Motivating a Sales Force

Finding the key to motivating employees is not a lesson easily learned, nor is it a lesson which, once learned, can be considered mastered. Instead, individual employees respond to different types of motivation in different ways, and successful supervisors develop comprehensive understanding of each of their employees and the corporate environment in which they operate. Employees in different types of jobs respond to motivation differently, as well, with those in jobs requiring a high level of independent thought likely to respond to different types of motivation than employees in highly regimented positions. This research examines types of motivation, the components that go into successfully motivating employees to meet their goals and objectives, and the specific challenges associated with motivating sales personnel.

There are a number of different approaches to work motivation, most of which can be broken down into either content theories or process theories. Content theories focus on what motivates people to perform, and are concerned with identifying the different rewards that people seek in their work. Process theories focus on how rewards control behavior. These theories are concerned with the dynamics, or process aspects, of work motivation (Gordon & DiTomaso, 1992).

One of the first attempts at developing a motivational theory focused on the principle of hedonism, which finds that people will seek pleasure and avoid pain. A

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economic realities. These theories have gained much attention because they stem from the idea that personal and situational influences are important in employee motivation. One of the most widely cited versions of expectancy theory is the Vroom model, which holds that the psychological force on an employee to exert effort is a function of his expectancies of the future, and the attractiveness of future outcomes (Scanlan & Keys, 1988). Two kinds of expectations are key to the expectancy model: effort will lead to performance and performance will lead to reward. The first expectation, that effort will lead to performance, refers to an employee's assumption that increased effort on his part will lead ton increase in productivity (or another desired accomplishment). If the employee anticipates that increased effort will not lead to increased performance, motivation becomes difficult. Another consideration by the employee is whether a given level of performance will result in reaching a particular outcome. The more strongly the employee believes that this is the case, the easier the motivational task (Kinni, 1998). The Porter-Lawler model, developed by Lyman Porter and Edward Lawler, seeks to combine content and process theor

Category: Psychology - M