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Every second of your life and every decision you make is being influenced by your motivation and your morality. These concepts are very important and very different for every individuals, every society, every organization and every country. Motivation is the need or reason to do something ( Cambridge English Dictionary , z.d.). Job motivation is needed for an employee to correctly execute their tasks within the organization. Morality are the norms and values for a person. Values are on a more individual level and are about principles a person sticks to and norms are at a more national level and can be formal and informal.
Both Job motivation and morality is highly relevant in the public sector. It is important to keep the system running efficiently, to keep being trustworthy for the citizens and because they need to make laws, policies and rules. You could even argue that public official should have an exemplary function, because they have such a big function in a country and deal with the citizens living conditions and money.
In this paper the motivation and morality of a public servant will be discussed based on a interview with the program manager in the ministry of in ministry of infrastructure and water state, Inspection Living environment and Transportation (ILT). The name of the program manager is José van der Linden-Valkenburg and she has been working for the government for a long time. She studied governance and she worked in the second chamber as a public official for a long time. When she managed a big project in the second chamber and did this very successfully she was asked to work as program manager in the ILT.
The paper will be divided into two parts. The first part is about motivation and the second part is about morality.
Motivation
Why do public officials work for the government? Is it because of the security they get with it or is it because of the greed for more power? Motivation is different for everyone, but are very similar as well. Motivation can be influenced very easily, but also strongly comes from inside. The first theory that will be discussed in this paper is the theory of Frederick Herzberg. Frederick Herzberg (1959) distinguished between motivators (satisfiers) and hygiene factors (dissatisfiers) (De Vries, 2016). Motivators are factors that increase motivation and hygiene factors are factors that decrease motivation.
The motivator factors are about achievement and recognition. José van der Linden said she is an idealist and she works hard for results. A motivator she mentioned is: My supervisors and colleagues react very positively to the things I achieve in this organization. They support me and have a problem solving mentality which motivates me a lot. Especially compared to my previous job where people were very egoistic and unfriendly.
She mentioned that her salary is necessary and very important, but she really emphasized that the support she got from her colleagues and supervisors are the biggest factor.
A dissatisfier she mentioned is: The working conditions in the organization are not very convenient, because they use the system called flex work. I think this is inconvenient, because when I am not at work early in the morning, I will not be able to have my own office and that can be very hard if I need to write a lot of documents or call with a lot of people. When I need to do these tasks I would rather stay home to do them.
So the motivators motivate her to go to work and the motivators are in the majority for mrs. Van der Linden, because she thinks more highly of the support and only sees the dissatisfier as a inconvenience for certain tasks. She is also very self-motivated, but that cant be measured with this theory, because this theory measures the external factors.
Theory of Douglas McGregor (theory Y X) And William Ouchi (theory Z)
The theory of Douglas McGregor is a theory that, in contrast to the theory of Frederik Herzberg, does measure the motivation of the person themselves and uses external factors as factors that can help keep the job motivation high, depending on the self-motivation.
Theory X assumes that employees want to put as little effort into a job as possible in order to earn their salary, and they need constant external incentives to perform (De Vries, 2016). This theory argues that a lot of external factors need to be involved like: rewards, punishments or intimidation.
In Theory Y the employees are very self-motivated and will improve and perform their best. In the public sector the managers want to have as much employees with self-motivation. Mrs. Van der Linden is very self-motivated and stated:
Even though I am just a small part of the public sector, I want to make a difference. I feel like I do contribute to the society, because when I see the results of my work I feel like I contributed.
This is however in circumstances where there are as little dissatisfiers as possible. If there are dissatisfiers the self-motivation can decrease.
Based on her comment the conclusion can be made that mrs. Van der Linden is very self-motivated and feels rewarded by just doing her job well. Theory Y applies to mrs. Van der Linden and this is why she is very fit for working as a public official.
Morality
According to De Vries (2016) : Morality relates to the values and norms people adhere to at the individual level. Morality is the norms and values people grow up with or get taught. The principles in your head that tell you what is normal and what is not are the values and the habits, traditions and laws are the norms you grew up with. Norms can also be informal, like expected behavior.
Norms and values are very important in a country and in the public sector. The morality in the public sector determines how the government is designed this determines how decisions, laws and policies are made. The most important moral according to Mrs. Van der Linden: I think transparency is the most important for my job. I deal with a lot of government money and transparency is necessary to make sure the money is used lawfully.
The next norms and values she considers important are: representing your and the organizations vision and mission and making sure to separate your private opinion and professional attitude. According to Mrs. Van der Linden a public official should have a exemplary function and if a public official does not have a good moral compass the person will be selected out of the system, because of the relevance of morality in a organization.
To prevent deficient motivation and morality it is very important to have a strategy as a organization to keep the employees motivated and loyal. To achieve this the organization needs more control to steer and direct employees with low motivation and morality. Another way to do this is by preventing corruption and low-morality, because this is something that can become a standard very fast and will become a big dissatisfier very big problem.
Last but not least to improve motivation and morality in a organization, an organization can use codes of conduct. Codes of conduct are principles set to make a clear expectation for the public administrators and to make them aware of their commitment.
The code of conduct in the public sector in The Netherlands is the oath of office. The public officials have to swear an oath to office. This oath makes the commitment to the job even more binding. Mrs. Van der Linden swore the oath of office and told me a public official can choose two ways of swearing the oath of office. You can swear the Christian oath or the non-religious type. Mrs. Van der Linden swore the non-religious type.
So the morality of public officials is highly relevant in the public sector to keep the performance at its best without corruption or abuse for personal gain.
Conclusion
The motivation and morality of public officials and the public sector means a lot and influences the performance of the organizations. Based on my findings and the interview with Mrs. Van der Linden the Inspection of Living environment and Transportation has public officials with high motivation, because of the motivators, people and teams there are, however they could change the work environment to reduce the dissatisfier -mentioned by Mrs. Van der Linden- and improve the motivation even more. Based on the findings on morality it can be concluded that there is a very high morality standard in the Inspection of Living environment and Transportation and especially Mrs. Van der Linden is a very hard working public official who is ready to sacrifice a lot to get good results and to stand for the vision and mission of the organization. The method of doing a interview to get a good inside look in the organization is very helpful, but also frames the story and perceptions of one person within the organization. The conclusion based on this interview and based on the theories fitting the statements in the interview the organization has very high motivation and morality which means that the organization is performing very well.
References
- Cambridge English Dictionary. (z.d.). Geraadpleegd 11 november 2019, van https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/motivation
- De Vries, M. S. (2016). Understanding Public Administration (1ste dr.). Geraadpleegd van https://bookshelf.studystore.nl/#/books/9781137575463/cfi/113!/4/4@0.00:0.00
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