Motivation and Performance

Introduction

In this 21^st century, the words ‘Motivation’ and ‘Performance’ have great value. As you know, both of these words will go hand-in-hand. Now, in almost all organizations, the reward system is based on performance which is called performance appraisal. At the same time, criticism comes in motivation package for the improvement of employee’s skills. In comparison to present world, in early times the rewards are just the offered wage and motivations are the corporate punishments. This literature review lights you with some of current motivation based performance approaches at some of the organizations or workplaces around the world.

Motivation and Performance

What is motivation? What is performance? From work and organization perception, motivation is the stimulus to achieve high performance. On the other hand, performance is outcome of proper motivation. As we all know, human beings are not machine, so they will have their own ups and downs in their performance. None can make humans a machine. But good managers can make them to behave like a machine. For that managers should know how to motivate their employees properly. The pioneers in motivation based performance are Mary Parker Follett (1918) and Elton Mayo (1933, 1945). According to their perception, resources can develop or collapse an enterprise. The human resource frame platform is based on the following assumptions. Organizations exist to serve human needs, and both organization and workers need each other because organisations need ideas, energy, and talent. On the other hand, people need careers, salaries, and opportunities. When the individual and organization fit is poor, one or both suffer. And if the fit is good, it benefits both. Wegmans also said that his organisation serves the needs of his organisations customer with keeping in mind that the organisation can achieve its goal only if it fulfil the needs of his employees.

In the view of Shields John, Performance does not mean just how ‘high’ or ‘low’, but it means different based on the perceptions that you are looking at with, like, how it is defined and measured? Who is and what purpose, it is defined and measured? According to production manager performance is labour productivity and for a customer it might be product quality or cost-attractiveness. But for an employee in the production line, performance is his ability to do good job based on the income security, and workplace health and safety. These varied definition of performance lights into two important aspects of performance. It is a remarkable process which is subjective, constructed, open-ended, and multidimensional. Performance is not only an individual phenomenon. It has group and organisation-wide dimensions, each with inputs, processes and results that parallel those operating at the individual level. In this sense, performance can be thought of as having sequential and scalar dimensions.

Difficulties in Motivation and Performance

According to Pritchard, People work for different reasons. Some people work for satisfaction; they feel good by doing good work and feel bad about the poor work. One of the job performance measure (Borman, 2004) concerns in manufacturing companies is focused on improving productivity of workers. Greguras (1996) describes that an employee can contribute in achieving the organization objectives through completing the assigned job in time. It is not possible to improve the performance of your employee based on the benefits attained only from the Organization. Improvement in performance has to achieve from your employees satisfaction. If an employee is satisfied, that employee will be happy and will be in higher energy level or excitement. This satisfaction motivates him to do more work in smarter way. In turn the individual performance and organizational performances increases. Managers have to motivate employees based on strong needs, basics needs, etc. None of us can able to get a clear picture of our own needs, then how will a manager gets the need of someone else.

One of the other barriers in motivating an employee is the changes in the objectives of Organization, arbitrary performance standards, the number of resources to get the huge work done, feedback mechanisms for the improvement of employees in criticism and disrespectful tone.  All these things will make the way to lose the good presence of mind for doing good work. These are also called disincentive factors in an organisation. People likes to control their work, people do not want to be held accountable for things they cannot control. People want feedback but not in the form of judgement. People want to valued, people do not want to waste their time. In a boarder view motivation is the process of changing one’s energy into one’s satisfied needs. It means making an employee to get completely focused to do the desired task of Organisation. For that, Managers should know his employees energy pool, which is the amount of physical, mental, and emotional resources a person has available to apply to different actions or tasks.

Another trouble comes in motivating your employees are the divergences. Each of your employees is different; they might be from different culture, economic levels, values, etc. Due to these divergences, you need to motivate your employees in their suitable way. For that you have to understand your employees desires, why they work in your organization, what are their goals, what are their hobbies, how they refresh when they are tired, etc. All these information guides you to motivate in your employees in a personalized manner. It is easy to say, but in practical, it is a hard task. Also, with greater diversity the challenge of motivation will also increase. In this scenario, the managers have to avoid demotivation due to frequent conflicts among groups of employees and within diverse groups. To motivate employees in diverse groups is a very elusive task.

