Achievement and Success in the Workplace

318
Chapter 8 Motivation and Emotion
Children raised in environments that support the development of strong achievement motivation tend not to give up on
difficult tasks—even if all the king’s
horses and all the king’s men do!
The New Yorker Cartoon © The New Yorker Collection 1993
Al Ross from Cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.
that ideas about achievement motivation differ from culture to culture. In one study,
individuals from Saudi Arabia and from the United States were asked to comment on
short stories describing people succeeding at various tasks. Saudis tended to see the
people in the stories as having succeeded because of the help they got from others,
whereas Americans tended to attribute success to the internal characteristics of each
story’s main character (Zahrani & Kaplowitz, 1993).
In short, achievement motivation is strongly influenced by social and cultural learning experiences and by the beliefs about oneself that these experiences help to create.
People who come to believe in their ability to achieve are more likely to do so than
those who expect to fail (Butler, 1998; Dweck, 1998; Wigfield & Eccles, 2000).
Achievement and Success in the Workplace
In the workplace, there is usually more concern with employees’ motivation to work
hard during business hours than with their general level of need achievement. In fact,
employers tend to set up jobs in accordance with their ideas about how intrinsic and
extrinsic motivation combine to shape employees’ performance (Riggio, 1989). Employers who see workers as lazy, dishonest, and lacking in ambition tend to offer highly
structured, heavily supervised jobs. They give the employees little say in deciding what
to do or how to do it. These employers assume that workers are motivated mainly by
extrinsic rewards—especially money. So they are often surprised when, in spite of good
pay and benefits, some employees are dissatisfied with their jobs and show little motivation to work hard (Diener & Seligman, 2004; Igalens & Roussel, 1999).
If good pay and benefits alone don’t bring job satisfaction and the desire to excel on
the job, what does? In Western cultures low worker motivation appears to come largely
from negative thoughts and feelings about having little or no control over the work
environment (Rosen, 1991). Compared with those in highly structured jobs, workers
tend to be happier, more satisfied, and more productive if they are (1) encouraged to
participate in decisions about how work should be done; (2) given problems to solve,
without being told how to solve them; (3) taught more than one skill; (4) given individual responsibility; and (5) given public recognition, not just money, for good performance (Fisher, 2000).
Allowing people to set and achieve clear goals is one way to increase both job performance and job satisfaction (Abramis, 1994). Goals that most effectively maintain
work motivation have three features (Katzell & Thompson, 1990). First, they are personally meaningful. When a memo from a high-level administrator tells employees that