Alla vägar leder till motivation? : -En fallstudie om motivation på kunskapsintensiva företag

Background: Motivation is a subject that is on everyone's lips in today's knowledge-intensive firms. What is motivation and what are we motivated by? We will, through three case studies, be grappling with the notion to clarify how managers and employees' perception of the concept is different, or possibly similar. Furthermore, the thesis examines whether the theory and practice of motivation are consistent with each other. Purpose: The purpose of our study is to seek understanding of what management within an organization believes are motivating their staff as well as how the staff perceive themselves be motivated by. We ask ourselves if organizations is up to date with the development of what motivates people. To increase understanding of the field of motivation, we want to examine if it exists a gap between management's understanding of what motivates people at work, and what employees themselves in this organization believes are motivating them. Method: The thesis consists of a case study of three case-companies with knowledge-intensive jobs and officials in the operational core. A qualitative research involving the collection of qualitative data through eight semi-structured interviews have been conducted. Results & Conclusions: The results of our study showed that the perception of motivation is consistent between managers and employees. What the staff perceives themselves be motivated by, their managers are aware of and are working actively to promote. Although the intrinsic motivators are those that mainly motivates the staff, extrinsic rewards in the form of monetary rewards when goals are achieved are being used. Furthermore, we believe that the theory and practice are in harmony with each other. This because the major traits of the respondents views are in line with what theorists believe warrant. However, we concluded that the actions performed to promote motivation in the workplace covers all the aspects of our theoretical framework of motivational theory and not just what the managers and employees expressed as motivators