Motivation is an important factor which encourages persons to give their best performance and help in reaching enterprise goals. A strong positive motivation will enable the increased output of employees but a negative motivation will reduce their performance. A key element in personnel management is motivation. According to Likert, “it is the core of management which shows that every human being gives him a sense of worth in face-to- face groups which are most important to him. A supervisor should strive to treat individuals with dignity and a recognition of their personal worth.”

Motivation has been variously defined by scholars. Some definitions are discussed as follows:

Berelson and Steiner: “A motive is an inner state that energizes, activates, or moves and directs or channels behaviour goals.’

Lillis: “It is the stimulation of any emotion or desire operating upon one’s will and promoting or driving it to action.”

The Encyclopaedia of Management: “Motivation refers to degree of readiness of an organism to pursue some designated goal and implies the determination of the nature and locus of the forces, including the degree of readiness.”

Dubin: “Motivation is the complex of forces starting and keeping a person at work in an organisation.”

Vance: “Motivation implies any emotion or desire which so conditions one’s will that the individual is properly lead into action.”

Vitiles: “Motivation represents an unsatisfied need which creates a state of tension or disequilibrium, causing the individual to make in a goal-directed pattern towards restoring a state of equilibrium by satisfying the need.”

Memoria: “A willingness to expend energy to achieve a goal or reward. It is a force that activates dormant energies and sets in motion the action of the people. It is the function that kindles a burning passion for action among the human beginnings of an organization.”

Nature of Motivation

Motivation is a psychological phenomenon which generates within an individual. A person feels the lack of certain needs, to satisfy which he feels working more. The need to satisfy ego motivates a person to do better than he normally does.

From definitions given earlier the following inferences can be derived:

1. Motivation is an inner feeling which energizes a person to work more.

2. The emotions or desires of a person prompt him for doing a particular work.

3. There are unsatisfied needs of a person which disturb his equilibrium.

4. A person moves to fulfill his unsatisfied needs by conditioning his energies.

5. There are dormant energies in a person which are activated by channelizing them into actions.