University of Minnesota - UMN Executive Leadership Insights
Motivating Employees
Book

Motivating Employees

Anne Bruce and James S. Pepitone
McGraw-Hill, 1999
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Editorial Rating

6

Qualities

  • Applicable
  • For Beginners

Recommendation

Anne Bruce and James S. Pepitone have written a basic, hands-on book about motivating employees more effectively. They emphasize the need for your employees to become self-motivated, since only intrinsic motivation truly works. The book provides good, specific suggestions about ways to increase motivation. However, its core principles sound familiar - like material from an Organizational Behavior 101 textbook. Nonetheless, this book provides a good, easy-to-read summary of these fundamental ideas. getAbstract recommends this book to supervisors or managers who want to refresh their foundation in motivating employees, or to new managers who need to acquire this ability.

Summary

The Importance of Intrinsic Motivation

The key to motivating employees is understanding that people are motivated to do something by the belief that it is in their best interest. As a result, you cannot motivate someone else. You can only influence them once they become motivated. Thus, you have to improve your ability to influence your employees, so they feel motivated to do a good job. You can do this by helping them recognize how their welfare meshes with the organization’s. Then, they will be naturally motivated to work hard - because they believe it is in their best interest. This relationship between influence, motivation, and hard work occurs because motivation is within each person or "intrinsic." People are motivated when they want to do something and, therefore, act to achieve that goal. While external factors may affect employees, these factors are always shaped by their personal intrinsic concerns. Employees have to "buy into" the extrinsic stimuli by linking it with their intrinsic concerns.

The Keys to Inspiring Intrinsic Motivation

Three basic motivational keys provide this intrinsic motivation in the workplace. The three "C" are collaboration...

About the Authors

Anne Bruce is a nationally recognized keynote speaker and workshop leader. She has led programs at Harvard and Stanford law schools. She facilitates workshops on performance management topics, leadership, customer service, and internal performance consulting. James S. Pepitone has twenty years experience as a management consultant. He has worked with many of the world’s leading companies. He is the author of Humaneering: Technology for Improving Human Performance at Work and Future Training: A Roadmap for Restructuring the Training Function.

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