Abstract
Work motivation has been an important component of industrial and organisational psychology since the 1930s (Donovan, 2001:55) and continues to play an important role in organisational research (Büssing, 2001:372). The amount of research on motivation has varied through time. During the 1930s and 1940s, work motivation became prevalent through drive theories i.e. reinforcement or need theories. While the 1950s and 1960s showed a decrease in the amount of attention on work motivation, however further theories were developed based on the cognitive perspective which provided the basis for future theories in the 1960s such as Vroom (1964) or Locke (1968). The 1980s were characterised by researcher trying to co-ordinate the various theories together which resulted in a focus on goal based theory (Kanfer, 1990:76). While most of the drive theories have fallen out of favour in the research community (Kanfer, 1990) the theories remains strongly in the today's literature (Donovan, 2001:53). Research in work motivation has lead to a large scope of result “about both the factors and processes of behaviour and performance in the workplace” (Büssing, 2001:372). Even though most people have an intuitive idea of what motivation is it can be difficult to describe or define properly (Petri et al, 2004:16). Motivation can easily be explained by classifying an employee function at three levels (Mol, 1990:42).
