What Factors Do Motivate Employees at the Workplace? Evidence from Service Organizations

Abstract

Work motivation is critical for ensuring sustainability of any business firm. Motivated personnel essentially helps an organization achieve its organizational goal and objective. Hence, it has become an essential duty for business managers and management committees to identify the motivating factors that would strongly affect their employees. The purpose of the current research is to identify which are the factors that motivate service employees most at their workplace in Bangladesh. The study has used survey questionnaires to collect data from service employees. Convenience sampling is used for data collection. A total of 240 questionnaires were distributed and 183 completed questionnaires were returned (response rate: 77%). The study used purposeful motivating factors, which are ranked (from 1 to 10) by the service employees according to the significance of the factors. Mean value is applied to determine the most crucial motivating factor, where the factor with lowest mean value is considered as the highest significant motivating factor. Results reveal that job certainty, career growth and advancement opportunity, and quality working environment have been the most crucial and influential motivating factors for the service employees. The study adequately underlines the necessity of motivational factors and provides some guidelines to keep employees motivated.