UNIT – I Lesson 1 HRM – AN OVERVIEW Lesson Outline Nature of ...

effort for the progress of the organization or bearing additional burdens for the benefit of
the organization. High morale facilitates cooperation and enhances a sense of unity or
“espirit-de-corps” among people working together. It could attract and retain competent
employees. It creates favorable image and an inclusive atmosphere among an
organization’s stakeholders.
The interplay of mind and body of oneself and behavior of self and others would
influence morale. Morale would suffer the most severe test of endurance in jobs in which
the future remains unpredictable, or a job in which the co-workers are of unfriendly nature
or when employees are holding grudges or feelings of resentment against each other.
Morale could also be deteriorating if employees feel stifled or their voices suppressed and
were unable to grow or when employees don’t feel that they are getting consistent,
unconditional, impartial and adequate recognition from their employer and supervisors.
4.11.2. Motivation:
Motivation is said to be a combination of all those inner tensions or the needs that we
describe as hopes, wishes, desires, fears, and intentions. Stephen P Robbins (1994) has
defined motivation as the willingness to exert high levels of efforts towards organizational
goals, conditioned by the effort and ability to satisfy some individual need. Motivation
includes any inner state that activates and moves people. It invokes the urge or compulsion
to do something. It is an inner process that begins with an awareness of a need or a sense
of tension and proceeds through the satisfaction of that need or the dispersal of that tension
to the awareness of another need or the sense of further tension and so on. Motivated
employees could be in a state of tension, to relieve which, they exert effort. Motivation
backs employees’ abilities to bring about performance and this could be represented as the
following formula: Performance = f (ability X motivation)
Motivation according to Harold Koontz and Cyril O’Donnell (1982) is a general
term applying to the entire class of drives, desires, needs, wishes, wants and other similar
forces. According to the Encyclopedia of Management, the term ‘Motivation’ refers to the
degree of readiness of an organism to pursue some designated goals and implies the
determination of the nature and locus of forces including degree of readiness. Motivation
is the result of the interaction between the individual and the situation. Individuals differ
in their needs, attitudes and motivational drives, and hence efforts to improve their
motivation should also be individualized.
4.11.3. De-motivation: De-motivation is both insidious and debilitating. Disappearance of
or reduction in motivation levels is called de-motivation. De-motivated employees would
prove a costly liability to an organization. Being able to spot that people are not happy in