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'C onnell, 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.