Motivation as a strategic element for job satisfaction.
It is a reality that organizational success depends more and more on the motivational perspectives of people within organizations. In this sense, companies must consider their employees as an essential strategic source for competitiveness. Therefore, human talent is the most important asset for the achievement of organizational objectives.
There are many variables that determine the importance of motivation within organizations, some of which are related to people's behavior and attitude towards their work functions, others are linked to the satisfaction of their fundamental needs and, on the other hand, those that are linked to productivity and work performance. In this sense, Hitt Michael, Black Stewart and Porter Lyman (2006), express that there is a strategic value in the motivation of people, since it maintains a competitive advantage. This is for several reasons, all of them related to the strong motivation of its personnel.
Under this approach, motivated workers produce better quality goods than those of the competition, are more productive and have lower turnover (i.e., there are few who leave the company to go to another job). In this sense, productivity means that they produce a greater number of products in the time worked. In addition, although it is relative, workers produce more and this reduces the total cost per product. Next, motivation maintains a level of satisfaction of people's needs, such as physiological, safety, social, esteem and self-realization needs, which lead to achieving better objectives.
However, there are certain obstacles that affect employee motivation that are sometimes beyond the control of companies and managers. Moreover, such conditions are often changing. The economic situation, for example, is constantly fluctuating and this could influence the motivation levels of many employees. Also, family and other individual circumstances that arise outside the organization influence the work situation, attitudes, whether to stay or leave the company, or willingness to give extra effort at work. Therefore, understanding these and other forces that affect motivation has been an ongoing challenge for managers not only today, but also since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
Under this approach, Stephen Robbins (2002) states that the belief that satisfied employees are more productive than dissatisfied ones has been a basic view among managers for years. Although this statement is very relative, advanced societies should be concerned not only with quality of life, i.e., high productivity and material acquisitions, but also with quality of life. Organizations with strongly humanistic values hold that satisfaction is a legitimate objective of a company. It is not only that satisfaction is negatively related to absenteeism and turnover, but also that organizations have a responsibility to provide their employees with challenging and intrinsically rewarding jobs.
