Human Motivation Essay Example for Free

Human Motivation Essay Need Theory Working relationships are a central portion of a person’s life. Motivation and dedication to any endeavor (e. g. work) and the pleasure from it are collective concerns of the organization and the individual. There are definite factors that generate satisfaction, the so-called â€Å"motivator† factors according to Herzberg. These factors push the worker to the highest levels of accomplishment possible. They are an inherent part of the work itself and consist of the nature of the work, the person’s sense of achievement, level of responsibility, and individual development and improvement. These motivator needs can only be rewarded by stimulating, challenging, and absorbing work. Consequently, the goal of motivation should be to enhance individual growth and advancement, develop sense of accomplishment and liability, and provide recognition (Franken, 1994). In a multinational company like National Panasonic, they practice and execute specific agenda for increasing motivation, one of which is Management by Objectives (MBO). They have faith in involving their employees in goal-setting and in decision-making. MBO works by integrating goal-setting into individual participation in decision-making in order to establish individual work goals to which the employee feels reasonably committed. At the motivational level, it is theorized that resistance to change is decreased if individuals participate in decisions regarding change and that individuals accept and are more committed to decisions in which they have participated in making. To further encourage and increase involvement, the company provides suggestion boxes and hold monthly contests where they give monetary rewards for the best three suggestions. These give the employee a sense of achievement and responsibility for its success. For this company, the employees receive incentives in the form of Ladder promotion, general salary increase annually plus performance rating salary increases, CBA – employees can expect a minimum of 15% increase in salary annually within three years; and welfare benefits which include group insurances, medical insurance, accident benefits among others Baron, 1983).  A company like this goes to such great lengths at least to assure that it does something for sustaining employees’ morale and motivation. Cognitive Theory Research on motivation is related to the overarching issue ‘What creates human action’ writes Franken (1994). While looking for more accurate scientific definitions, though, one finds a huge selection. Motivation theory, in addition, seems to necessitate an assumption of the human species, as various motivation theories formulate different assumptions about human nature. To presuppose that human beings are thinking creatures is of course not a contemporary breakthrough – the paradigm of the rational actor was based on such a conception – but due to the domination of behaviorist theory there are grounds to claim this once more. Cognitive scholars argued that to appreciate human behavior, one must also examine that which is not directly observable, that is, people’s thoughts. Widespread to cognitive theories is the assumption that people’s ideas about how the world came to be influence their behavior. The relevance of cognitive theory to motivation is the fact that it is not just one undeniable reality that influences behavior, but cognitions of reality. As these differ involving individuals, it entails that individual differences become central in motivation theory. A reward may signify something essential to one person and yet quite a different thing for another. Furthermore, history becomes significant. Because how a human being cognizes reality today relies on how she envisioned of it yesterday, and of how he/she imagines her future. Leading, early cognitive motivation theories were those of Kurt Lewin (1935) and Victor Vroom (1964/1995), where the authors made an effort to conceive of universal paradigms in order to understand human motivation, comprising such factors as how greatly a person rates a particular outcome, the possibility that the effect will be achieved, and other forces, termed driving forces and restraining forces (such as time, money, family obligations etc. ) that may influence an individual’s behavior (Baron, 1983). Cognitive theories lead motivation theory today. Universal models may have been discarded, but there is a huge amount of explicit ones, such as self-efficacy theory, equity theory, goal theory, control theory, attribution theory, the theory of reasoned action, or theories of how expectations of one-self and others affect motivation.. This may well be very applicable to adult learners in terms of individual learning abilities and attitudes. Individual differences are accounted for with this model. Adults’ perception and attitude towards learning or education are best explained when using the cognitive theories of motivation.

