Job Performance Model of Motivation

As an international expert on leadership and decision making, the Expectancy Theory of Motivation was suggested by Victor H. Vroom. He was named to the original board of officers of the Yale School of Management when it was founded in 1976. Vroom has focused much of his research on dealing with motivation and leadership within an organization. His 1964 book called Work and Motivation became one of the most influential books on the subject of motivation. He has served as a consultant to a number of government agencies, as well as more than 100 major corporations worldwide, including General Electric and American Express. He is currently a professor at the Yale School of Management at Yale University.

Vroom's Expectancy Theory addresses motivation and management. The theory suggests that an individual's perceived view of an outcome will determine the level of motivation. It assumes that choices being made maximize pleasure and minimize pain. This is also seen in the Law of Effect, "one of the principles of reinforcement theory, which states that people engage in behaviors that have pleasant outcomes and avoid behaviors that have unpleasant outcomes" (Thorndike, 1913). Vroom suggests that prior belief of the relationship between people's work and their goal as a simple correlation is incorrect. Individual factors including skills, knowledge, experience, personality, and abilities can all have an impact on an employee's performance.

Vroom theorized that the source of motivation in Expectancy Theory is a "multiplicative function of valence, instrumentality and expectancy." (Stecher & Rosse, 2007). He suggested that "people consciously chose a particular course of action, based upon perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs as a consequence of their desires to enhance pleasure and avoid pain" (Vroom, 1964).

Vroom's Expectancy Theory is based on these three components:

• Expectancy:
  Expectancy can be described as the belief that higher or increased effort will yield better performance. This can be explained by the thinking of "If I work harder, I will make something better".
  Conditions that enhance expectancy include having the correct resources available, having the required skill set for the job at hand, and having the necessary support to get the job done correctly.

• Instrumentality:
  Instrumentality can be described as the thought that if an individual performs well, then a valued outcome will come to that individual. Some things that help instrumentality are having a clear understanding of the relationship between performance and the outcomes, having trust and respect for people who make the decisions on who gets what reward, and seeing transparency in the process of who gets what reward.

• Valence:
  Valence means "value" and refers to beliefs about outcome desirability (Redmond, 2010). There are individual differences in the level of value associated with any specific outcome. For instance, a bonus may not increase motivation for an employee who is motivated by formal recognition or by increased status such as promotion. Valence can be thought of as the pressure or importance that a person puts on an expected outcome.

Vroom concludes that the force of motivation in an employee can be calculated using the formula: Motivation = Valence*Expectancy*Instrumentality

           

Vroom also believed that increased effort would lead to increased performance, given the person has the right tools to get the job done. The expected outcome is dependent upon whether or not the person has the right resources to get the job done, has the right skills to do the task at hand, and they MUST have the support to get the job done. That support may come from the boss or by just being given the right information or tools to finish the job.

Although many people correlate high performance with high rewards, many times the theory is limited because rewards are not always directly correlated with performance in many organizations. It is also related to other parameters such as position, effort, responsibility, education, etc.

It is important to remember that there is a difference between incentives and motivators. Incentives are non-material objects. They are manipulated by managers and leaders in order to get employees to do desired tasks. Incentives may work, if the incentive is something the employee desires, however if the incentive is taken away, the behavior may not sustain. Motivation theories need to accentuate motivation and not incentives. For this reason, motivation implies that people make decisions about their own behavior and what motivates them.

The locus of control is different for incentives and motivation. Motivation is intrinsic control where incentives are extrinsically controlled by people in the organization (Mathibe, 2011).