Job Motivation Essay

What is motivation? Motivation defined as the internal force that drives a worker to action as well as the external factors that encourage that action (Locke & Latham, 2002). This report aims to analyze the interviewee’s work motivation by using the job motivation theory. In this report, I interviewed a job incumbent. I will analyze the interviewee’s work motivation by applying the job characteristics model, expectancy theory and reinforcement theory. In this case, my interviewee was a secondary school teacher in Hong Kong called Miss Tse. She had been a teacher for twenty years. She teaches Chinese and Chinese history. Besides teaching, she needs to prepare notes for the students and solving problems from the students. Why Miss Tse choose teacher as her vocation? She mentioned that she loves get along with the children. Also she adores the duties of a teacher. So being a teacher had become her ideal. Hackman and Oldham proposed the job characteristics model, which states that five core job characteristics influence (skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy and feedback) three critical psychological states that in turn lead motivation (Hackman & Oldham, 1975). The first core characteristic is skill variety. It refers to the need of different skills for the success of job tasks. In the case of Miss Tse, her work had a high variety. She mentioned that after the education reform and the changing of the society, the workload for the teacher had become greater than the past. Besides the high workload of the education, Miss Tse needed to communicate with the student and their parents more. She said that nowadays people are more individualism especially the parents, they concern on the academic result more than the personal growth. So Miss Tse needed to put more time on it. As a result the job variety had become higher.