Essay: Motivating leaders

Leading oneself
This chapter presents existing literature, related to leadership gaps and what organizations can do to help leaders enhance the gaps, that is classified as Leading oneself. Leading oneself means leaders ability to lead, manage and develop them selves. In this literature review, Leading oneself contains two sub-chapters: the first concerns motivate leaders and the second is about leaders self-awareness.
3.1.1 How to motivate leaders
Leadership is a major contributing factor for organizational productivity. Productivity means the efficiency to convert input (resources; machine, human, personnel, energy, money, materials, etc.) to output (e.g. money, produced units etc.) (Tangen, 2005) (Bernolak, 1997).
Improved employee performance results in increased organization productivity and motivated leaders can influence employees’ performance at higher extent, than non-motivated leaders (Tucker, 2010). In addition, employee’s performances are crucial for successful organizational changes. Thus leaders motivation becomes critical to the success of change.
In order to motivate leaders, it requires an understanding of leader’s driving forces. Driving force means the reason why people act a certain way (Eccles et al., 1998). The motives are influenced by the context and surrounding environment. It is common that organizations associate motivation with compensation such as bonus, increased salary, stocks or promotion, to drive productivity (Baker et al., 1988). This type of compensation is called extrinsic reward. Intrinsic is another form of motivation concerning learning, joy, and mental well being (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Intrinsic motivation can also come from organizations whose trying to offers interesting roles for leaders. However, there are four types of motivations, and by knowing what each leader is motivated by, organizations can reward each one in suitable way to maximize performances, which could contribute to increased productivity for the entire organization.
The following text explains the different motivations, which are independent of position and rank within the company. Various authors have different theories of the motivators.  Graves et al (2016) argues that there are mainly four different types of motivations; external, introjected, identified and intrinsic (which is the gray painted circles in the figure below). However, Ryan & Deci (2000) argues that there are mainly six motivators, amotivation, intrinsic motivation and four kinds of extrinsic motivations: external regulation, introjection, identification and integration (which is both the white and grey painted circles in the figure below).
Figur 1 Categories of motivators, what they affect and reason behind them (Ryan & Deci, 2000)
Ryan & Deci (2000) describes both all the different motivators and the non-motivator (amotivation) that an individual may experience while Graves et al (2016) provides a more simplified model, where the non-motivator and the integration are excluded. If an organization understands what makes employees motivated, they can thus avoid that employees are unmotivated, i.e. amotivation. Graves et al (2016) may have omitted amotivation from their investigation due to that reason. It is also perceived that the difference between identification and integration is minimal, which is probably the reason why integration is omitted from Graves et al (2016) study. Furthermore, only the gray marked circles in the figure above; external, introjected, identified and intrinsic, is presented and discussed in this literature study.
External motivation means that employees are driven by personal benefits as reward from satisfying others. These people are driven by external rewards such as praise, promotion, stocks and money but also by avoiding punishments from not fulfill tasks. Introjected motivation means employees are driven by maintaining their personal self-value and avoid feeling apprehensive for not having done what they should. In both external and introjected motivation, staff experience required responsibilities and behaviors as forced in some extent since tasks and requirements often originate from organizational standards. It is not always that employees share these beliefs fully. The other two motivations are perceived differently as they come from within the individual instead. Identified motivation means employees achieving personal goals through hard work. Example might be to secure their own pension or to develop a system that facilitates the daily work of other employees. Intrinsic motivation means that employees are driven by their own interests and perform tasks because it is exciting, fun and educational. The individual feels that responsibility is voluntary and self-directed. They receive positive emotions that contribute to increased attitude to work, which provides good performance. Generally speaking, employees working to meet personal goals or employees having a role with interesting responsibilities that they feel good about contributes to performance at higher level. (Ryan & Deci, 2000; Graves et al., 2016; Koestner & Losier, 2002).
According to Graves et al (2016), when 321 managers in the United States were examined; it was found that individuals with high score within intrinsic and identified motivation are most favorable for companies. The reason is that they focused on fulfill personal goals with enjoyable tasks and have engagement to the company in larger extent. It also turned out that they were least likely to leave the organization. Employees with intrinsic or identified motivation do not put much emphasize on external motivation. However, McCombs (1991) argues that connection between the subject and peoples’ personal interests and goals are crucial aspects to facilitate learning (McCombs, 1991). This means that the most favorable motivators for learning is intrinsic and identified motivation.
