Jiahao Guo
IST 335
Final Paper
April 25, 2015 Final Reflection

1. Work motivation
Our project of this semester is an online platform for teachers and students to set a date and time for office hours. The motivations of the whole process during the time we were working on the project were the power to keep us moving forward. Motivation, according to Britannica Academic online, “forces acting either on or within a person to initiate behavior”. It suggests “the activating properties of the process involved in psychological motivation” (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2015). In this situation, the motivations for my group and for me include several items.
First and foremost, the motivation of most of us to work hard on this project is to get a better score obviously. This reason is quite plain and frank. Since the project covers a big part of the final score, and we have all devoted time and energy to the course, most of the students want their final score to be worthy of their devotions; secondly, each department has their different works to do with their own motivations. For instance, members working in Human Resource department have many human relations to deal with, and also they need to come up with a proper point distribution strategy to give each individual who is working in the organization some points that matches his or her workload. So, getting everyone satisfied with points becomes their motivation. In our case, for us, members working in product development department, getting our product better is one of our motivations. In our department, members were divided into three groups, one for each phase with a particular work. The whole process will not be successfully done without everyone’s devotion whole-heartedly, because even a single flaw during the process in a phase will affect the next phase, which will bring many troubles for the other group members; thirdly, personally speaking, I want to get my own job done in a very satisfying way. Abraham Maslow proposed needs theory in the 1940s and according to him, the needs can be arranged in a hierarchical order: physiological needs, safety needs, social and belongingness needs, esteem needs and self-actualization needs (Hitt, 211). For me, since I’m not a native speaker, I want to get my part of the job done as well as I can so that I can prove my own ability in team work and in the project as well as other students even though English is not my mother tongue. Besides, getting a better result from the work can give me more confident and let me have more faith in myself in the next project or any other work.
In addition, Victor Vroom’s expectancy theory can also be applied into the project of Easy Hours. According to Vroom, motivation is “a function of an individual’s expectancy that a given amount of effort will lead to a particular level of performance, instrumentality judgments that indicate performance will lead to certain outcomes, and the valences of outcomes.” (Hitt, 219). In the project, all members of us expect our work can finally end up with a success, which means a useful online service actually benefiting our customers. This expectation is at the same time, also our motivation.
At last, equity theory covers a big part of the motivations in our work. Stacey Adams’s equity theory can be understood as a theory that “suggests motivation is based on a person’s assessment of the ratio of outcomes she receives for inputs on the job compared to the same ratio for a comparison other.” (Hitt, 222). When I compare my outcomes and my inputs with other’s outcomes and inputs, the inequality can be pretty obvious. For example, some of us who have devoted much more time and energy got much lower scores than those who have not devoted so much. For me and my other Chinese companions, we did more but talked less, which might be one of the reasons why our marks are not as high as others. So, this naturally becomes one of our motivations to do a better job for the project.