Richard Essay -- essays research papers fc

â€Å"Richard Wright: Author of Black Boy†   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Richard Wright’s â€Å"Black Boy† depicts the different observations of the South and the North. In the South, Wright faces pre-depression and racism. In the North, Wright faces the conflicts from the Communist party. At the end of Black Boy, Wright quotes â€Å"What had I got out of living in the city? What had I got out of living in the South?†(Wright 452)   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Wright’s thought of the South was that the South was a socially unreconstructed region where blacks who asserted their basic human rights invited punishment or death. Black Boy forces the reader to imagine the Southern life from a Negro point of view. The perspective of the South is that the entire society is assembled to keep the Negro in his place. White society of the South restricts a black person’s freedom of movement, discourages his ambition, and banishes the black person to a place of inferiority. In Black Boy, an elevator boy named Shorty invites a white man to kick him for a quarter. Shorty is a symbol of nothingness because he does not have any pride in himself and towards his race. Wright would rather die that have himself kicked. Wright marvels at the willingness of southern Negroes who control themselves, their hopes and dreams. Black Boy states that the South is so dark that Wright wanders over the fact that the sun is still shining. 1 )   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚     Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Readers are felt free to make false charges on the South were forced to inspect the problems of race, oppression and class in the North. Due to segregation in the South, it was unthinkable for a black boy to become a writer. Wright learns that his people grope at the Southern life making them believe in a better world up North. Wright leaves the South so that he could engage himself with reality. Wright’s reflections on the South ended with a quote, â€Å"This was the culture from which I sprang, this was the terror from which I fled.†(Wright 303)   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  When Wright goes to Chicago, Wright did not go North with a sense of what he wanted to become. In the North, Wright faces the pressure of the Communist Party. In the Communist Party, the themes of black and white are less intense. The issue of black and white as a race continues but Wright notes, he now feels â€Å"a different sort of tens... ...for the Walls bringing in firewood and the Walls consider their house a second home to Wright where he understands them more than his own family. Wright wrote Black Boy knowing that the book should not be read as a historical truth which struggles to report those false facts, but read as a narrative truth. Wright does not mention that his mother was a successful schoolteacher and that many of his friends were college faculty members. Wright also leaves out his father’s family background, which could have explained what type of person Wright’s father was. 5) The story that Richard Wright creates in Black Boy, whatever it is a historical record, is important both in telling the reader how the author remembers life in the South and in showing the reader what kind of person the author was to have written Wright’s story as he did. 6) Bibliography 1) Harold Bloom, Modern Critical Views: Richard Wright, New York, Chelsea House Publishers @1987 2) Richard Wright, Black Boy: A Recollection of Childhood And Youth, New York, Harper Perennial Publishers @1945 3) Hayley Mitchell, Readings on Black Boy, San Diego, Ca, David L. Bender @2000

