Nokia’s New Home, Case Study Example

• Identify at least two reasons Romanians are motivated to obtain a job at Nokia’s new factory in Cluj

Romanians seek to join Nokia out of two motivating factors. The first factor is in relation to what would be considered according to the Maslow’s hierarchy needs as a physiological factor. The Romanians need basic necessities of food and shelter. To meet these needs they need a job. Considering that the jobs at Nokia are expected to be well paying, the people are highly motivated to take this opportunity to carter for their needs.

The second motivation is the opportunities that Nokia has to offer. The people see the employment opportunity with Nokia as a chance to not only learn and develop their technical knowhow buts also fast track their career development. This is reinforced by the expectation that Nokia expects the plant to be fully under the management of Romanians in four years time. The people who get an opportunity to work at Nokia will therefore be well positioned to take senior management positions at the company. Not forgetting the fact that this is a big employer who to the potential employees will be a major source of pride.

• Identify at least three factors that are likely to contribute to the intrinsic motivation of those hired. Explain how these factors will contribute.

Challenge

This intrinsic factor implies that people have meaningful goals that they are trying to attain. For the goals to be challenging they require people to have activity at optimal levels or at high levels of difficulty. Nokia is a global leader in the industry and therefore the people working there will have high targets expected of them. This will compel them to work extremely hard to meet the challenge. This will be a key motivation to ensure high level performance.

Competition

People want to naturally compare favourably with others. The employees will seek to outdo each other at the work place to ensure that they gain recognition. The competition could be natural or artificial depending on the circumstances. The competition that one puts up to try and gain respect from peers is the natural competition. Artificial competition on the other hand is instilled through recognising the top performers and rewarding them.

Cooperation

Nokia has instilled a culture of cooperation among its employees. This helps the employees feel to belong to the company as well as feel the urge to give assistance to their co workers. The cooperation is a major intrinsic motivator as most employees will always feel comfortable working in an environment where there is synergy between the various functions.

Leadership

The knowledge by the Romanians that they will be in leadership positions and control the operations as well as major decisions in the plant is also a major motivation for the employees as they need to see a future that portend better possibilities for them to be motivated.

• Identify at least three factors that are likely to contribute to the extrinsic motivation of those hired. Explain how these factors will contribute.

Herzberg’s theory on motivation describes several factors that he also calls hygiene factors of motivation. These are factors that are likely to cause dissatisfaction if absent (Baas & Avolio 1994). The extrinsic factors are therefore vital for the proper delivery of duties.

One of the extrinsic factors is pay. Employees who are well paid are motivated to work hard. Setting pay scales that compare favourably with the existing market scales is likely to be a major motivator to the employees to work hard. This ensures that they are highly motivated and they therefore deliver good results. This also ensures that the quality of work done is good enough to ensure that the customers are satisfied.

The other extrinsic motivation factor is recognition. The employees at the Nokia offices are likely to be highly motivated due to the recognition. Nokia has a good recognition scheme which is likely to keep the employees highly motivated. There are those employees who are likely to work hard just to earn this recognition. On the other hand the recognition that these employees are likely to receive from their societies due to the mere fact that they work for a world’s leading handset maker.

Supervision

The system of job supervision and management at Nokia which includes bonuses being granted on basis of entire group performance is another extrinsic factor that is likely to have major impact on the employees at Cluj. Most important is the consideration by the employees of the likely consequences of not cooperating to meet their set targets. The fear of punitive measures being adopted by the employer is therefore a major extrinsic factor that motivates the employees to work hard.

• Identify at least two ways Nokia motivates global managers to cooperate with each other and share their knowledge and expertise.

The bonuses given to the senior executives are pegged on Nokia’s manufacturing performance on the world wide scale. This means that these payments are dependent on the overall performance as opposed to the performance of one unit. To ensure that this is achieved, these financial chiefs are compelled to collaborate and share the information they have especially on good practices that are likely to improve the overall performance of the company as a whole.

The second way is through penalising the drop in the consolidated performance on all the managers. This is shown where the manager states that if the group is performing sub-optimally they all feels it in their pay slips. This ensures that the managers make their best efforts to ensure that the performance targets are met.  This ensures that there is cohesiveness of deed and designs as well as thought sharing which helps improve the performance of the entire company.

• Update the case information by using at least two (2) data sources in addition to the case.

Nokia seeks to have a flat operation (Nokia.com). This means that the chain of command will be dismantled hence allowing easy relations between the various employees. This could serve as a major source of motivation as most of the employees will feel very at ease in the organization hence enabling them to give their best performance. Besides improving employee performance this structure will help speed up the operations as it will speed up decision making.

Another article takes job levelling as a major consideration in deciding employee motivation.  Employees can be demotivated if they are placed in positions that do not meet their qualifications. This was a problem faced during the Nokia Siemens merger. Placing an employee in a position where they feel like they have been demoted has negative impacts on their motivation (Report on Organizational behaviour).

References

Bass, B.M. & Avolio, B.J. (Eds.). (1994). Improving organizational effectiveness through transformational leadership. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Nokia Website. Nokia as an employer. Retrieved 24 Feb 2010. Available. http://www.nokia.com/careers/nokia-as-an-employer.

The scribd.com. Report on organizational behaviour. Retrieved 25 Feb 2010. Available http://www.scribd.com/doc/17300180/Report-on-Organizational-Behaviour.