Leadership and Human Motivation

Post Written By: Crystal Kubeczka



Motivating your employees to reach their goals can sometimes be challenging. The scholarly article “Leadership and Human Motivation in the Workplace,” explains different ways one could help motivate employees in order for reaching goals. The article states that emotional responses are what determine how one wants to get motivated. “Emotions are defined as the result of the interaction between subjective factors, environmental factors, and hormonal processes. Emotions, with respect to the concept of leadership, can be either goal-congruent or goal-incongruent.” Goal-congruent is a positive response and usually becomes permanent whereas goal-incongruent is a negative response and is only temporarily.

So how exactly do employees get motivated in order to accomplish their goals? As stated in the article, “Albert Bandura says that self-efficacy is a powerful cognitive and emotional state that determines whether a person puts forth energy to successfully execute a productive behavior.”  Self-efficacy is a measure of belief in one’s own ability to complete tasks and reach goals. So motivation is up to the person and how far they want to achieve success. Some ways to get motivation within the employees included training, cash incentives for people doing the training, and certifications that can be used as part of the evaluation process for moving up in the company. Employees must learn how to cope with change within the business and challenge themselves to become motivated towards the new tasks. “Feelings of self-efficacy are enhanced with the acquisition of new skills. Thus, as new challenges confront employees, they become more likely to tackle the task.” So as it states in the article the employees become used to the change and are more likely to achieve success because they learned how to adapt to the new change.

Scholarly Article Used:

Wilsey, M. D. (1995). Leadership and human motivation in the workplace.  Quality Progress, 28(11),         85. Retrieved from http://lib-ezproxy.tamu.edu:2048/login?url=                 http://search.proquest.com/docview/214749216?accountid=7082