization must be on opportunities, not problems.

3. The decisions of relevant personnel, such as work, salary, promotion, demotion and resignation, must show the values and beliefs of the organization. They are the real control means of the organization.

In the decision-making of relevant personnel, the management must show that integrity is the only absolute condition that a manager should have. At the same time, the management should also show that it also demands fairness.

Pursuing high standards of performance

The first requirement of WHO is to set high standards of performance.

This requires a correct understanding of performance. Performance requirements can continue to produce results in various work arrangements for a long time. Performance records must include errors and failures. It must show a person's strengths and weaknesses.

Some people usually do better, rarely fall below a certain level, but rarely stand out. There are also some people who are average under normal circumstances, but they can accept challenges like "stars" and achieve excellent performance when they encounter crises or major challenges. Both of them have achievements, which should be affirmed. But their performances are quite different. There is another kind of person who does nothing wrong, never makes mistakes and never fails. Such people should not be trusted. He is either a liar or doing something safe and reliable. If a person's grades have been poor or his performance is average, he should change his job, which is responsible for him. A person who is not qualified for his post will feel irritable, confused and anxious. It is not good to put a person in a position where he is incompetent. If you don't face up to a person's incompetence, it is cowardice rather than sympathy. In order to be responsible for subordinates, one should also make achievements. Subordinates have the right to ask competent, dedicated and efficient people to be leaders. Subordinates have the right to demand performance from superiors, otherwise, it is difficult for them to achieve performance.

Finally, in order to be responsible for everyone else in the enterprise, one must also have achievements. If a manager or profession does not perform well, the whole organization will be damaged; If a person has achieved excellent performance, it will be beneficial to the whole organization.

Performance focuses on opportunities rather than problems.

If an organization always pays attention to opportunities rather than problems, it will have a high spirit of achievement; If an organization puts its strength where it can produce results, that is, on opportunities, it will feel excited and challenged, and get a sense of performance satisfaction.

Of course, we can't ignore this problem. However, an organization concerned with problems is an organization on the defensive. This is an organization that always thinks about the golden age of the past. That kind of organization always thinks that if there are no mistakes, they will do better.

Opportunity-oriented management requires every manager and professional to give priority to opportunities in their goals. When making their own performance and work plans, every manager and professional should first ask themselves the following questions: "What opportunities will have the greatest impact on the performance of the company and my unit?"

Third, the trust incentive method

The operation of a society must be lubricated by the basic trust between people, otherwise, the society cannot operate normally and orderly. Trust is a catalyst to accelerate the outbreak of human self-confidence, and self-confidence is more important than hard work for success. Trust motivation is a basic way of motivation. Mutual understanding and trust between cadres and masses and between superiors and subordinates is a powerful spiritual force, which contributes to the harmony between people in the unit and the formation of team spirit and cohesion in the unit.

Leading cadres' trust in the masses is reflected in trusting the masses, relying on the masses and carrying forward the spirit of being masters of the masses; Trust in subordinates is reflected in treating people equally and respecting their labor, authority and opinions. This kind of trust is embodied in "employing people without doubt, suspecting people without use", and also in letting go of use. Only by using freely on the basis of trust can we give full play to the subjective initiative and creativity of talents. Sometimes you can even play beyond the level and achieve results that you can't believe.

Fourth, the work incentive method

Talents who have both ability and political integrity, can manage and make good use of people, and can open up a new situation in a department. We should grasp the actual needs, foster strengths and avoid weaknesses, promote and reuse in time, and don't dampen the enthusiasm of "a swift horse." As a leader of a unit, you should have a discerning eye, and you should not "turn a blind eye" or "turn a blind eye" to the talents around you because of the self-interest of the leader. Suppressing and burying talents can only make enterprises suffer. For those who are truly "golden" in practice, we should add a burden to the task in time and introduce a competitive incentive mechanism to form a virtuous circle of "excellent cadres have a sense of accomplishment, mediocre cadres have a sense of pressure, and incompetent cadres have a sense of crisis".

Verb (abbreviation of verb) knowledge incentive method

With the development of knowledge economy, the world is becoming more and more informationized, digitized and networked. The speed of knowledge updating is accelerated, the unreasonable knowledge structure of cadres and the aging of knowledge are becoming increasingly prominent. To establish the idea of "lifelong education", we can adopt self-study and strengthen the vocational training for the general staff of the unit; You can also encourage all kinds of talents to study full-time, visit and study, and go to colleges and universities for further study. As a cross-century talent, one should also master the necessary knowledge of foreign languages and computers and be able to use all kinds of information obtained by the Internet (the unit should also establish an efficient information and intelligence network). All kinds of talents at all levels can continuously improve their ideological and moral quality, scientific and cultural quality, social activity quality, aesthetic quality and physical and mental quality only by working hard on "specialization" and "erudition". Knowledge motivation is an important principle of talent management.

