User talk:ROGELIO E. WARDE (MBA 204)

 MONEY AS MOTIVATION: NOT A GOOD DECISION 

Rogelio E. Warde II | MBA | Camarines Norte State College

Money definitely plays a major part in motivating human resource, as far as motivation factor is concerned, that too in the work place. It is only the need for the money, that makes people work, either it be for a thousand pesos or dollars, quantity doesn’t matter, but it is the motivating factor. If there is plenty and more than sufficient any one would hardly want to work.

In contrast, Money is not the only motivation for work, because there are people who spend countless hours working in fields like teachers, who are not paid nearly what they are worth. When you choose a profession, the first criteria for the selection is that one must love what they do, or else, you will be unhappy.

People are also motivated by having autonomy, but more money doesn’t often equal greater perceived autonomy. In fact, you usually have to give up autonomy to rise up the compensation ladder. The real heart of autonomy as a motivator, however, rests with the perception that you are executing your own decisions without a lot of oversight or rules, which is hardly common in the corporate world today.

Similarly, feelings of relatedness and fairness are motivators. They are determined more by informal interactions, social networks and daily perceptions than by money or formal promotions.

This is not to suggest that money doesn’t motivate. Certainly it encourages self-serving materialism. But those who rely on money as their sole or primary motivator are on perilous terrain, particularly if they ignore other more powerful and emotional sources of human motivation.

To have wide knowledge, if money is a good motivator, I add up to this article three foreign and two local opinions (specifically from Camarines Norte).

According to Yen Tran, a Human Resource Manager, The most persuasive answer to this question is the meta-analysis by Tim Judge and his colleagues in 2010. The authors here reviewed 120 years of studies to synthesize the findings from over 90 quantitative studies. The results show that the association between wage and job satisfaction is really weak. There is less 2% overlap between pay and work satisfaction levels. Also, the correlation between pay and pay satisfaction was just slightly higher, showing that employee satisfaction with their salary is mostly independent of their actual salary. When the authors conducted group-level comparisons, they find out that employees that earn wages in the top half of their data range the same levels of job satisfaction to the employees that earn wages in the bottom-half of the data range. According to the engagement research on 1.4 million employees from 192 organizations in 49 industries and 34 countries by Gallup – a U.S research-based, global performance-management consulting company, there is no considerable difference in employee engagement by pay level.

However, Sergei Brovkin, Chief Thinker at Collectiver.com (2011-present) states that money isn’t a good motivator. Money is a hygiene factor, according to Hertzberg’s two-factor theory, i.e. not a motivator. Theories aside, you should have noticed that certain things sound encouraging to you, while other things are like “Meh. If they don’t have that, I’d rather go somewhere else.” That’s the difference between motivators and “hygiene.” Money may motivate people more than other factors only when they have been severely underpaid or left with no source of income altogether. But that motivation does not last long. This may explain why long-term strategies of outsourcing some business functions to “best-cost” countries do not work well in the long run: people there scramble to get this job with a global corporation, for peanuts, but very soon they realize that money is not the end of it but only the beginning. Still, having the hygiene factors in place is important. Leading businesses make sure that their employees are high on both – hygiene and motivation. That results in high performance.

On the other hand, Michael Siegwarth, a Software Developer says that: I've met a lot of people who could get better paying jobs, but stayed in their current job, for many different reasons, including nice leadership, commuting distance, fun routine, job security, etc. Maybe they didn't need the money so much, but this would lead us to think that money is only the most motivating factor if it is the thing you currently need the most in your life.

According to Mary Rose Longaza, an employee, a beauty queen and a graduate of Camarines Norte State College (CNSC) explains that for her, motivation are those stuffs (family, career) that serves as her driving force to do efficiently and effectively in her daily routines. But, she add up that money may also consider as motivation in a way that, how can you perform your task if you were not be incentivize or be given an appropriate income. However, she clear that what really motivates her the most is the fact that she experienced a lot of frustrations (like she didn’t meet any deadlines) than pleasures and that’s the main reason why she always pushes herself into her limits and doing some stuff that makes her scared the most because for her, it means that it will surely teaches her things about herself and vent out even more. Surely having a college degree makes you a living but self education makes you alive.

On the other side, Danielle Nano, a license professional teacher and also a proud graduate of CNSC, says that, Motivation for her is the driving force or whatever keeps her doing what she have to do despite the challenges she need to face in order to achieve something. But what really motivates her are the fact that she love both teaching and playing music that the more she do it, the more she grow as a teacher and a musician. It’s not the process that matters but the result that she has in her mind.

If I am to be asked if money is a good motivating factor, I will simply answer, “It depends”. It depends on the workplace and work you are doing. If you are not doing what you like then money will motivate you and vice-versa. Personally after being employed of 4 years. Money doesn't motivate me anymore. Why? Because earlier I was working for money and now I am working for the success of my organization. But at the end of the day remember one more thing my friend "Money is not everything, But you need money for everything".

However, I believe that motivating is the management responsibility on how to influence people’s behavior based on this knowledge of what makes people “tick”. Motivating and motivation both deal with the range of conscious human behavior somewhere between two extremes - reflex actions and learned actions.

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