Directorate of distance education master of business administration

Motivation 
 
Motivation is said to be a combination of all those inner tensions 
or the needs that we describe as hopes, wishes, desires, fears, and 

---

211
intentions.  Stephen P Robbins (1994) has defined motivation as the 
willingness to exert high levels of efforts towards organizational goals, 
conditioned by the effort and ability to satisfy some individual need. 
Motivation includes any inner state that activates and moves people. It 
invokes the urge or compulsion to do something. It is an inner process 
that begins with an awareness of a need or a sense of tension and proceeds 
through the satisfaction of that need or the dispersal of that tension to 
the awareness of another need or the sense of further tension and so on. 
Motivated employees could be in a state of tension, to relieve which, 
they exert effort. Motivation backs employees’ abilities to bring about 
performance and this could be represented as the following formula:  
Performance = f (ability X motivation)
Motivation according to Harold Koontz and Cyril O’Donnell 
(1982) is a general term applying to the entire class of drives, desires, 
needs, wishes, wants and other similar forces. According to the 
Encyclopedia of Management, the term ‘Motivation’ refers to the degree 
of readiness of an organism to pursue some designated goals and implies 
the determination of the nature and locus of forces including degree 
of readiness. Motivation is the result of the interaction between the 
individual and the situation.  Individuals differ in their needs, attitudes 
and motivational drives, and hence efforts to improve their motivation 
should also be individualized.