Expectancy Theory of Motivation

Nowadays, besides the income, motivation is one of the best ways to keep people more productive during their work. Each person might have a different goal as long as they know how to achieve it. According to Williams and McWilliams (2010), ‘motivation is the set of forces that initiates, directs and makes people persist in their efforts to accomplish a goal’. In other words, motivation can become the factor that encourages someone to persist on their stance in order to achieve their goal. It depends on the choices that people make on how much and where to put effort into their jobs. Not only that, as a person that people are working for, the manager must know exactly what are the workers’ needs to be able to satisfy them by providing the opportunities and attractive rewards. In order to find out the practical step relates to this situation, managers are trying to look a bit deeper on their goals, which is known as the concept of expectancy theory. Expectancy theory is a theory that states people will be encouraged widely in which they believe their attempts will bring them to a good performance and more rewards. ‘Expectancy theory says that people will be motivated to the extent to which they believe that their effort will lead to good performance, that good performance will be rewarded and that they will be offered attractive rewards’ (Williams & McWilliams 2010). Altogether, by applying the theory of expectancy, people will be encouraged widely in which they believe that their attempts will bring them to a good performance. At the end, someone will reward their performance by offering attractive rewards. According to expectancy theory, there are three components that play an interactive role in affect people to make conscious choices about their motivation.
The first component of expectancy theory is valence, which is the desire of people to work and achieve a reward from their jobs. It refers to the individual personally place on the rewards and depends on their wants and needs. Expectancy theory identifies that most people will be more attractive when the bonus comes, some of them will not be interested, even might not make much difference at all. In addition, people would be considered valence on every possible outcome and rewards which they can get from their job once they have decided on how much effort to put forth. The greater the level of valence gained, the more effort people can prefer into their job. Another component is expectancy, which simply means the relationship between effort and performance. People believe that hard work and efforts are the cause of the strong expectancy which can lead them result in better performance. Therefore, they have an intention to work harder. People also respond that workers would not be able to perform job successfully when their expectancy are not strong enough, it does not matter on what and how hard they do at work. After determining the relationship between effort and performance, the last component of expectancy theory is the relationship between performance and rewards, which calls instrumentality. Similarly instead in this situation, people believe that more performances they gained will lead them to more achievement of rewards. People believe in improving performances they will become better and achieve more rewards as long as their instrumentality are not weak. But, people are unsure workers will come out with better performance and gain better rewards without a strong instrumentality because they could not be considered working hard. If a worker believes that they will absolutely receive the rewards that they desired by having a good performance, they will be more interested to take action in order to achieve their goals. However, they would not be able to exert effort until they believe that they also can do it.
Expectancy theory states that there are three basic components which have to be higher if people want to be strongly motivated. As mentioned by Muchinksky (1977), 'valence (V) refers to the attractiveness or importance of particular outcomes as perceived by an individual', which means people will be more motivated to put their effort in an attempt to receive the reward they want. Directed to the expectancy, which is referred to the standard of hard work which performed by each individual. For instance, 'someone on a piece-rate payment system should have a high, positive performance-pay instrumentality since increases in performance are followed by increases in pay', as stated by Pritchard and Sanders (1973). Once their works are done nicely, they would have an opportunity to result in a good performance. In relation to the instrumentality that refers to the level of perception between good performance and achievement of outcomes. Instrumentality means the relationship between performance and outcome. This component relates to the level of performance which has to be done in order to achieve the rewards. As an example, a salesman is the one who has the higher instrumentally. He is paid based on commission. An individual ought to be motivated on performing at a higher level since the amount of the reward is accorded on the result of performance. In a nutshell, By having a strong valence, expectancy and instrumentality, people would be able to perform their jobs successfully because they are working hard. By contrast, when these three factors are declining, people figure that they would not be able to achieve the result in better performance. Therefore, the motivation will be declined, too. According to Vroom (1964), the component of valence, expectancy, and instrumentality are related each other. The higher levels of motivation will result when these three components of expectancy theory are higher than when they are low, which implies that if one of these components are zero, overall the level of motivation becomes zero. For instance, when an employee believes that their effort will result in a better performance and achieve more rewards, the motivation will become zero when the valence of reward that they expect to receive is zero, which means once they achieve the reward, they assume that the rewards have no value to them. Clearly, a strong relationship between effort and performance is effort encouraging the confidence that making more effort will increase performance and the highest level of performance will bring to a good and attractive reward.
Actually, this expectancy theory has been motivated us indirectly and without we realize. As well as myself, I am also one of the people who have been in this situation. It is when I am deciding myself to do a part-time job in order to ease tuition fees which have to be paid by my parents. My expectation and wants of getting this job is to get the possible outcome. In this case on which I have an intention to do the part-time job, I have automatically decided to put much effort in my own as well. So that, when my expectancy is strong, I believe that I will be more motivated to study seriously because I know exactly that is not easy to make money. By having this, I know what I expect to do so it will motivate me to work harder and performs better during work. However, I should be able to divide my time equivalently between study and work or else eventually I might lose either my education or work. By contrast, when my expectancy is weak and I do not work as hard, I would not be able to perform my job successfully no matter how hard I work. Finally, when my instrumentality is strong, I believe that improved on performance and a strong commitment to a job can lead me to result in better and more rewards. On the other hand, when my instrumentality is weak, I might not be able to achieve my desired goals. Hence, to be highly motivated in achieving a personal life by applying a theory of expectancy, we need to determine the needs and wants from our job. Furthermore, by having strong expectancies on making a decision, believing in our effort and working hard will lead to a good performance.
In summary, valence, expectancy, and instrumentality have an important role that can lead people to a good performance in order to achieve a personal and workplace goals. It depends on how workers make conscious choices about their motivation and what are the possible rewards that managers can offer to their employees. When used correctly, the rewards will be encouraging and motivate employees during their work. Instead, they can become unmotivated, puzzling even anger them when rewards are used incorrectly. Goals are also used to be motivating employees as well. However, motivation can be destroyed by the leaders who only focus on meeting their own goals by sacrifice the employees.