Questions For Review
8-1. How does the job characteristics model motivate employees?
Answer: The job characteristics model is the Hackman and Oldham’s concept that any
job can be described through five core job dimensions: skill variety – requirements for
Learning Objective: Describe how the job characteristics model motivates by changing the work
environment
Learning Outcome: Describe the major theories of motivation and relate them to organizational
performance
AASCB: Reflective thinking
8-2. What are the major ways that jobs can be redesigned?
Answer: Job rotation – the periodic shifting of a worker from one task to another;
Learning Objective: Compare the main ways jobs can be redesigned
Learning Outcome: Describe the major theories of motivation and relate them to organizational
performance
AASCB: Reflective thinking
8-3. What are the motivational benefits of the specific alternative work arrangements?
Answer:
a. Flextime: Employees work during a common core time period each day but have
b. Job sharing: The practice of having two or more people split a 40-hour-a-week job.
The advantages are that each offers alternative work options so flexibility can be built
into an employee’s schedule. They all often reduce absenteeism and turnover for a
company. Flextime is not applicable to every job. It reduces traffic congestion, increases
Learning Objective: Explain how specific alternative work arrangements can motivate employees
Learning Outcome: Describe the major theories of motivation and relate them to organizational
performance
AASCB: Reflective thinking
8-4. How can employee involvement measures motivate employees?
Answer: Employee involvement programs are participative processes that use the input
of employees to increase their commitment to the organization’s success. They can
Learning Objective: Describe how employee involvement measures can motivate employees
Learning Outcome: Describe the major theories of motivation and relate them to organizational
performance
AASCB: Reflective thinking
8-5. How can the different types of variable-pay programs increase employee motivation?
Answer: Variable pay is a portion of an employee’s pay that is based on some individual
and/or organizational measure of performance. Piece rate is when workers are paid a
Learning Objective: Demonstrate how the different types of variable-pay programs can increase employee
motivation
Learning Outcome: Describe the major theories of motivation and relate them to organizational
performance
AASCB: Reflective thinking
8-6. How can flexible benefits motivate employees?
Answer: Flexible benefits allow employees to tailor their benefit program to meet their
Learning Objective: Show how flexible benefits turn benefits into motivators
Learning Outcome: Describe the major theories of motivation and relate them to organizational
performance
AASCB: Reflective thinking
8-7. What are the motivational benefits of intrinsic rewards?
Answer: Intrinsic rewards stimulate intrinsic motivation through personal attention given
Learning Objective: Identify the motivational benefits of intrinsic rewards
Learning Outcome: Describe the major theories of motivation and relate them to organizational
performance
AASCB: Reflective thinking
Experiential Exercise
Occupations and the Job Characteristics Model
This exercise contributes to:
Learning Objective: Describe how the job characteristics model motivates by changing the work environment
Learning Outcome: Describe the major theories of motivation and relate them to organizational performance
AASCB: Reflective thinking
Break the class into groups of three to five.
8-8. As a group, consider each of the five job characteristics (skill variety, task identity, task
significance, autonomy, and feedback). Then, write down jobs that have high levels of
each characteristic (if you can think of jobs that have high levels of multiple
characteristics, note those as well). Do you think the jobs you identified are high or low
paying? Why?
8-9. Next, write down jobs that have low levels of each characteristic (and if you can think of
jobs that have low levels of multiple characteristics, note those as well.) Do you think the
jobs you identified are high or low paying? Why?
8-10. For those jobs you identified as having low levels of job characteristics, come up with
some strategies to increase them. Be specific in your recommendations. Discuss these
with the class.
Teaching Notes
This exercise is applicable to face-to-face classes or synchronous online classes such as
BlackBoard 9.1, Breeze, WIMBA, and Second Life Virtual Classrooms. See
http://www.baclass.panam.edu/imob/SecondLife for more information.
Ethical Dilemma
Inmates for Hire
This exercise contributes to:
Learning Objective: Demonstrate how the different types of variable-pay programs can increase employee
motivation
Learning Outcome: Describe the major theories of motivation and relate them to organizational performance
AASCB: Ethical understanding and reasoning; Reflective thinking
We’ve all heard about how companies are using overseas workers to reduce labor costs, but the
real cost savings for some jobs may lie with prison workers. Federal Prison Industries (FPI, also
called UNICOR) is a company that is owned by the government but employs prison inmates.