Corrections Purpose and History Essay

The history of punishment is a unique one, since the dawn of man human kind has punished one another. Man did not merely throw someone in a chamber and let them contemplate their crimes such as we do in today’s society; rather, during those early times, punishment was harsh and swift. Criminals were not drawn through the litigation processes; instead, they were found immediately guilty of a crime and brought forth to be punished in an open forum, serving to the masses as an example of the consequences of crime. The early forms of punishment in Europe varied greatly but all forms were meant to inflict unimaginable pain upon the recipient, and it is from the European methods of imprisonment from which the U.S. drew inspiration. Punishment such as crucifixion, burning on pyres, guillotines, and gauntlets are but a few examples of what methods were utilized as early methods of punishment in early Europe. This illustrates the underlying ideology that punishment should be administer ed with two principles in mind, deterrence and retribution. Purpose and History Methods of imprisonment introduced near the turn of the eighteenth century England inspired and revolutionized the way we punish and house inmates. In England during the fifteenth and sixteenth century’s corporal punishment reined supreme. Public beatings were carried out in the streets with whips; beheadings and torture were the norm for serious crimes; and enslavement was common for petty offenders. During the seventeenth century in England and other European countries, imprisonment for lesser offenses started to occur but conditions were less than desirable or humane. These facilities were overcrowded, unsanitary, and, worst of all, gender/age neutral, which meant that male felons frequently took liberties with incarcerated women and children (â€Å"Incarcerated: The History of the Penitentiary from 1776-Present†, 1997). The American Colonies quickly embraced the idea of imprisonment, because of the religious freedoms English settlers sought when they colonized this nation. The Quakers were a religious group that settled in the northeast United States and they developed new laws to govern punishment and incarcerations that focused on prolonged imprisonment to serve as retribution for crimes committed. The Quakers belief system focused on of morality, peace, non-violence, and humanity. As such they showed mercy on offenders by allowing them to shed their anti-social behaviors through long term incarceration and a penance of hard labor. It is from this that modern the concept of reformation was established. Since this form of incarceration gained popularity, it has held onto two core principles: that a criminal can make restitutions for his/her crimes and that a convict can be eventually reintegrated back into society. The new form of punishment provided an alternative to the implemented punishments of yesteryear. Auburn versus Cherry Hill Pennsylvania System This reformation of how society punished criminals served as the foundation for new and competing theories on incarceration and punishment. In America around the early 1800’s, two prison systems were the dominant models of confinement: the Pennsylvania and the Auburn State. The first model was the Pennsylvania model, which was first used at Cherry Hill prison. This model used solitary confinement as its primary tool: convicts were perpetually detained without interactions with other individuals or time outside of confinement. The idea was that solitary confinement would lead to inward reflection and religious motivation and result in a penitent convict. In fact the word penitentiary actually comes from the Pennsylvania model of perpetual confinement because it had religious implications. At first, particularly in Cherry Hill, a Bible would be left in the solitary confinement cells in the hopes it would help prisoners repent. The second model was the Auburn State prison system, which supported the labor penance model. It operated under the assumption that hard, physical labor could not only serve as restitution but as a means of helping a convicted criminal reintegrate into society fully reformed. Often, prisoners worked during the day in total silence and would be hosed down them at night. A main criticism of the Auburn system was that prisoners were being used essentially as slave labor. Inmates were being farmed out to private business owners, who had contracts with the state, which in turn lined the pockets of the private businesses and cut costs for the state. As such, the Auburn model became the popular model, because states faced significantly less prison and prisoner care costs. Businesses paid a fee in order to use the prisoners and the prisoners acted as unpaid labor for the businesses. The state prisons pocketed the fees thus creating a revenue stream that could be used to support the prisons, rather than tapping into state funds, i.e. tax payer dollars (Colvin, 1997). Around the 1920’s to 1930’s many changes occurred due to the state of the economy and activists pressing the government for prison reform. One of the main changes occurred when Congress enacted the Hawes Cooper Act, which effectively stymied the sale of prison-made goods or the us e of prison-labor by making such goods subject to state punitive laws. This act was passed in no small part due to the jobs that were needed by good upstanding citizens—jobs that were being taken away during extremely tough financial times by cheap prison labor. Congress had the authority to pass such a law thanks to its power to control and tax interstate commerce. The Ashurst-Sumners Act was the final nail in the coffin by prohibiting transport companies from accepting prison-made products (McShane & Williams,1996). The changes that stemmed from the Depression helped shape the correctional system into the rehabilitation-oriented program we have today. Prisoners are now classified into the likelihood of rehabilitation and the type of crimes that were committed, and this determines what type of facility an offender is incarcerated. Since 1935, the government made it clear that prisons must separate prisoners on the basis of gender and age. Now, facilities specifically for juvenile offenders have been established and the handling procedures for yo unger offenders have been defined. Furthermore, there are programs to rehabilitate all types of offenders whether their needs are as simple as talking to someone during counseling sessions or educational opportunities. In some ways this system has been detrimental to corrections as a whole because it arguably results in overcrowding and a more lenient attitude: if you commit a crime then you will only have to contend with years off your life rather than hard labor and making reparations for the crime (Seiter, 2011). Over-population has resulted in more money taken from the taxpayers because if there are more people in the correctional system, more facilities and care are needed. Crime levels have dissipated over the years but not dramatically enough to really prove that this system is the true solution to our problems. Conclusion Modern principles of rehabilitation and reform have brought about the institution of facilities to incarcerate convicted individuals; these structures are called penitentiaries, jails, and prisons. Current prisons are more aptly concerned with long-term detention rather than a temporary housing prior to punishment like it was used as in the past. Today’s Prisons are a shell of the former institutions. Inmates in facilities today would never allow themselves to be used for labor outside prison walls it would be considered cruel and unusual punishment. For now the correctional system work, but soon it could be on the verge of collapse and any moment the flood gates could burst and the concept of rehabilitation could come to an end. References: Mcshane, M. D., & Williams, F. P. (1996). Encyclopedia of American Prisons (2nd ed.). Taylor and Francis. INCARCERATED: THE HISTORY OF THE PENITENTIARY FROM 1776- PRESENT. (1997). Retrieved from http://www.richeast.org/htwm/jails/Jails.html Colvin, M. (1997). Penitentiaries, Reformatories, and Chain Gangs: Social Theory and the History of Punishment in Nineteenth Century America. : St. Martin’s Press. Seiter, R. (2011). Corrections an Introduction (3rd ed.). Upper saddle Hall, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall.

My Strengths And Personal Statement - 1502 Words

One of my strengths would be my responsiveness to students’ individual needs. I understand that not every student is at the same level, and I try to do my best to check in with every student, and make sure that they are on the right track with their assignments. It is important to me to respect the dignity of each learner, while also challenging them and helping them to grow academically. On a ‘Get to know me’ questionnaire that I gave to each student, many students said that they did not feel comfortable speaking up in class. I had to find a way to incorporate oral speaking into my lessons because a part of the English nine B.C. curriculum is oral language speaking strategies. In order to prepare the grade nine students to read their poems out loud in front of the class, I scaffolded the reading process. I began the lesson by going over an oral speaking rubric, that I created to assess the poetry oral presentation, then I asked students to assess their peerâ€⠄¢s poetry readings by telling them one thing they did well and one thing they could do improve upon, then students were given a few minutes to practice on their own, and then students presented to the class. Scaffolding the presentation process really helped to calm down the student’s nerves. I even had the principal come watch one block’s poetry presentations, and the students amazed their peers, the principal, and myself with their readings; this was definitely one of the highlights from my practicum experience.Show MoreRelatedPersonal Statement : My Leadership Strengths1344 Words   |  6 Pages My leadership strengths are that I am persistence, I am creative, and I am expert in accounting. Being persistence means I never give up, not even when things get tough. 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