CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
- BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY
The need to increase productivity and efficiency in the work place or any organization has led to increasing academic interest in the area of motivation over the years. Scholars have been keenly interested in knowing what factors are responsible for stimulating the will to work. Thus motivation has become an issue of concern for both scholars and practitioners of personnel management.
Every organization either in the private or public sector is goal oriented and all efforts are geared towards the successful attainment of those goals and objectives. Therefore, for any organization to record any degree of meaningful success in the pursuit of its goals and aspirations, it must have the ability to create values (motivation) enough to compensate for the burdens imposed upon the staff. Such value or motivators can come in the form of good training policies, facilities or incentives such as fringe benefit, promotion, status symbol etc so as to satisfy the needs of the staff for enhanced performance (Obisi, 1996).
It has been shown, argued and proven that unless individual staff are motivated to make sufficient use of the potentials found in them during the employment process they may not achieve the level of performance that is desired from them (Morris, 1998). For a staff to be motivated, he or she has to perceive that his or her needs and wants are being met. Thus the satisfaction of the staff represents an indispensable dimension of the motivational process. A satisfied individual would certainly contribute positively to the realization of the organizational goals and objectives while a dissatisfied staff may only not contribute but can even act in such a way that the realization of such goals and objectives could be completely destroyed. This underlines the importance of staff satisfaction to the organisation.
Motivation is said to be the core of management of human resources. The management of men and women is a challenging task. No two persons have the same qualities, feelings and behaviour. The nature of man is very complex. It is not easy to take care of human beings with such varying characteristics and qualities.
Without motivation, organisation would not last long. Human resources must be activated, trained, developed and above all motivated in order to realize individual and organizational goals. An individual who has ability, skills and knowledge would not do much without motivation. However, an individual with skills, knowledge and ability with added motivation is a sure way to success (Ajiola, 2002). The performance of a worker does not depend largely on his ability, intelligence, skills and knowledge but on the motivation which he has. If we do not motivate a worker, he would not as such be a problem solver (Abbegleen, 2001).
