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Measuring Achievement May Be Difficult Because Of The Need To Quantify And ...

Measuring achievement may be difficult because of the need to quantify and attribute specific gains. A profit may be affected by accounting practices, or events that might be considered ‘luck' (e.g. a fall in oil prices) over which senior management have no control.

Hygiene factors identified by Herzberg, although seemingly referring to basic needs, are just as applicable to those in senior roles.
The major dissatisfiers were company policy and administration, supervision, salary, interpersonal relations and working conditions (Herzberg 1966: 74).

While senior staff have influence over company policy, there may be disagreements at board level which create dissatisfaction. Working conditions may be an issue if hours are long and frequent travel is required, and the nature of the job may impact on interpersonal relationships both at and outside work.

As will be seen later, lack of these hygiene factors can create a situation where individuals behave irrationally in order to compensate.
Salary may be an important element of status, particularly for the individual whose salary is publicised and compared against those of people in similar roles. This suggests that the concerns affecting those at the top of organisations are similar to those further down the hierarchy, although they may manifest themselves in different ways for employees at different levels.

Herzberg suggests that the overall goal for any worker is personal growth achieved through success in performing job-related tasks (Herzberg 1966: 78). It does appear that the situation is rather more complex and reliant on a range of motivation and hygiene issues.

Vroom

Maslow and Herzberg's theories can be considered as content theories of motivation. They focus on what goals individuals can be expected to aim for. Process theories, such as Vroom's expectancy theory, look at the strategy the individual employs to achieve goals.

Vroom suggested that the motivation of the individual depended on their perception of the importance of the goal to them, the amount to which they perceived their own effort could generate a result, and the contribution of the result, if achieved, to reaching the goal (Vroom 1964: 17).

Vroom lists possible motivating properties of work: wages expenditure of mental or physical energy production of goods or services social interaction social status (Vroom 1964: 30): all of these are subject to expectancy theory. For those at more senior levels, generation of results is easier to influence through power and autonomy than for those further down an organisation, yet there is still a dependence on other staff who may not feel the goal is as important as the senior manager does and the two other factors: goal importance and the likelihood that good results will help achieve it.

MacGregor

MacGregor's Theory X and Theory Y represent two theoretical extremes.

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