It is essential to realize that employees’ motivation is possible to change if the work environment is supportive for employees. Supportive work environments provide managers with a sense of security, where they have interesting tasks and responsibilities from their perspective and can achieve their own personal goals (Carpenter et al., 2012). Threatening work environments (excessive work demands, high level of competition and absence of employment security) contribute, unlike supportive work environments, to managers trying to protect or defend themselves by focusing on satisfy others to avoid losing their jobs or to increase their status. To create work environments in organizations that facilitate managers’ internal motivation to grow, the organizational policies, reward systems, and support to managers should be reviewed (Graves et al., 2016).
On the support of managers
Managers’ bosses have a crucial role to elicit managers’ internal motivation. Managers need to feel support from their bosses, like for instance that manager’s contribution brings value to the organization and that bosses care about manager’s well-being and make them feel secure, to induce managers’ internal motivation (Ngima & Kyongo, 2013). If this support is missing, it contributes to that managers may feel unsafe or threatened about their role. If managers feel unsafe they may have difficulties in communicating their interests, goals and values, which results in a lower internal motivation of managers.
Bosses ought to encourage managers’ self-direction and problem solving rather than control their work and provide solutions for them. This is because when managers feel more responsibility, it creates increased commitment, increased quality and productivity as they search for solutions themselves (Williams, 1995). Managers interests need to be identified which enable tasks can be adjusted accordingly. This means that manager’s work becomes more personally meaningful and interesting, which creates internal motivation. Bosses need to continuously provide managers with informative feedback. Furthermore it is essential that bosses listen to managers’ feelings and ideas instead of ignoring them. Banks (1997) argues that these supports from bosses encourage the growth of managers’ internal motivation.
Reward systems
Rewards are something organizations can use in order to motivate leaders to better contribute to organizational changes. According to several authors, rewards are, in many organizations an essential element to motivate managers and employees (H”rtel & Fujimoto, 2015) (Hurd et al., 2012) (Lederer & Karmarkar, 2013). Other authors argue, that rewards have less importance to motivate better performance (Sundheim, 2013; Chamorro-Premuzic, 2013). Although, the authors disagree that all individuals are driven by external rewards, it is apparent that some people are positively affected in their performance by external reward while others are not affected at all.
Anyway, the effects of external reward depend on how they are designed; they can be affirming or manipulative (Pierce et al., 1999; Deci & Gagn”, 2005; Graves et al., 2016).
Manipulative rewards create significant pressure on managers to achieve a specific result. This means that managers’ behavior, thoughts and feelings are controlled by rewards instead of their own interests, values and goals (Ledford et al., 2013).
Affirming rewards means that managers are rewarded when they meet organizational objectives they consider important. It enables managers to devote time for challenges they believe are interesting and relevant for the organization, which increase their internal motivation and thus performance (Florence, 2009).
Whether the reward is manipulative or affirmation form, it always consists either of the following: increased salary, bonus, increased holdings of shares and promotion. Manipulative and affirmation concerns the reasons why the managers receive rewards, not what they receive.
Organizations who want to promote high-performing managers should use affirming rewards, since managers who work with their interests performs at a higher level. To earn the reward, challenging and interesting objectives should be formulated for the managers. To reinforce the relevance regarding the objectives, it is important to link manager’s objectives with organization’s objectives and vision (Boswell & Boudreau, 2001).
Organizational policies
Organizations that are characterized by politicized work environments, means that promotions and rewards are given depending on rather subjective factors (e.g. create strong relationships with important employees by agree with their ideas or actions in order to increase or maintain status) than objective factors as actual performances (Sharabi, 2012; Arian et al., 2012). This means that managers focus on strengthening relations in front of contribute with good performance. Politicized work environments contrary to the growth of managers’ internal motivation. As mentioned before, managers’ motivation is critical to achieve successful organizational changes.
Given the foregoing reasons, organizations should review the reward and promotional procedures and ensure that appropriate performance measures are used to evaluate individual rewards instead of rewarding employees’ relationship to powerful people.
3.1.2 Self-awareness
This leadership characteristic includes being self-aware of ones strengths and limitations. It also means notice personal mistakes and learn from them and continuously seek feedback to improve own performance (Cates, 2015; Musselwhite, 2007). Leslie (2015) argues self-awareness is considered to be deficiencies for leaders in companies in general.
Leslie (2015) argues that organization’s can facilitate leaders’ self-awareness by introducing assessments of leaders. Leaders should be assessed by subordinates, peers, bosses and even in some cases external partners such as suppliers and customers. The advantage of collecting opinions from such a broad perspective is that it creates a good general picture of the person’s leadership qualities. Best practices and lessons learned can be applied from both inside and outside of the organization.