Motivation in a project environment

Motivation in a project environment

The role of the project manager is to achieve specific objectives with a project team. In general, project team members want to derive job satisfaction from the work that they do. Job satisfaction can come about in different ways - a sense of achievement in a job well done, personal and professional development, financial remuneration, or a combination of these and other motives. The common factor is that satisfied project team members give of their best and produce high-quality work. Conversely, absence of motivation can lead to conflict, low morale, poor productivity, and, in some cases, failure to meet project objectives. Effective project managers must strive to create an environment in which project team members feel motivated. To do this, they must understand the dynamics of human behavior and how it defines motivation. This involves understanding what motivation is, the motivational process, and how to implement their understanding of the motivational process in a practical way.

What is motivation?

In general, motivation can be thought of as internal drives within a person prompting them to voluntarily devote extra effort to the achievement of project objectives. There are many different definitions of motivation, but certain ideas are common to all the theories.

Motivation

• exerts an influence on productivity
• stimulates project team members to achieve their objectives
• is an internal process
• involves psychological, social, and economic satisfaction

Although opinions differ on the precise factors that motivate people, there is general agreement that the work environment must meet certain motivational criteria. The work atmosphere must encourage people to join the organization and stay and develop with it. The right work environment should encourage people to discharge their responsibilities and carry out their assigned tasks. It should also encourage people to exceed normal performance, hopefully demonstrating creativity and innovation in the process. To establish a motivational environment, the project manager must strive to ensure that team members' personal goals coincide (wherever possible) with organizational objectives. To do this, project managers must understand the process through which team members derive motivation.

The motivational process

The motivational process can be divided into six core phases.

1. Identification of needs

Team members identify the needs that their presence in the workplace fulfils. These needs can be thought of as deficiencies that people feel they have to deal with. They can take a variety of forms:

• a psychological need for recognition or the opportunity to work on high-profile projects
  
• a physiological need for food, clothes, and shelter
  
• a social need for workplace friendships
  

Project managers need to be aware that these are some of the common needs that team members seek to resolve through work.

2. Creation of drives

In the workplace, each team member's needs create desires, which in turn generate drives within the person. The project manager should view these drives as a state of unrest that the person wants to diminish or eliminate.

3. Selection of goal-oriented behavior

Prompted by the state of unrest stemming from inner drives, the team member strives to identify and achieve goals that will alleviate their unrest. These goals, which are specific results that individuals want to achieve, spur a person on to work harder, which means that motivation can be thought of as goal directed.

4. Execution of goal-oriented tasks

Once the team member successfully completes a goal-oriented task, their unrest or dissatisfaction is reduced. If they work extra hard to achieve promotion, the extra effort can lead to tension and stress, which is resolved if they succeed. This, in turn, leads to a psychological association between the successful completion of goal-directed behavior in the workplace and a reduction in the state of unrest. This association will encourage the team member to repeat goal-directed behavior. This is an association that the project manager should take advantage of by creating an environment that encourages goal-directed behavior.

5. Feedback

Team members derive personal satisfaction from positive feedback after project objectives have been reached. If a team member receives recognition for a job well done, it reinforces the belief that the behavior is appropriate and that it should be repeated. Negative feedback has the opposite effect and should help to discourage poor performance. Project managers should be aware of the crucial importance of feedback in the creation of a motivational environment.

6. Reassessment of needs and goals

Having received either positive or negative feedback, team members tend to reassess their needs and goals and modify their strategies, actions, and behaviors.

Problematizing the motivational process

The six-stage model of the motivational process oversimplifies what happens in the real world. No team member's behavior will be as simple and clear cut as the model. Project managers must understand that the motivational process will be complicated by situations that arise on a day-by-day basis in the workplace. But they can at least be prepared for some of the more common problems.

For instance, two team members may possess similar abilities but produce radically different standards of work. Perhaps this is because they have different levels of motivation. This illustrates the point that project managers can only deduce whether a person is highly or slightly motivated. There is no definitive way of establishing the precise motivational levels of team members.

The needs that a person strives to appease through goal-directed behavior in the workplace may change and conflict over time. Project managers need to be up to speed on the changing needs of their team members. And it is important for project managers to recognize that team members prioritize their needs in different ways. Some people may be motivated by money, whereas others may be motivated by the opportunity to work on high-profile projects. And even if a need remains the same, the level of energy that a team member devotes to fulfilling that need may change over time. It is essential, therefore, that project managers develop effective interpersonal relationships with team members, so that they can keep in touch with exactly what is motivating their workers at any given time.

Creating the right environment

To be effective, project managers must strive to create a motivational work environment. To do this, they first need to understand the motivational process. They also need interpersonal and communication skills to apply this understanding, in a meaningful way, to the inevitably complex individuals that comprise project teams.