AD212 American Business and Management

Chapter 11: Motivating and Satisfying Employees

and

Williams, "Motivation: The Value of a Work Ethic"

Some companies (for example, GE) decided as early as the 1920s that, based on ideas from the human-relations movement, providing employees benefits such as cafeterias, clean and well lit working environments, health care, and generous pensions would motivate them to work hard and keep the company's interests in heart. How well does this work?

Does your behavior, as a student, better fit Theory X or a Theory Y? Or is Theory Z likely to be more effective? What about your friends and roommate(s)?

Can a company's motivation methods influence its corporate culture? If so, how?

Job enrichments seems to fly in the face of the well known improvements to efficiency that come with reducing jobs to simple, rapidly completed tasks. (See, for example, the second paragraph under "Job Enrichment" on p. 315, which seem to be totally at odds with Taylorism.) If this is so, how can job enrichment be beneficial to productivity?

In the article, "Motivation: The Value of a Work Ethic," the author comments that his secretary's typing improvement was "a good learning experience for both of us." What did they learn?

Answer the questions at the end of the Video Case, "Motivation is the Recipe for Success at Harbor Sweets" (p.323).