Impact of Motivational Conditions on Cooperation in Project Teams

Abstract:

Project work has become a common practice in organizations in recent years. Studies have demonstrated the extremely appropriate motivational environment of the teams to determine employee behavior. The research examines the impact of motivational conditions on cooperation in project teams. We discovered that the coherence between performance and mastery environments has a positive and significant connection to the collaborative of distinct organizations. In addition under conditions of low prosocial motivation, a focus on either a mastery or a performance climate is more likely than an agreement between those two climates.

Introduction:

Collaboration plays an important role in a project team work nowadays and it's a key success factor in teams and projects. Successful project management relies on team collaboration which typically ends in successful deliverables. Collaboration with effective coordination and communication reflects positively on the teams' performance. Understanding what motivates employees climates level to effectively collaborate in team members, results in them optimizing their personal performance. Based on Nerstad et al (2013), there are two distinguished motivational organizational climates, a mastery and a performance climates.

Get quality help now

Bella Hamilton

Verified writer

Proficient in: Motivation

5 (234)

“ Very organized ,I enjoyed and Loved every bit of our professional interaction ”

+84 relevant experts are online

Hire writer

Employees in performance climates tend to withhold information and compete with each other's to achieve a personal advantage over their peers yet under certain conditions positive behaviors and work engagement is noticed. While in mastery climates employees tend to share their knowledge with peers and peruse self-development but deviate from companies objective.

The problem definition:

Mastery climate alone benefits individuals yet harms the organization, while performance in the other hand benefits the organization yet affects individuals, what if the two climates exists simultaneously, the focus point of this study is to explore the extent to which the congruence and the (in) congruence of the two climates and their effects on collaboration and motivation.

Literature:

The literary review demonstrates the historical development of the empirical experiment test with 4 hypothesis, that contributes to mainly the study of motivational environments, and which discusses the goal-setting theory. A second examination examined the role of pro-social motivation in relation to team results in this respect, and these studies can be viewed as moderate by offering pro-social motivation in relationships between motivating climates and team collaboration.

Methodology:

The method technique consisted of sample and procedure, measurement and analysis. At first stages. The survey was distributed via e-mail and published through LinkedIn. 235 responses were collected all of whom are senior project team members from various Netherlands organizations and 173 were qualified for further analysis. In the second phase, the study used multiple scales without changes in items or anchors, the participants answered 79 questions covering 5 subjects keeping in mind a business innovative project they had been part of for the past two years such as creating new business strategies, developing or re designing a business processes. Team collaboration is evaluated through 14 Collaborative Work Questionnaire items. This tool is appropriate for this research since it measures individual's perceptions of cooperative behavior and shows how people perceive cooperation in teams. Mastery and performance climates were measured using a scale which is commonly used in climate research, since it measures employees understanding of how effective they are in their job environment. Congruence in motivational environments is identified when the scores of both climates is equal and (in) congregation is when the scores are exactly the opposite. Prosocial motivation was measured by assessing how individuals would help each other's. Several levels of controls were included such as gender, age, and education level and tenure category. Last stage analysis, polynomial regression analysis with response surface was used to analyze the impact of the climates in team motivation and collaboration.

Result obtain by author:

Means, standard and measures of correlations are shown in Table 1). We refrain from including control variables in our further analyzes in order to improve the authority of our experiments. Table (2) reports the outcomes of the analyzes of regression. Hypothesis 1 suggests that a motivational climate with equal quantities of elements of mastery and achievement is positively linked to team cooperation. This assumption is supported by the outcomes in Table 2 (M3) (slope al= 0.32; p= 0.001). M3 also demonstrates an adverse connection between motivational climate incongruence and team cooperation (slope a3 -0.40; p= 0.000), thus promoting Hypotheses 2a and 2b. Fig. 3 graphically shows these impacts and gives a comprehensive overview of the outcomes of regression. Concerning Hypothesis 2a and 2b, Fig. 3 demonstrates that team cooperation is small in a low-performance climate of mastery and high in a high-performance climate of mastery. Fig.4 show the findings of the response surface analysis, respectively Analysis of the information for a low level of prosocial motivation reveals a substantial favorable slope along the P= M line (Table 2, M5: slope al= 0.51; p= 0.000) stating that when both environments are present in equal quantities, there is a positive association with team cooperation. However, they think it safe to suggest that this will still have a beneficial, but insignificant, impact on team cooperation when performance environment and mastery environment are high simultaneously. In fig (4) display that a climate congruence of mastery-performance is less ideal for team cooperation. In other words, either a mastery climate or a performance climate is favorably connected with collaboration in teams in the presence of low prosocial motivation.

Overall, these findings indicate that staff perceive more cooperation in teams at greater rates of prosocial motivation when there is congruence in motivational environments, i.e. aspects of a mastery and a climate of performance are present. At low rates of prosocial motivation, more team cooperation when it comes to the same staff perceives incongruity in motivational environments, the organizational climate is either focused on mastery or as it is not possible to distinguish a clear climate, and cooperation in teams.

Discussion and Conclusion:

In a survey among 173 senior project member from various organizations, found that the congruence between performance and mastery climates is positively impacting collaborations in teams even if low prosocial motivation exists. It is still important to address performance objectives in a mastery climate since too much focus on mastery can create less commitment to achieving organizational goals. The mastery-performance climate incongruence relationship shows results in that when performance climate is perceived to dominate the mastery climate, this is associated with the perception of low team collaboration. In conclusion, it can be said that the presence of performance climate may not be as negative as suggested by previous studies. At the end of the day, organizational paradigm, structure, and policies often resolve around performance, not mastery.