Like some overseas sweatshop workers, prisoners are paid exceptionally low, at 23 cents to
$1.15 an hour, receive no benefits for their work, and do not work in a participative management
environment. The motivation for them to work hard is instead completely intrinsic: to learn trade
skills and the value of work while they are incarcerated, in hopes that they will be more
employable upon their release.
Although the organization is unable to supply workers to the private sector, federal agencies are
required to purchase goods produced by its workers whenever FPI’s bids are competitive. Steven
Eisen, chief financial officer of Tennier Industries, came face-to-face with FPI when his
company lost a $45 million contract to manufacture clothing for the U.S. Defense Department.
One hundred of Tennier’s workers were laid off as a result. He argues it is wrong to give jobs to
prison inmates at the expense of law-abiding citizens who may be struggling to find
employment. “Our government screams, howls, and yells how the rest of the world is using
prisoners or slave labor to manufacture items, and here we take the items right out of the mouths
of people who need it,” says Eisen.
Proponents of the program say it is beneficial to inmates, pointing to data from the Bureau of
Prisons showing that inmates who work for FPI are 24 percent less likely to be incarcerated
again and 14 percent more likely to be employed when released. Traci Billingsley, speaking for
the Bureau of Prisons, states, “FPI supplies only a small fraction of the government’s goods and
services. FPI also helps support American jobs as it often partners with private American
companies as a supplier.”
Source: Based on D. Cardwell, “Competing with Prison Labor,” The New York Times (March 15, 2012) pp. 1, 4.
Questions:
8-11.Do you think it is fair for companies to have to compete against prison inmates for government
work? Why or why not?
8-12. Michigan Representative Bill Huizenga says, “If China did this—having their prisoners
work at subpar wages in prisons—we would be screaming bloody murder.” Do you agree
or disagree with his statement? Why?
Answer: Responses to this question will vary depending on each student’s opinion.
8-13. Do you think prisoner employees should have any benefits other workers have? Why or
why not?
Case Incident 1
Motivation for Leisure
This exercise contributes to:
Learning Objective: Describe how the job characteristics model motivates by changing the work environment
Learning Outcome: Describe the major theories of motivation and relate them to organizational performance
AASCB: Reflective thinking
“When I have time, I don’t have money. When I have money, I don’t have time,” says Glenn
Kelman, chief executive officer of Redfin. He’s not alone. While many workers find themselves
faced with 60-, 70-, or 80-hour weeks (and sometimes more), others who are unemployed can
find themselves with too much time on their hands. Take Dennis Lee, a sales associate working
in Chicago whose girlfriend is unemployed. She has time to spare, but he says her
unemployment makes it “financially impossible for me to support the both of us, even if we just
go on a small trip, like, to Wisconsin and get a small hotel and stay for a couple of days.”
Those who are employed and who may have the financial means to take a vacation often leave
those vacation days on the table. The average U.S. worker gets 2.6 weeks of vacation a year, yet
only 43 percent take that time. Although the reasons U.S. employees may not be motivated to
take their vacation time vary from a sense of job insecurity to heavy employer workload
demands, some companies now let employees trade vacation days for cash, essentially selling the
vacation hours they do not intend to use. Other employers cap the amount of vacation time that
can be accrued.
The challenge of taking leisure time does not seem to be a problem for many European countries.
Take the French, who get 30 days of vacation and say they take all of them. In fact, if you work
in the European Union and get sick on vacation, the European Court of Justice says you are
entitled to take a make-up vacation.
Sources: P. Coy, “The Leisure Gap,” Bloomberg BusinessWeek, (July 23–-29, 2012), pp. 8–-10; A. B. Krueger and A. I. Mueller, “Time Use,
Emotional Well-Being, and Unemployment: Evidence from Longitudinal Data,” American Economic Review (May 2012), pp. 594–-599; and L.
Kwoh, “More Firms Offer Option to Swap Cash for Time,” The Wall Street Journal (September 26, 2012), pp. B6.
Questions
8-14. Do you think U.S. workers are less motivated by vacation time than workers in other
countries? Why or why not?
Answer: Responses to this question will vary depending on each student’s opinion.
