Literature Review: The Relationship Between Motivation And Employee Performance

The main objective of this literature review (LR) is to demonstrate the relationship between motivation and employee performance. The definitions of motivation, Employee performance and organisational performance are well defined so as to elaborate its importance in the working sector.

The review also gives the provision for an insight on motivation, factors that affect motivation and performance, how it correlate with employee performance and its relative importance in the public sector.

2.2 The Concept of Motivation

Scholars have made several researches on motivation since it is a complex phenomenon. Motivation and employee performance have become one of the most decisive and popular driving force behind every organization. The first most important theories were from:

1. Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs (1943)

2. Herzberg’s two factor theory (1959) and

3. Vroom’s expectancy theory (1964).

In Herzberg (1959) research, he pointed out the most important question; that is; why supervisors of a company need to motivate his employees. Smith (1994) in his research rather comments that managers have the duty to motivate employees for the continuous existence of the company.

“It is of most important to handle effectively with employees in a company in order to bring success” argues Amabile (1993). She also stated that “Unmotivated employees tend to apply less effort in their job, avoid the work place as much as possible, produce low quality of work or even quit the company”.