Motivation

During the recent years motivation has been one of the "hot" topics when talking about performance improvement or productivity gains. There are many concepts and applications of motivation used in day-to-day activities used by many organisations around the word however, it seems to be very difficult for everybody to find the correct "mix".

The purpose of this paper is to review and analyse ideas, concepts and theories of three academic journals articles on motivation. In order to preset my view in more consistent way, the articles have been classified into certain areas/concepts of motivation (Motivation Concepts, Empowerment and Rewarding Employees) and discussed under these topics.

MOTIVATION CONCEPTS

Motivation has been defined as a predisposition to behave in a purposive manner to achieve specific, unmet needs. The article "Understanding Employee Motivation" (Lindner, J.R.) delivers key motivating factors in the context of employee motivation theories. The author described five major approaches that may help managers to recognize what motivate their employees. Firstly, according to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs theory workers have five levels of needs: psychological, safety, social, ego and self-actualizing. Maslow emphasized that lower level of needs has to be