8-15. Why do you think U.S. workers often do not take all of their allotted vacation time, even
if they may lose the benefit? Are these personal choices, or are they driven more by
society, or by organizational culture?
Answer: This item can be assigned as a Discussion Question in MyManagementLab.
8-16. If many unemployed are spending around 2 hours/day looking for work as some research
indicates, how would you evaluate the impact of unemployment on work motivation?
How would you spend your days if unemployed?
Answer: Responses to this question will vary depending on each student’s opinion.
Case Incident 2
Pay Raises Everyday
This exercise contributes to:
Learning Objective: Demonstrate how the different types of variable-pay programs can increase employee
motivation
Learning Outcome: Describe the major theories of motivation and relate them to organizational performance
AASCB: Reflective thinking
How do you feel when you get a raise? Happy? Rewarded? Motivated to work harder for that
next raise? The hope of an increase in pay, followed by a raise, can increase employee
motivation. However, the effect may not last. In fact, the “warm fuzzies” from a raise last less
than a month, according to a recent study. If raises are distributed annually, performance
motivation can dip for many months in between evaluations.
Some organizations have tried to keep the motivation going by increasing the frequency of
raises. Currently, only about 5 percent of organizations give raises more than annually, but some
larger employers like discount website retailer Zulily, Inc., assess pay quarterly. Zulily CEO
Darrell Cavens would like to do so even more frequently. “If it wasn’t a big burden, you’d almost
want to work on it on a weekly basis,” he said. That’s because raises increase employee focus,
happiness, engagement, and retention.
CEO Jeffrey Housenbold of online photo publisher Shutterfly, Inc., also advocates frequent pay
assessments, but for a different reason. The company gives bonuses four times a year to
supplement its biannual raise structure as part of a review of employee concerns. “You can
resolve problems early versus letting them fester,” he said. Another reason is to increase
feedback. Phone app designer Solstice Mobile gives promotions and salary increases six times a
year; with this structure, Kelly O’Reagan climbed from $10/hour to $47.50/hour in 4 years. The
company’s CEO, John Schwan, said that young workers are especially motivated by the
near-constant feedback. O’Reagan said, “Seeing that increase was like, ‘Wow, this is quite
different than what I had ever dreamed of.’”
You might be wondering how organizations can keep the dollar increases to employees flowing.
Organizations are wondering, too. One tactic is to start employees at a low pay rate. Ensilon, a
marketing services company, has coupled low starting salaries with twice-yearly salary reviews.
Initial job candidates are skeptical, but most of the new hires earn at least 20 percent more after 2
years than they would with a typical annual raise structure.
No one is saying frequent pay raises are cheap, or easy to administrate. Pay itself is a complex
issue, and maintaining pay equity adds another level of difficulty. Frequent pay reviews are
motivating, but only for the people receiving them—for the others, it’s a struggle to stay
engaged. If a person has a track record of raises and then pay levels off, it can feel like a loss of
identity as a strong performer rather than a natural consequence of achieving a higher level of
pay. The frustration can lead to lower performance and increased turnover for high performers.
CEO Schwan acknowledged, “It’s definitely a risk.”
Sources: R. Feintzeig, “When the Annual Raise Isn’t Enough,” The Wall Street Journal, July 16, 2014, B1, B5; J. C. Marr and S. Thau, “Falling
from Great (and Not-So-Great) Heights: How Initial Status Position Influences Performance after Status Loss,” Academy of Management Journal
57, no. 1 (2014): 223–48; and “Pay Equity & Discrimination,” IWPR, http://www.iwpr.org/initiatives/pay-equity-anddiscrimination.
Questions
8-17. Do you think frequent, small raises versus annual, larger raises is more motivating? Why
or why not?
Answer: Responses to this question will vary based on the student’s experience and
8-18. Do you think you would personally be more motivated by more frequent raises or by
performance bonuses if the annual amounts were the same?
Answer: This item can be assigned as a Discussion Question in MyManagementLab.
8-19. Annual pay raises in the United States are expected to be around 3 percent in the next few
years. Do you think this percentage is motivating to employees? Why or why not?
Answer: Again, responses to this question will vary by student.
My Management Lab
Go to mymanagementlab.com for Auto-graded writing questions as well as the following
Assisted-graded writing questions:
8-20. In regard to Case Incident 1, what cultural differences in collectivism/ individualism
might help predict motivation for the amount of vacation employees want to accrue and
will take annually?
