Employee Motivation and Organizational Behavior Training Course

Course overview

Organizational behavior is the study of why people at work do what they do, and it is one of the few management subjects with a serious research base behind it. It is also one of the most widely misused. Motivation theories from the 1950s are still quoted as settled fact in management training, personality instruments with weak predictive validity are used to make hiring decisions, and a great deal of confident advice about what motivates employees turns out to rest on studies that were never replicated.

This course takes the subject seriously in both directions: what the evidence actually supports about motivation and workplace behavior, and what has been overclaimed. It covers the foundations of organizational behavior, the major motivation theories and their standing, how group and individual behavior forms at work, practical approaches to motivating and engaging people, and how positive behavior is sustained rather than periodically relaunched.

Why the popular version is misleading

Maslow's hierarchy is drawn in almost every management course and was never intended as, nor supported as, a strict sequence. Herzberg's two-factor theory rests on a method with known bias. Personality typologies that sort employees into four colors have almost no predictive validity for job performance. Meanwhile the findings with strong support, goal-setting theory, procedural justice, the effect of autonomy and feedback on intrinsic motivation, get less attention because they are less quotable.

This matters commercially. Organizations redesign reward systems, hiring processes and management practice on the strength of these ideas. Knowing which ones carry weight, and how much, is the difference between a change that works and an expensive rearrangement of the furniture.

Course objectives

By the end of the course, participants will be able to:

• Distinguish motivation theories that hold from those that do not.
• Weigh an effect size before acting on the claim around it.
• Recognize when a cause has been misread as a personal trait.
• Read group behavior before treating it as an individual fault.
• Design work that supports intrinsic motivation.
• Judge when pay will move behavior and when it will crowd it out.
• Trace demotivation to its cause before choosing a response.
• Verify that a measure has not changed the behavior it tracks.
• Test whether a finding transfers from the study to the shift.

Course outline

Unit 1: Introduction to motivation and organizational behavior

• Individual, group and organizational levels of evidence.
• Replication crisis evidence on which findings survived.
• Conscientiousness as a predictor, and its real effect size.
• Attribution error, and the causes a manager misreads.

Unit 2: Theories of motivation

• Herzberg's two-factor theory, and the evidence against it.
• Goal-setting theory, the best supported of the theories.
• Self-determination theory, and the claims that hold up.
• The overjustification effect, real but often overstated.

Unit 3: Understanding workplace behavior

• Group norms, and the speed at which new joiners conform.
• Social loafing, and the team structures that invite it.
• Organizational justice and its measured effect on behavior.
• Counterproductive work behavior, and what predicts it.

Unit 4: Strategies to motivate and engage employees

• Job design, and what the job characteristics model shows.
• Setting specific goals, and where stretch targets backfire.
• Feedback, and the studies where it made behavior worse.
• Reward design, and the behavior pay does not change.

Unit 5: Sustaining motivation and positive behavior

• Habit formation, and why most change decays in a quarter.
• Manager behavior as reinforcement, whether intended or not.
• Diagnosing demotivation as capability, clarity or fairness.
• Separating usable findings from those needing conditions.

How the course is delivered

The course is delivered as evidence-led discussion. Participants examine the original research behind the well-known theories, including its limitations, and then apply the conclusions to documented workplace cases. The intent is to leave participants able to challenge a confident claim about motivation with an informed question. There is no personality instrument, no acted element and no scored assessment; the work is analytical.

The applied psychology of motivation is developed further in Psychology of Employee Motivation for participants who want to go deeper on the individual level.

Who should attend

• Managers who want an evidence-based rather than anecdotal view of what moves their teams.
• HR professionals designing reward, performance or engagement approaches.
• Organizational development and internal communications professionals.
• Team leaders dealing with a motivation or behavior problem they have not been able to diagnose.

About EuroQuest International Training

EuroQuest International Training was founded in 2015 by a team with more than 25 years of experience in professional development. We run over 1,000 courses and have trained more than 15,000 participants. Our head office is in Bratislava, Slovakia, and we deliver courses through hubs in Dubai, London, Barcelona, Istanbul, Vienna, Paris and Geneva. Courses are built and reviewed by practitioners who have worked in the fields they teach.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need a psychology background?

No. The course explains the research and the methods behind it as it goes. What it asks for is a willingness to question ideas you may have been taught as settled.

Does the course include a live lab?

No, and there is no personality test or scored instrument either. Participants work from published research and documented workplace cases, analyzed and debated in the room.

Will this tell me how to motivate a specific difficult employee?

It will help you diagnose the cause, which is usually the missing step. The course is educational and does not provide clinical or psychological assessment of individuals.

Related courses

• Employee Engagement and Retention Strategies
• Leadership Psychology and Motivation Techniques
• Developing High-Performance Organizational Culture
• Internal Communications and Employee Engagement

Register for this course

Choose a city and date from the schedule above and register online, or contact the EuroQuest team for group bookings and in-house delivery. Management teams that attend together tend to leave with a shared, and noticeably more skeptical, vocabulary for discussing motivation.