An employee's motivation to work consists of all the drives, forces and
influences ? conscious or unconscious ? that cause the employee to want to
achieve certain aims. Managers need to know about the factors that create
motivation in order to be able to induce employees to work harder, faster,
more efficiently and with greater enthusiasm. Employees are motivated in
part by the need to earn a living and partly by human needs for job
satisfaction, security of tenure, the respect of colleagues and so on.
The organisation's rewards systems may applied to the first motive and job
design to the latter. Much research has sought to discover the sources of
motivation is tentative and no definite conclusions can be advanced.
For instance, "Social philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart
Mill asserted that humans are driven by the desire to obtain pleasure and
avoid pain. And B.F.Skinner's theory of operant conditioning implied that
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motivation emerges from the interplay of stimulus and response ...