Sixth, the emotional incentive method.

Emotion is one of the most direct factors affecting people's behavior, and everyone has the need to crave all kinds of emotions. According to the psychological explanation, people's emotions can be divided into altruistic emotions, competitive emotions, hedonic emotions and other types, which requires leaders to pay more attention to people's lives, dare to tell the truth and do practical things with true feelings, and care about the spiritual life and mental health of employees while meeting people's material needs. Improve the emotional control and psychological adjustment ability of ordinary employees and all kinds of talents to establish normal, good and healthy interpersonal relationships, interpersonal relationships and personal relationships with the masses; In order to create a gay atmosphere, a friend atmosphere and a family atmosphere of mutual trust, mutual care, mutual understanding, mutual support, mutual respect and love, unity and harmony; In order to effectively cultivate people's living ability and cooperation spirit and enhance their sense of belonging to the unit.

Seven, the target incentive method

The goal is the psychological attraction of the organization to individuals. The so-called goal motivation is to determine appropriate goals, induce people's motivation and behavior, and achieve the purpose of mobilizing people's enthusiasm. As an inducement, goal has the functions of starting, guiding and motivating. Only by constantly motivating yourself to pursue high goals can a person stimulate his inner motivation.

In the process of goal motivation, we should correctly handle the relationship between big goals and small goals, personal goals and organizational goals, mass goals, ideals and reality, principles and flexibility. In the target assessment, we should comprehensively examine talents qualitatively, quantitatively and hierarchically according to the standards of virtue, ability, diligence and performance, so as to achieve "rigid" norms and clear rewards and punishments.

Eight, honor incentive law

From the perspective of human motivation, everyone has the need for self-affirmation, glory and striving for honor. It is a good way to give necessary spiritual rewards to some outstanding and representative advanced figures. For all kinds of talents at all levels, spiritual motivation is the main motivation, because it can reflect people's need for respect. In terms of honor encouragement, we should also pay attention to the collective encouragement and cultivate everyone's sense of collective honor and team spirit.

Nine, behavior incentive method

People's emotions are always dominated by actions, and people's incentives will in turn dominate people's actions. What we call behavioral motivation is to motivate others with the emotional behavior of the target object, thus mobilizing people's enthusiasm. We often say that the power of example is infinite, that is, the behavior of typical characters can stimulate people's emotions, trigger people's "introspection" and * * *, thus playing a strong demonstration role, just like a banner, guiding people's actions.

Ten, pay attention to the team's reward.

Although the incentive effect of rewarding teams is weaker than rewarding individuals, it is necessary to establish a team incentive plan in order to promote the cooperation among team members and prevent the unbalanced mentality of subordinates due to the excessive wage gap between superiors and subordinates. In some successful enterprises, the funds used to reward teams often account for a large proportion of employees' income. The assessment criteria and reward criteria for excellent teams should be clear in advance and guaranteed to be understood by team members. Specific reward distribution forms can be summarized into three categories. One is based on cost-saving rewards, such as scanlon plan, which multiplies the cost saved by employees by a certain proportion and rewards them to their teams. The other is a reward based on profit sharing, which can also be regarded as a way of paying dividends. The third category is to set a part of the total salary as a reward fund, and set assessment and selection criteria to reward according to the completion of team goals and the advocacy direction of corporate culture.

XI。 Incentive methods for knowledge workers

Mahan, a knowledge management expert? After a lot of research, Tammy believes that the first four factors that motivate knowledge workers are: personal growth (about 34% of the total), work autonomy (about 365,438+0%), business achievement (about 28%) and money wealth (about 7%). Therefore, it can be said that compared with other types of employees, knowledge-based employees pay more attention to challenging work that can promote their development, and they have a continuous pursuit of knowledge, personal and professional growth; They demand autonomy, so that they can work in an effective way and complete the tasks assigned to them by enterprises; Get a reward commensurate with your contribution and enable yourself to share the wealth you have created. Obviously, in today's people's career choices, money is not the most important, but fairness is the most important.

Because an important factor of motivation is whether individuals feel fair about the salary structure. Whether a person is satisfied with the remuneration is explained by the theory of fairness, which means that the individual subjectively compares his own investment (including many factors such as the degree of effort, economy, education and so on). ) evaluate with others whether he is paid fairly or justly. Adams is famous for expressing the theory of fairness (or unfairness) by formulas.

The essence of fairness theory can be expressed as: personal income/personal input = another person's income (as comparison)/another person's input (as comparison).

