Ability, motivation and employe work behaviors

Abstract

Human resource activities match individuals and jobs. Individuals bring particular
skills/knowledge/aptitudes and needs values to the employment relationship. Jobs
have certain content or duties, tasks, behaviors, functions and responsibilities
necessary for satisfactory performance. Three general factors affect employees work
behaviors. First is individual ability. Everyone has heard stories of the super
salesperson or super engineer who, when promoted to management, turned out to be
mediocre or worse. Skills, aptitudes and knowledge that are well suited to one job may
be useless in another. Second is the complex dimension of motivation, resulting from
the match between the individual’s needs/values and job outcomes, as well as the
perceived link between engaging in work behaviors and obtaining the desired
outcomes. The third factor affecting employee work hard behaviors is conditions
beyond the individual’s control. Motivation interacts with ability to affect individual work
behaviors. Staffing activities move people into, through, and out of the organization.
Determining which individuals to hire, promote, transfer or lay off often requires
indicators of their ability to accomplish the job requirements. Measuring abilities and
predicting future behaviors from those abilities is an important purpose of staffing
activities.