One of the best ability to human is the ability to think. Because of this ability, you cannot use the same way of motivation for a long time. Humans need changes according to time. If you motivate your employee based on old motivational assumptions, your work will go in vein. The motivation is an ongoing and innovative process.

How to Overcome Difficulties in Motivation and Performance

One way of bracing employee is to provide effective motivation, which makes them more satisfied with what they are doing and committed to their jobs. They are motivated with money, but it is not the only motivator. There are other incentives which can also serve as motivators. As we all know, for achieving an effective work performance in an organization, work motivation is one of key factor as put by Luthans (1998). The new technologies, time management, leadership effectiveness will also to considered to understand how they relate to work performance. Although there are different features, all of these features are inter-related. For example, to motivate your employees, you should possess good leadership qualities which is a central feature of organisational performance. A good leader can direct their subordinate’s efforts towards the goals and objectives of the organization. There must be an appropriate form of behaviour to enhance performance. Based on the leaders ability to achieve effective performance from others, the leadership is defined. Akinboye (2005) defines leadership as managers motivating workers to work for certain aims that represent the values and the motivations, the wants and needs, the aspirations and expectations of both managers and workers.

With greater diversity, the probability of occurring human relation mistakes increases which result in low performance. In this situation, mistakes might happen due to different personalities, past experiences, partiality in leadership, etc. Because of these reasons, there is no one theory or model that can help all managers to motivate all employees for all time. Gordon (1996) notes, that the motivational needs became paramount when your workforce becomes more diverse and recognizing. The employee’s position and status in the organization, age, gender education marital status or any other socio economic characteristic has to be considered during motivation process. To overcome these issues, your managers should use a contingency approach to find the appropriate motivational theories to follow (Kreintner and kinicki, 1995). You can change behaviour of your employees by understanding the components of motivation, which are action, result, evaluations, outcomes and needs satisfaction, and how they work together.

For the effective performance management, the organisation has to validate the performance standards and measures which are directly relevant to what is required in the job position or role involved. Reliability, cost-effectiveness and felt-fairness are the other key requirements for effective performance. A Performance management system should meet the test of felt-fairness, both in terms of the decision-making process involved, or procedural fairness and the outcomes delivered, or distributive fairness.

Elgenhuis suggests a way to overcome performance difficulties by creating a winning organizational climate. In organization with a winning climate there is willingness to go and above and beyond the call of duty, to ‘go the extra mile’. This has a direct impact on the performance of the organization and also makes people to stay with organisation for long time.

Commonly Used Methods 

To improve performance, Honda provided better work environment based on survey which boosted results. In Europe, large number of organisations started taking feedbacks in the second half of 1990s.

Managers find a confusing array of regulations and procedures standing in their way when they seek to reward good performance. (Alan K. Campbell, 1978) In spite of pervasive difficulties encountered by all public managers, Campbell’s experiment with merit based compensation was good. All public hr managers started to fairly motivate and reward public employees for better performance is a recurring and consistent theme of public human resource management literature and practice. Another method is the effective reward system and an effective performance appraisal system (Badway, 2007) In this method, employee can accommodate his family and also allowed to have a say in decision making of the work they carried out.

The contemporary theories of motivation are rooted in the principle of hedonism (Kreitner and Kinicki, 1995), states that people seek pleasure and avoid pain. Moorhead and griffin (1995) suggest that the drive to satisfy some important needs is the common goal in various theories of motivation. According to Maslow’s, managers have to concentrate in physiological needs by paying reasonable wage and providing comfortable physical environment.

According to Falcone Paul, for progressive performance, Organisation has to develop people’s skills and valuing individual. While communicating the inabilities to an employee, organisation has to use polite way of communicating instead of harsh way. He suggests organisations to use sentences starting with “I expect...” This polite approach will construct your employees. You can help your employee to succeed in his job and in turn help in achieving your organisations goal, by taking a little care in your communication. Training or special direction to be provided, whenever possible, it’s best to address a problem with positive tools as opposed to negative methods. Training is a kind of punishment, a positive punishment. You should help the employee succeed on her job. Even if discipline must be administered in the form of a warning, it should still be delivered hand in hand with training and other affirmative employer efforts. Keep in mind as well that training is the glue that binds people to a company: Everyone likes learning new things and developing new skills. And training, more than anything, helps people reinvent their hobs in light of their company’s changing needs. Although motivation is internal and not external, noting drives an employee to renewed commitment more than being challenged and stimulated by a new learning curve.