The proportion of return and investment between one person and another person used to compare with him should be balanced. If people feel that their remuneration is not suitable, they may be dissatisfied, reduce the quantity or quality of output, or leave the organization.

If people feel that the pay is fair, they may continue to work at the same output level. People may work harder if they think that the individual's return is greater than what they think is fair. It is also possible that some people may underestimate this reward.

This reward, in layman's terms, is salary, treatment or salary.

The motivation of knowledge workers should not be based on money, but on their development, achievement and growth. Put another way: focus on long-term effects or short-term effects. As a knowledge worker, we should also base ourselves on the long-term effect.

1. The degree of effort is directly related to the salary. One of the elements of the success of the bonus plan is to convince employees that they can get the corresponding bonus through their own efforts. Therefore, the reward standard of bonus plan must be formulated according to the actual productivity of employees, and it must be reasonable and can be completed by ordinary employees. At the same time, it is necessary to provide employees with corresponding training, equipment and tools. On the other hand, employees can control the whole work process, and the higher their efforts, the higher their work performance, thus increasing their salary. If the bonus scheme for the group is not as clear as the correlation between effort and reward, then the latter is better.

2. Salary itself must be different from the personal needs that employees attach importance to, which will inevitably lead to a certain structure of salary that has different appeal to different employees. Therefore, you must investigate the needs of employees and implement rewards in a targeted manner. When an employee has high expectations for other needs, such as a sense of accomplishment and identity, money may have little effect on his job performance.

3. The bonus plan is based on careful study of working hours. The research on precise working methods usually involves industrial engineers, working hours and ergonomics research experts and other management experts, so as to formulate objective, fair and standard working hours quota.

The bonus plan is clear and easy to calculate. For a factory worker, how many products are produced this day, he can immediately calculate how much bonus he will get. If it is overfulfilled, he will immediately speed up the progress and improve efficiency in order to get more bonuses. For a sales manager in a large area, if the bonus scheme is easy to understand, you can know how much bonus your sales team can get without calculating the expenses such as advertising investment and sales cost. Such a bonus plan could not be more effective.

5. The standard for establishing an effective standard bonus plan must be fixed, and it is necessary to stipulate under what circumstances this standard is effective; Bonus standards must also be clear and unambiguous, such as asking subordinates to "do their best"; Bonus standards must also be cautious, not just focusing on quantity and ignoring quality.

6. Build employees' confidence in standards. In a large enterprise with standardized management, this phenomenon may not exist, because once the rewarded standardized managers are determined, they cannot raise the standards or lower the wage rate at will. In small and medium-sized enterprises, especially those with unhealthy management concepts, the owners have poor quality and low reputation, which leads to low efficiency of workers. Even if there is a bonus plan, it is difficult to play an effective role, which eventually leads to a vicious circle of mutual distrust.

7. Establish and improve the institutionalized management of rules and regulations. Legalization will increase employees' trust in the enterprise and reduce doubts. For managers, it is also clear and easy to manage.

8. Employees participate in the formulation of the bonus plan because they have a clear understanding of their salary needs and the possibility of completing their work goals, so letting employees participate in the formulation of the bonus plan will increase the effectiveness of the bonus plan. The following experiment clearly illustrates this problem. It has become a serious problem that the service staff in shopping centers are not enthusiastic about their work. Later, with the approval of the general manager, the human resources department allowed three of the five teams in the jewelry sales department on the first floor to make their own bonus plans (* * * participated) to motivate employees and improve sales performance, while the other two teams still used the unified bonus plan in the mall. Since the implementation of this system 10 week, the sales performance of the three sales teams whose team members participated in the bonus plan has increased by 40%, 38% and 58% respectively, while the other two groups have not improved. After a period of time, two groups in the customized group canceled the customized bonus plan, and the sales of these two groups soon declined, which proved that it was effective to let employees participate in the bonus plan.

To sum up, there are many ways to motivate employees, which can be adopted by domestic enterprises at present. However, according to the enterprise's situation and development stage, we should flexibly choose and implement the appropriate scheme.

Enterprises are first and foremost a collection of people; The production and operation activities of enterprises are carried out by people; Various elements of enterprise management can only play a role if they are used by people who actively participate in the operation; Enterprise management is not only the management of people, but also through the management of people. Therefore, only those who participate in enterprise activities always maintain strong fighting spirit and high enthusiasm can enterprises achieve better performance. As a leader of an enterprise, we should be good at combining the development of the enterprise with the needs of employees skillfully. Through some effective incentive measures, it not only inspired the morale of employees, but also promoted the development of enterprises, and truly achieved a win-win situation.