The Team Motivation in Organizations

The Team Motivation In Organizations

Employee motivation is crucial to good management. Consequently, itÐŽ¦s no surprise that employee motivation is a subject near and dear to managers. But why it is important and how to motivate the whole team to a greatest degree and thus provide the organization with best management?

During the development of the enterprises, the team motivation is an important issue for the human resource manager. Through the communication with quite a few managers, the similar problems were faced.

First of all, two general stories are told as followed.

The first story is about a company that requires high professional talents. In 1999, three persons, one with Dr. Degree and the other two with Master Degree, were dissatisfied with the current situation and decided to build up their own career futures. They resigned the job and opened a company. It was full of difficulties and interests during the first period of starting a business. Everyone cooperated harmoniously and regarded the company as their own career point. After the 6 months, the company has mushroomed in the sales and revenues. But at that time, the conflicts aroused. Except for the problem of companyÐŽ¦s developing strategy, the benefit distribution began to influence on the mutual cooperation. Someone thought his work and return did not match. Although they all got much more salary than before, they still thought they needed the mutual fair as one of them said. One deputy manager thought his contribution for the company is most profound, while he did not receive the expected return; the other deputy manager thought his ability was the strongest among allÐŽK. The company lost the former harmonious cooperating relationship gradually. In April 2000, one of them quit from the company and prepared to find the new partners to open up his enterprise, and the other one of them entered a foreign company in the early 2001.

The above story is talking about the problem of managersÐŽ¦ cooperation, while the following story is talking about that how the morale of general staff was shocked and led to the companyÐŽ¦s closing.

A company that sells healthy products bought a patent from the China Science Institute several years ago. It manufactured and delivered the products to the market immediately, which received the unexpected success, thereafter the revenues doubled in the first two years. But with the enlargement of the company, the owners began to pay attention to their own ÐŽ§propertyЎЁ; meanwhile, they hired a consulting company to specify a series of strict regulations that seemed to be extremely scientific or unassailable, which made each link would not give any staff any opportunity to destroy the companyÐŽ¦s property. Relatively, the staff got a high salary, but most of those staff with high professional talent whom was recruited with lots of hard works would resign in several months, even someone would quit when he or she had got a promotion. According to the word of some mid-level managers, the persons stayed were the ones the company did not want to keep, while the persons left were the ones the company really did not wanted to let them go. In fact, in the recent 3 years, the backbones of the company left for nearly 30%, and some of them quit to the competitors, which led to a fatal shock. The market share dropped from the original more than 30% to less then 10%, and the company even experienced the profit deficit in the first quarter of 2004.

These two stories maybe cannot reflect all the problems in the human resource management of an enterprise, but the problems that are mentioned in these two stories are common and representative. Something we need to think about is that the leaders of these two companies both have a profound knowledge of teamwork motivation, but they confused about how to keep the ÐŽ§teamЎЁ in a long run.

Actually, as much as people pay attention to the division of labor in the early times, ÐŽ§division of laborЎЁ is based on the requirement of improving the efficiency; meanwhile the specialization and the effective division are the key elements of the manufacturing efficiency. But with the aggravation of competition of high professional talents and the increase in the variation of operating environment, the teamwork spirit becomes to be valued gradually. More and more companies began to pay attention to the organizational design that is led to the horizontal coordination and teamwork organization. Accordingly, some succeed, while some failed.

To sum up, the reasons why one organization loses its team spirit and reduces the willingness of cooperation include as followed:

I. No common goals between the team and the organization

Each person has his or her own goal, while the organization itself has its developing goal, only under the condition that these two goals are set up for the same direction, can the team achieve in the perfect working cooperation and spirit, or the organization will be just like a floating ship without compass. When team members are involving in making decisions and carrying them out, the asymmetric information, the different personal values and interest, both can dismember the setting goal and make it titular. Corning Incorporated, a company has run over 10 years and succeeded in the human resource management and experienced teamwork, indicates that as one of the organization model, teamwork can be achieved by accomplishing the goal only with a probability of 3%, among which, 51% resulted from the goal lost. What we need to think about more deliberately is that the actual reason why quite a few organizations have failed to carry on the internal goals unanimously is the lack of effective communication system rather than the mutual disagreement. When the team or the organization becomes more and more ÐŽ§matureЎЁ, the behavior mode of each unit begins to sprout and hereafter blossoms, it is the right time for the enterprise to take measure to strengthen and emphasize the common goals. It was a tragedy that so many enterprises did the above-mentioned arrangements too late!

II. The conflict between the team cooperation rules and the flexibility.

When a team or an organization has developed to a certain degree, it will emerge a kind of talent ÐŽ§game ruleЎЁ accordingly. The team leader wants each team member to abide by the team rules and regulations, but the external environment requires the team both in high flexibility and adaptation, otherwise, the team will suffer the rigid thought and action. It is an objective reality that there exists the difference among team members and that it is difficult to harmonize the respective