Conclusion

According to Kroth(2007), even though scholars proposed integrated motivational theories, there is no generally accepted models for all employee motivation. In this review, you can find many theories, but none of the theories can be used for a long time. To achieve a good performance, you should motivate your employees in an appropriate way. To find an appropriate way, managers should continuously follow your employees and has to find out what are their current needs and desire. These difficulties necessitate the need for human resource management team in an Organization.  

References

•  European Journal of Economics, Finance and Administrative Sciences, no. 16, pp. 2-8.
• Pritchard, Robert 2008, Managing Motivation: A manager’s Guide to diagnosing and improving motivation
•  Kogan Page, 2008, HR Strtegy for the High Performing Buisness: Inspiring success through effective human resource management
•   Wigfield, Allan; Eccles, Jacquelynne S. 2002, Deveolpment of achievement motivation
•  Condrey, Stephen E,  2010, Handbook of Human resource Management in Government
•  Falcone, Paul, 2010, 101 sample write-Ups for documenting employee performance problems: A Guide to Progressive Discipline & Termination
•  Shields, John, 2007, Managing Employee Performance and Reward: Concepts, Practices, Strategies   Lee G.Bolman & Terrence E. Deal, 2005, Reframing Organisations Artistry, Choice,  and Leadership 

International Business Strategies

Introduction

In this article, you can see some of the strategies used in doing business. This article will glance through some of the business strategies.

Multi-Domestic Strategy

Multi-Domestic strategy is an international strategy, which will be effective while entering into a new nation having many differences from the firm’s nation of origin. Implementing this strategy helps in localizing the firm to the people of the new nation. In this strategy, the firm concerns more for local responsiveness than the global product, which means that their product will be customized to the local demands and also the firm is controlled by local managers. This decentralized control reduces the political risks in managing the firm in the new market. This Strategy has less impact on international human resource management.

Global Strategy

Global strategy is good to enter into the new nations which have similar culture to the firm’s nation. In this strategy the control is centralized, which means that firm is less localized. The product of the firm will be same all across the nation. The activities across the nation will be well coordinated and cost effective and faster product development.

Transnational Strategy

Transnational strategy is a combination of multi-domestic and global strategies. This strategy integrates the global competitiveness with local responsiveness. It is not easy to implement. It has huge human resource impact.

Inventory Management

Introduction
Inventory management is the process of managing or controlling stock of resources of economic value by minimizing the cost of resource storage and maintenance in order to meet the customer requirement in right quantity, right place, right time and right cost, where the resources are manpower, machines, capital goods or material at various stages of production. This paper describes the needs and methods of inventory management. It also provides some good ideas on the risk and benefits of keeping inventory.

Inventory Management

One of the important parts of supply chain management is the inventory management. It is the process of maintaining appropriate level of inventories in the warehouse. The basic processes in inventory management are analyzing the inventory requirement, setting inventory targets of the firm, implementing replenishment techniques in maintaining the inventory, monitoring the usages of goods, accommodating the inventory balances, reporting inventory status.
According to Sookdeo, inventories are of different types like inventories raw materials and purchased part, partially completed goods, finished goods. The functions of inventory are to meet the expected demand, to smooth the production requirements, to increase the speed of production, to prevent stock outs, to take advantage of order cycle, to help hedge against price increases, to permit operations, to get advantage of quantity discounts.

