Equity Theory
Suppose employee A gets a 20% raise and employee B gets a 10% raise. Will both be motivated as a result? Will A be twice as motivated? Will be B be negatively motivated?
Equity theory says that it is not the actual reward that motivates, but the perception, and the perception is based not on the reward in isolation, but in comparison with the efforts that went into getting it, and the rewards and efforts of others. If everyone got a 5% raise, B is likely to feel quite pleased with her raise, even if she worked harder than everyone else. But if A got an even higher raise, B perceives that she worked just as hard as A, she will be unhappy.
In other words, people's motivation results from a ratio of ratios: a person compares the ratio of reward to effort with the comparable ratio of reward to effort that they think others are getting.
Of course, in terms of actually predicting how a person will react to a given motivator, this will get pretty complicated:
People do not have complete information about how others are rewarded. So they are going on perceptions, rumors, inferences.
Some people are more sensitive to equity issues than others
Some people are willing to ignore short-term inequities as long as they expect things to work out in the long-term.
Suppose employee A gets a 20% raise and employee B gets a 10% raise. Will both be motivated as a result? Will A be twice as motivated? Will be B be negatively motivated?
Equity theory says that it is not the actual reward that motivates, but the perception, and the perception is based not on the reward in isolation, but in comparison with the efforts that went into getting it, and the rewards and efforts of others. If everyone got a 5% raise, B is likely to feel quite pleased with her raise, even if she worked harder than everyone else. But if A got an even higher raise, B perceives that she worked just as hard as A, she will be unhappy.
In other words, people's motivation results from a ratio of ratios: a person compares the ratio of reward to effort with the comparable ratio of reward to effort that they think others are getting.
Of course, in terms of actually predicting how a person will react to a given motivator, this will get pretty complicated:
People do not have complete information about how others are rewarded. So they are going on perceptions, rumors, inferences.
Some people are more sensitive to equity issues than others
Some people are willing to ignore short-term inequities as long as they expect things to work out in the long-term.
No comments:
Post a Comment