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Focus on management history
Keywords
TQM, Motivation, Scientific management, Human relations
Abstract
Centers on motivation in work organizations, yesterday, today and tomorrow. To retain qualified employees in an organization and to maintain a satisfactory type of role performance, people's experiences in the system must be rewarding, particularly if they have freedom to move in and out of organizations. Motivating people to work in the twenty-first century with theories conceived in the 1800s and early 1900s is likely to be infeasible. After reviewing the major events in the management history of the last 100 years, the authors try to distill the knowledge that will help illuminate the motivation path for present and future managers. The core message is that managers should reconsider the outdated motivational patterns utilized to maintain role performance in organizations. The authors propose a fresh motivation formula for the twenty-first century, based on "friendship, work and respect".
Introduction
How can we motivate people to work? How can we create a situation in which people can achieve their personal goals while fulfilling the goals of the organization?
Historically there have been two major approaches to solving the motivation puzzle. Management can motivate people to work by fear, by being tough. Or it can motivate people by understanding, by being good. The authors argue that in spite of some diversions, these two paths to motivation have been vying for managers' attention throughout the years. The modern approaches - total quality management (TQM) and business process reengineering (BPR) - although more subtle and sophisticated than earlier predecessors, still represent these two opposite positions of the motivation pendulum.
In a first section, corresponding approximately to the 1900-1970s period, the article gives an historical perspective on motivation in work organizations, with the "be tough" and "be good" approaches occupying the center of the management stage, while relevant diversions and qualifications serve as the background. In a second section, covering the 1980s and 1990s, the paper analyzes the impact of TQM and BPR on people's motivation to work. In the final section, the authors draw conclusions and offer a vision of the new frontier after TQM and BPR.
Motivating people to work: historical perspective
"Be tough" or the forces of darkness Starting in the early 1900s,...