What Is Motivation?

  1. 12-1 Define and explain motivation.

Several CEOs were attending a meeting where the topic was “What do employees want?”1 Each CEO took turns describing the benefits they provided and how they gave out free M&Ms every Wednesday and offered their employees stock options and free parking spaces. However, the meeting’s main speaker made the point that “employees don’t want M&Ms; they want to love what they do.” Half expecting his audience to laugh, the speaker was pleasantly surprised as the CEOs stood up one-by-one to agree. They all recognized that “the value in their companies comes from the employees who are motivated to be there.”

These CEOs understand how important employee motivation is. Like them, all managers need to ...

Get Fundamentals of Management, 11/e now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.