Role of the Manager in Motivating Employees

What is a manager's role in motivating employees? Is it true that today's American workers are less motivated than those from years gone by? Can supervisors manage by intimidation and expect reasonable results from their employees? Sharon Nelton takes on these issues and more in the article, "Motivating for Success," in Nation's Business. Nelton suggests that workers are innately motivated, and that supervisors do not so much motivate employees and supply the ingredients necessary for employees to lose their motivation. Instead of offering quick tips that can be applied once and then forgotten, Nelton offers a series of suggestions that require companies to change the way they do business in order to respect the needs and value of their employees.

At the heart of successful motivation, according to Nelton, is the golden rule: treat your employees the way you want to be treated. While this is a simplistic view of management, its practice can be much more difficult to enforce. Employers today work in a complex legal environment in which many of their actions can be judged not only by the employees, but by other interested parties, including customers, vendors and even the courts. As a result, maintaining good relationships with employees, a key to keeping motivation high, becomes a business necessity, not merely a business luxury.

In order to put the golden rule into practice at companies, Nelton makes the following 10 recommendations.

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gives the employee the opportunity to seek assistance from the manager in one area or another, such as gaining additional training. What happens when ethical considerations come into conflict with financial realities? That's the question that Karen Berney sets out to answer in "Finding the Ethical Edge." Writing in Nation's Business, Berney provides a series of anecdotes that illustrate how businesses have found creative solutions to problems that enable them to maintain an ethical approach to the way they do business while also maintaining a strong bottom line. Two sidebar articles outline specifics that companies can use to enforce ethical behavior among their employees. And the article is careful to point out that all employees or members of an organization must be behind the ethical commitment of that organization if it is truly to accomplish its ethical objectives. It is not merely enough for the president to announce that the company is going to pursue ethical standards in its business, or that an organization is bound by the rules of ethics. This is because there is no one set of ethics that can adequately address the myriad ethical dilemmas that companies face in their day-to-day business. Since every employee or me

Category: Psychology - R