Need for Inventory Management

The reason why companies keep inventory is to meet the demands of their customers, to keep the organization running, to get lead time, to avoid financial risk, to get discounts in price, to meet the sudden requirements, etc. The Companies want profit, for that their business has to run good. In other way, they should be capable of meeting the customer demands. Improper inventory management can cause loss to a company.
The product manufacturing companies get profit by selling their products. But to manufacture the product, resources should be available in inventory when it is needed. To attain profit, the inventory should be reliable, efficient and affordable. Improper management of inventory may lead to either excess stock or insufficient stock. For the successful management of stock, the stocks should be classified properly. The inventories are of different types, some goods may get damaged, if it is stored for a long duration. On other hand some goods are needed more and some are less in amount while manufacturing a product, in that case the stocks should be maintained in proportion of usage. That means, the goods used more should be stocked more and the goods used less should be stocked less. This proportional way of keeping inventory improves storage space utilization and efficiency.
Safety stock is the additional stock above the current and short term needs. The necessity of safety stock comes into existence when the unexpected element of event happens. For example, once due to some technical or natural reason, the replacement order for the inventory delayed, that its lead time increased a lot. At that time, the firm has to depend on the safety stock to run their business.
Anticipation Stock is the stock of goods stored in the view of performing a marketing promotion or an upcoming season or any event. The firm has to decide first on the promotional activity and has to start stocking the inventory for that event.
Hedge stock is the stock kept or accumulated based on the expectation of rising prices or supply uncertainty in the market place.

Implementing Inventory Management

One of the important steps to maintain a good inventory is the purchasing plan. Purchasing plan is important, because it helps to prevent the shortage of stocks. The company should find out the usage of stock, based on other conditions like different seasons, festivals, etc. In this plan, company should know when to order for supplies, when to keep high stock, what proportion of goods to be stocked, how long a good can be stocked, etc.
Another method for inventory planning is accurate demand forecasting. In this method, software systems predict the future demand of the product by using mathematical formulae based on historical usage data. This demand forecasting is an ongoing process; it can be done based on the duration of acquirement of inventory goods.
Inventory monitoring is the other important process in maintaining accurate inventory management. In this process, Firm has to track the arrival of product, usage of product, shipment of product, and disposition of inventory items to ensure the accuracy of inventory management. A cycle counting process can be done for this purpose.
Inventory report is the overview of what is there and what is not there in the inventory. Based on these reports, the Firm has to make decision for managing the inventory.

Effective inventory management
An effective inventory management is needed to meet demand of the customer while keeping inventory costs in a reasonable level (William 2005). The following are some of the methods to implement effective inventory management.
The firm has to implement a system to track of inventory details. To manage an inventory, the firm should know the count of resources in the inventory. For counting the inventory, the firm can use either an inventory counting system which counts the number of items in the inventory at periodic intervals or perpetual inventory system which keeps track of removal of items in the inventory continuously. This helps in monitoring the current availability of each item in the stock. Based on this count, the firm can replace orders of needed resources.
Another way to manage the inventory effectively is by doing a reliable forecast of demand. For attaining this forecast, the firm can use one of the following inventory methods. Two bin system and Universal –barcode method. In two bin system, the inventory is divided into two containers. According to this system, the firm should reorder for goods when the first container is empty. On the other hand, universal barcode that is printed on a label which has information of the item to which it is attached.
To meet the demand of customer, the firm should have a good knowledge of lead time to replace a resource. Lead time is the time interval between the ordering and receiving the item. In this case, firm has to replace an order considering the lead time. In other words, the firm has to replace an order with lead time.
For managing the inventory, firm should be able to estimate reasonably the following costs. Holding cost is the cost to store an item in the inventory for a period of time. Most of the
cases, the holding cost is calculated in a year. Ordering cost is the cost of ordering and receiving an item. Shortage cost is the cost of an item when the demand exceeds supply.
Another method to improve inventory management is to classify the system based on ABC classification system. In this classification, some goods have given high importance and classifying inventory according to some measure of importance and allocating control efforts accordingly.
Replenishment order in inventory management is done based of the following models. The following model provides the accurate details of the time at which replenishment has to be done.

Economic order quantity model
In economic order quantity, the quantity of inventory is based on the following assumptions and formula. The assumptions are only one product should be involved, annual demand requirements should be known, demand should be there throughout the year, lead time should not vary, each order should be received in a single delivery, and there should not be any quantity discounts.
EOQ= square root of {(2*annual demand*order or set up cost)/annual holding cost}

Economic production model
Economic production model is based on the following assumptions lime production should be done in batches or lots, capacity to produce a part exceeds the part’s usage or demand rate, assumptions of EPQ are similar to EOQ, orders are received incrementally, only one product should be involved, annual demand requirements should be known, demand should be there
throughout the year, lead time should not vary, each order should be received in a single delivery, and there should not be any quantity discounts.

