One of the most important concepts in Human resource development is motivation. For most companies, you can about how a particular employee is not motivated to carry out his or her work and hence their performance has seen a backseat. This is a key reason why most companies spend a huge amount of money in organizing training and recreational activities just to motivate their workers. Motivation is simply the drive or desire has in order to accomplish any work. For example, when a worker is faced with a particular task, it's motivation that will determine if such person will complete it as required or not. Furthermore, loss of competitiveness and underperformance can be linked to the absence of motivation, which results in a loss of productivity and resource of the company. This is the reason why before being hired, most HR managers will buttress a high level of motivation. There are different theories concerning motivation and we will discuss some of them.

First of such theory to discuss is the Herzberg’s Hygiene theory. This theory states that for workers to be motivated some criteria have to be met and the absence of these criteria’s will demotivate the employees. The idea of this theory is that when there is a hygienic factor is a prerequisite for productivity and performance. This is not a determining factor of performance. On the contrary, the nonexistence of such factor can dissuade or demotivates workers or employee. Therefore, the final verdict is that HR managers should create the basic criteria or conditions under which such work is fulfilled so as there will not be an issue with performance.

The second theory is the Maslow’s need hierarchy theory, which proposes that individuals are motived with respect to a hierarchy need. This starts from satiation of the basic requirements and progresses to the need for recognition and finally, the need to realize one’s vision and attains the highest state of personality. The idea of this theory is that as one improves from one stage to the other depending on how such needs are met at each stage. Therefore, human resource department must ensure that worker’s needs are properly taken care of at each particular level so that they will attain the top of their career.

Finally, the last of the theories is the McGregor’s theory of motivation. This is referred as the carrot and stick approach and used by many HR managers. The theory states that employees can be motivated by a dual-pronged strategy of rewarding them for good work and punishing them for bad work. The opposites of these reactions mean that employees have a strong incentive to do well as opposed to doing badly.

For the health of the company, motivating the employees is very important. They can only give their best when they are sufficiently motivated. The strategy followed by most companies is the rewards, compensation, and benefits to motivate their employees. Apart from these, HR should motivate employees through branded items and not just through compensations and benefits.