Employee Motivation Summary

Adam M. Grant, an organisational psychology researcher, discusses boosting the motivation of employees in public service sectors by having them acknowledging their prosocial impact. He argues that most of the public service jobs are often associated with “high levels of burnout and emotional exhaustion” due to the wrong emphasis on the motivation. Even though public service sectors provide the opportunity and platform to serve the public, often enough we find employees are blinded by the need of personal materialistic gain. Grant believes that shifting the focus of the motivation to the prosocial impact of their roles will enhance the employees’ motivation. In order to prove his point, Grant conducted an experiment to know if contact with beneficiaries

An example that Grant provides on the immediate prosocial impact is lifesaving jobs. From various resources, Grant finalises the basis of prosocial motivation to be “attraction to public policy making, commitment to the public interest, compassion, and self-sacrifice” and he further concurs with this argument by linking them with the behavioural influence on employees arising from the exposure to their prosocial impacts. Prosocial impact, as conceptualised by Grant, is "the extent to which employees' effort protect, promote, or contribute to the welfare of others." By definition, it is obvious that Grant attempts to integrate prosocial impact with job ethos in public service sector by referring it to employees' point of view. Alas, from the same definition itself, we can also see that this prosocial impact is merely the rate of output that employees exert as it might be difficult to determine the changes of employees' behaviour and

Even though it may not concern the public as much as public service work, the fact that it involves public and mainly people suggests that the impact exhibited by the role in this line of jobs can be considered to be prosocial. The question followed by this might be to what level the impacts should affect? Having not exactly beneficiaries unlike their counterpart, whether or not connection to public could influence workers could be a subject of argument. Nevertheless, it is evident enough that being aware of the importance of their role and their contribution in the community (their organisation) may play a role in influencing their