8-21. How would you design a bonus/reward program to avoid the problems mentioned in Case
Incident 2?
8-22. MyManagementLab Only – comprehensive writing assignment for this chapter.
Instructor’s Choice
Applying the Concepts
This exercise contributes to:
Learning Objective: Demonstrate how the different types of variable-pay programs can increase employee
motivation
Learning Outcome: Describe the major theories of motivation and relate them to organizational performance
AASCB: Reflective thinking
For decades, the primary teaching philosophy in higher education has been pedagogy, described
as the assumptions underlying teaching children. It is based on the concept of the teachers telling
the students information they must absorb, then observing the student’s performance on tests or
assignments to determine a grade. The goal for this method is to assign grades on a normal
frequency distribution, around 75 as the mean, the traditional bell curve.
If the assumptions of higher education change to andragogy, assumptions underlying adult
education are adopted, then the course content is based on telling the students why they need to
learn and what their benefit is, and then students are motivated to learn because of the reward
achieved from the learning process.
The results of these two approaches differ. In the case of the first, students are motivated to
memorize information for regurgitation on an objective test, which merely shows the use of
short-term memory. In the second, the student realizes the importance of acquiring the
knowledge, and then activities in the course can permit students to learn through practice and
application, which tends to be incorporated into long-term memory.
Ask students in the class how they would structure a course and its content to incorporate the
andragogical approach in a college class. Instead of traditional lectures in class, what would
students suggest as learning activities that would be challenging but effective in acquiring
knowledge of skills in the course?
Instructor Discussion
Select a course that currently depends heavily on traditional higher education practices including
lectures, tests, and written assignments. Do not identify the specific course or instructor. Perhaps
a course such as foundation history meets these criteria. As students look at the request in the
exercise, they may suggest some innovative ways that the learning process could be enhanced to
make it more of an incentive to acquire skills and knowledge. You might survey the Internet for
best practices in the course topic, to see what others have done with innovative ways to create
learning. You might also find that the goal of these courses is to ensure all students acquire the
competencies of the course so that, with proper incentives built into the course, it will result in
students’ grades being skewed higher. A grade distribution on a bell curve goes out the window
as more activity focuses on ensuring all students are successful.
Exploring OB Topics on the Web
This exercise contributes to:
Learning Objective: Demonstrate how the different types of variable-pay programs can increase employee
motivation
Learning Outcome: Describe the major theories of motivation and relate them to organizational performance
AASCB: Reflective thinking
1. Paying up is hard to do! Should the organization choose a skill-based pay plan or
pay-for-performance? Start by comparing the two, then making a recommendation as to why one
would be preferable over the other. Go to
http://www.educationworld.com/a_issues/issues/issues374a.shtml to learn more about the choice
for teachers. If you were to make a recommendation as to which strategy would be the most effective,
which would you choose? Why? (Hint: It will have to be linked to a motivational theory). Write a
one-page reaction paper discussing your views.
2. From quality circles to TQM, getting employees involved is not a simple venture. Go to
http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelvenables/2013/04/20/how-lego-makes-the-safe-quality-diver
se-and-irresistible-toys-we-all-want-part-two/ to learn about how one company, Lego, has
successfully encouraged employees to work together toward common goals. Write a short
summary outlining what has helped Lego, and what other companies can learn from its
experience.
3. What do worker’s want? Money? Probably. But other things, too. Go to
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-11-11/too-many-businesses-don-t-know-what-wome
n-want to read an assessment of what women want. Write your own assessment of what
motivational theories are at play in this article—just a paragraph or two. Bring your assessment
and the article to class for a group discussion.
4. Self-esteem, self-efficacy, self-respect, and self-actualization. Learn more about these
terms and how employers can foster these concepts in their employees at
http://humanresources.about.com/library/weekly/aa081301a.htm. Write a journal entry or
short paper about when you experienced an environment that encouraged you to develop
your potential. For example, it could be when you were involved in an arts program, a
writing clinic, a club, a sports team, a class, etc. What motivated you when you felt
discouraged or simply tired and did not want to go that day? Who was the “coach” who
encouraged you, and how important of a role did that person have in your success? What
did you learn about yourself in the process? Do these skills transfer to other areas of your
life?