EPQ= square root of {(2*annual demand*order or set up cost)/annual holding cost}

Latest Trends in Market

Now in markets, there are different methods and tools are available to manage inventories like enterprise resource planning, manufacturing resource planning, just-in-time and lean manufacture. The application of information technology in grocery industry has reduced the cost and time to process an order and in turn improved the supply chain performance (Casher and Fisher 1997).
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is the latest tool used in inventory management. An ERP is a real time information system which is modularized and integrated with a wide range of functional scope responsible for the processing and management of business transactions (Paull 2010). This ERP system integrates information across all departments. It helps in the flow of information among different processes and functions. It tracks manufacturing process, order entry, inventory details, etc at the same time. Hence, this is a real time system, firms can take decision on inventory based on this tools report. With the help of this system, Firm can able to see its inventory details at any point of time.
For example in trade industry, the daily operations involve procurement management, shipment schedule, consolidating sales orders, and delivery. With the help of a proper inventory management system or ERP system, the industry can automate its process.
According to Synergy-focus case study on trading industry in China, the implementation of inventory control system, the industry’s improvement in efficiency is 300%.
Manufacturing resource planning (MRP) is the planning process in which all processes in the manufacturing industries are integrated like business planning, production planning, order processing, capacity requirement planning, forecasting, inventory control planning, etc. According to Giraffe production system, the benefits of manufacturing resource planning are the following:
Order entry and production forecasting which deals elimination of duplicate information, attaining consistent productivity data across the enterprise, and making commitments based on capacity. Resource planning handles the forecast and plan of both human and machine resources. It also helps in attaining improved productivity and reduced production costs. Production Scheduling provides priority assigned to each order. It tracks jobs and generates reports automatically. It also does the rescheduling of uncompleted jobs. Order fulfillment is the other benefit of MRP. It improves customer service and product delivery on time.
Just-in-time production system purpose is to produce and deliver finished goods just in time to be sold. According to Schonberger, the purpose of JIT is to “produce and deliver finished goods just in time to be sold, sub-assemblies just in time to be assembled into finished goods, fabricated parts just in time to go into subassemblies, and purchased materials just in time to be transformed into fabricated parts." In Just-in-time system, the firm works with minimum finished goods in the inventory.

McDonalds Inventory Management systems
McDonald uses Just-in-time inventory management system (Aktinson, 2005). As the name suggests, Just in time provides the supplies for the customer in time. When a customer orders a burger, McDonalds does not start to cook. It reheats and assembles the burger according to the particular order. If McDonalds begins to cook food when a customer places an order, McDonalds’s will take time to prepare a burger. As McDonalds is a fast food, it cannot make a customer to wait for a long time to get the ordered burger. With the help of just in time inventory management system, McDonalds pre-cook a batch of hamburgers and keep them under heat lamps. They keep them as long as possible and eventually discard what could not be sold. The advantage of this system is to serve a customer as fast as possible while having the finished product sitting in the inventory as short as possible.
The other benefit of just in time inventory management system is that the product will be good in quality. Because of this system, McDonalds prepares hamburger ‘just in time’. McDonald’s ability to produce faster reduced the ordering cost of the customer. Because of their ability to prepare fast, the customers need not to wait long for burgers. This firm has lower inventory levels, which may cause a bigger problem during high demand. But, McDonald’s ability to make burgers in record time prevents them from those situations. The holding cost of burger parts are costlier, hence it will be spoiled if it is kept for a month of time. If this frozen burger parts are cooked, the spoil time increases to 15 minutes. Because of this, in McDonalds old system the cost of burger was high to absorb cost of spoiled burger. But now they can prepare burger in record time, as a result of that there is less spoiling of burger in turn low cost of burger. Hence, this Just in time system is beneficial to McDonalds.
The advantages for McDonalds for using just in time inventory management system are reduction of cost of ordering and cost of holding, and reduction in safety stock. The reason for keeping the safety stock is to meet inconsistency in lead time and demand. In McDonalds case, the supplier is internal and they are using just in time system, so they can reduce the lead time and variation in lead time (Aktinson, 2005).

Conclusion
In short, this paper covers all the aspects of inventory management benefits, risk, etc. In this report, you can get information about the benefits of inventory management. This paper is also mentioning about the different methods followed in inventory management. This also details one of the inventory management based on the case study of McDonalds. From this paper, you can understand the reason, why inventory management is important in business process.



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