HOW TO IMPROVE EMPLOYEE MOTIVATION AND GROUP PERFORMANCE THROUGH LEADERSHIP – CONCEPTUAL MODEL

We live times of intense change, due to fast technological development, when information and knowledge are certain factors of power. Organizations today must not underestimate the importance of capable employees, owners of these great factors like information and knowledge. The key to success, as many organizations have shown, is, of course a mix of attributes, but one of much importance stands in the quality of employees and their performance. How to motivate and keep such employees is a real challenge in the actual business world. Employee fluctuation is a big risk, because it brings many losses: loss of expertise, of know-how, of time, it breaks relationships and teams. One solution to this problem is creating a good and attractive environment, so that employees are motivated enough to bring up the best in them and rise their performance to a high level. The main objective of this study is to present a new approach in motivating employees and raising their performance. In this approach, the leader is the main pawn, the generator and sustainer of a healthy environment. By reviewing the literature and the most recent works in this domain, two styles of leadership come into focus: transformational and servant leadership. Both are relatively new concepts, with common but also different attributes, and both having the same final goal: performance, but through a different approach. Based on a vast literature research, the conceptual model was built, considering the main attributes of the two leadership styles, their impact on motivational factors, their influence on job satisfaction and ultimately on team performance. The intermediary results of the research sustain the conceptual framework and main hypothesis of the study. One important contribution of this research is introducing elements of servant leadership together with transformational leadership in the empirical research and also creating an overall conceptual framework which can be applied into practical context, in order to help organizations improve their performance through nonconventional methods