Article Writing Homework Help

Discussion 1: Motivating Others

This week’s Learning Resources explore what motivates people and the management strategies that can support motivation. For example, employees who consider their work to be challenging and intellectually stimulating may find work to be a rewarding experience and are already motivated to be productive and successful. At the same time, work that is too challenging and complex can be unrewarding and de-motivating for an employee, especially if the risk of failure is higher than the reward of success. To be successful, managers must learn to recognize when a project may be beyond an employee’s abilities and when employees consider the work to be so rewarding they are motivated to stay on task with little supervision. Successful managers have also learned how to nurture an employee’s motivation when the employee is given a difficult project, support them when resources may be scarce, and orient them toward success when the risk of failure may be high.

To prepare for this Discussion, review the case study “Is the Rookie Ready?” (Green, Schrage, Walker, & Muller 2009) in this Week’s Learning Resources. In this scenario, a manager, Tim O’Connell, has some difficult choices to make. A valuable project has come in and Tim is not sure if a younger and inexperienced manager is ready for the project, nor is Tim confident in how to support his young manager and her team. Imagine that you are a colleague of Tim O’Connell and he has e-mailed you and shared his concerns with you about accepting the Hybara Casinos opportunity. He has reached out to you for advice on how to handle this situation.

With these thoughts in mind:

By Day 2

Post your recommendation for how Tim should proceed with Hybara Casino opportunity in the form of a business e-mail. In your e-mail, analyze the relations among commitment, job satisfaction, and performance of his team. Explain to Tim what he needs to do so that his team will be motivated to put forth their best effort, even during the difficult circumstances presented by the Hybara opportunity.

Discussion 2

Shared Practice: Personal Motivation and Purpose

Steven Levitt, a father of four and co-author of the book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (2005), had a small problem. When his youngest daughter was born, his middle daughter’s toilet training regressed. Levitt decided to use an incentive to reward his daughter by giving her one piece of candy every time she successfully used the toilet. In first week, his daughter figured out how to use the toilet just a little bit, go to her father to receive her reward, and then return to the bathroom minutes later to receive another piece of candy. She learned to exploit the system to her maximum advantage (What Happens When…2007).

This story illustrates one of the challenges of implementing effective reward systems—they can have unintended and undesirable outcomes that may not be sustainable. And when trying to figure out how to effectively reward employees, managers can sometimes treat their charges as children that need the fear of punishment or the enticement of a reward as motivation. However, as Daniel Pink (2009) argues in his book DRiVE: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, motivating employees is much more complicated than simply meting out rewards or punishments. For employees to be motivated to do their best, they need to know they are a part of something greater than themselves.

The resources this week address how managers motivate employees successfully.

This week’s Shared Practice requires you to consider what rewards have motivated you to perform in your professional career. Then, you reflect on your experiences to determine how you frame your primary motivation and purpose.

With these thoughts in mind:

By Day 3

Post a description of a positive professional experience when you felt motivated to perform at your best and a description of a challenging professional experience when you did not feel very motivated to perform. Be sure to include what were the sources of motivation in both experiences. Then explain what each experience taught you about the influence of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation on your performance and the motivations that are the main sources of job satisfaction for you.

As you are analyzing your motivations and sources of job satisfaction, consider the advice that was reportedly given to U.S. President John F. Kennedy:

“A great man is one sentence.” —Clare Boothe Luce

After you post your descriptions, write your one sentence that captures how you define your purpose or main priority on which you want to focus to make your organization, community, or the world a better place. Think about the legacy you want to leave or how you want to be remembered, or what makes you want to get out of bed each day.

Hint: Your sentence should emphasize how you want other to see you. For example, your sentence might be: Jane Rivera founded a company that gave back to the community and served a role model for young entrepreneurs. Or, Travis Williams’ family and friends could always count on his unconditional support.

Provide your assessment of why you chose your sentence and what it means to you.

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