Factors affecting employees’ motivation

Article history: Received: August 10, 2020 Received in revised format: November 15 2020 Accepted: November 27, 2020 Available online: November 27, 2020 This study primordially aimed at determining the effects of different factors affecting employee’s motivation at Groz-Beckert Vietnam Co. Ltd. Upon perusal and review of related literature, the researchers found out that there is a dearth of studies that have been conducted relative to this subject appertaining to MNCs in Asian countries. Thus, this paper intends to provide empirical evidences towards the link between and among selected variables being covered in this study. The researchers used the quantitative research analysis method which have surveyed and floated questionnaires to 300 employees from various units, departments, divisions at Groz-Beckert Vietnam Company Ltd and retrieved 265 validated responses. Research result further revealed that, out of the 7 factors: income and benefit, superior, work result, colleague, work condition, training and promotion, work nature positively and significantly impacts the staffs and workers of the said organization. Based on research results and findings, the researchers will provide some viable and palatable recommendations for the human resource development policies and such proposals can enhance employee’s motivation in the said entity. For ease of data collection, convenience sampling was adopted. Data were analyzed using SPSS version 21 that included descriptive and inferential statistics. The outcomes of the study showed that almost all the variables have positive correlation with the workers motivation in performing their jobs at the workplace. © 2021 by the authors; licensee Growing Science, Canada


Introduction
The development of economics in general and specifically for many enterprises depends on many factors, conditions, social and environmental forces, however; the most crucial one rests on human resources. As the competition on market, economy has stiffly increased day by day, the trend of integration and globalization has become closer and closer to every firm, especially with the recent advancement of science and technology, the 4.0 technology revolution. The quality level of human resource is the key to success for all companies to fulfil the rising demand of development. Numerous researches have already been undertaken to assess and evaluate the different factors that influence motivation, however; these are contextually and geographically examined. This study tries to examine and focus on the impact of Groz-Beckert operations under the legal and regulatory conditions existing in Vietnam in the context of human resource practices prevalent in international organizations such as Groz-Beckert. Groz-Beckert is the world's leading provider of industrial machine needles, precision parts and fine tools, as well as systems and services for the production and joining of textile fabrics with over 160 years of operation. All around the world, the products and services support the textile processes of knitting and warp knitting, weaving, felting, tufting, carding and sewing. As a subsidiary of Groz-Beckert group, Groz-Beckert Vietnam Co. Ltd. is deeply aware of the importance of a motivated workforce (Groz-Beckert, 2020). Therefore, human resource training and development has always been a strategical investment of the company. A lot of policies on income, welfare as well as the team building activities have been put into action. The target is to build up qualified employees for the mid-term and longterm plan of the company. However, there is still room for improvement since the fluctuation rate is still at a high level (7%). This will cause instability and difficulty in achieving the increasing demand for quality, quantity. The present study hopes to contribute some new perspective for the stable development of the company.

Research objectives
The research aimed to analyze, evaluate factors affecting employee's motivation at Groz-Beckert Vietnam Co. Ltd and thereby proposing managerial actions. In details: Firstly, determine factors affecting employee's motivation at Groz-Beckert Vietnam Co. Ltd. Secondly, evaluate the influence level of each factor at Groz-Beckert Vietnam Co. Ltd. Lastly, propose managerial actions at Groz-Beckert Vietnam Co. Ltd.

Research questions
To attain the research objective, this study focuses on answering the following research questions: Does Work Nature factor affect employee's motivation? Does Work Result factor affect employee's motivation? Does Work Condition factor affect employee's motivation? Does Training and Promotion factor affect employee's motivation? Does Income and Benefit factor affect employee's motivation? Does Colleague factor affect employee's motivation? Does Superior factor affect employee's motivation? Hitka et al. (2019) define motivation as a psychological process that fuels and sustains individual's actions in connection with his/her job, tasks or projects. Motivation has played a major role on employees' productivity and as one of the main ingredients of management process, managers and leaders should possess adequate understanding on the factors and forces that enhance motivation. Motivation-driven employees are expected not only to perform beyond expectations but contributes to the achievement of organizational objectives. Phuong and Tu (2017) earlier defined motivation as the willingness, passion, and efforts to achieve organizational goals and employee performance. Also, motivation is a major element of labor potentials that employees experienced in their workplaces that significantly relates to employee productivity (Cantele & Zardini, 2018). Latham (2012) describes motivation as the method that focuses on individual strength, path, and determination of efforts toward accomplishing goals and objectives.

Factors affecting motivation
Employee's motivation is affected by many different factors which can be categorized into 3 groups: Group 1: Human-related factors. They are intrinsic factors that energize a person to do something, examples: one's benefit, personal goal, personal attitude, the ability of a person, experience. Group 2: External factors influencing an employee, examples: company's culture, human resources policies. Group 3: Work nature-related factors are the main elements that determine the worker's salary in an organization, such as job stability and autonomy, level of the discrepancy of a task, responsibility, task complexity and work's attraction.
Another model that explains how motivation can be achived is by understanding the individual's level of needs through the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Based on this model, five-level pyramid of needs exists within a person: Physiological needs: these needs are often called physical or biological needs to survive for human beings and these include food, water, shelter, air, clothing,warmth, etc. According to Maslow, these are primary needs although the lowest level of needs which must be satisfied first before all other secondary needs (McLeod, 2020). Safety needs: These needs are considered higher than the physiological needs and based on Maslow's hieracrchy, these encompasses safety and security needs. The urgency of people to experience peace and order, perdictability, and presence of control to people's lives. These can be experienced by individuals, families, and the society like the availability of schools, business, police, medical care, etc. Common examples of this type of needs include financial and emotional security, social stability, health and well-being, laws and order, freedom from fear and others. Love and belongingness need: These needs belong to the third higher needs that empahsized interpersonal relationships, friendships, sense of belongingness. Examples of this type of needs include but not limited to acceptance; affection and love; trust; intimacy; affiliations with family, colleagues, friends, and other related needs (Doerr, 2015).
Esteem need: These needs encomapssess people's longing to have a unchanging and credibly affirmative assessment of themselves. According to Maslow's model, the needs are the fourth level of needs and classified into two categories: (i) esteem for oneself (dignity, achievement, mastery, and independence) and (ii) the desire for reputation or respect from others (e.g., status, prestige). Accordingly, respect or reputation play an assential role for children and adolescents (McLeod, 2020). Self-actualization need: these needs are considered the highest level of needs and it is referred as the realization of individual's potential, fulfilling oneself, peak experiences and achievement of things that were once longed for. Maslow (1943) labels these needs as realizing the needs and desires that people can become in the most possible way.
On the other hand, one of the theories of motivation is the Herzberg's two-factor theory known as the Hygiene Factors (Job Dissatisfaction) and Motivator Factors (Job Satisfaction) wherein Hygiene factors consist of pay, company and administrative policies, fringe benefits, physical working conditions, status, interoersonal relations, and job security while Motivator factors comprised of recognition, sense of achievement, growth and oppotunities, responsibilty, and meaningfulness of work (Schermerhorn, 2008). Furthermore, hygiene factors are those job forces which are important for the occurence of motivation in job settings. If these forces are not present in the workplace, they lead to job dissatisfaction (Gagne & Deci, 2005;Powell & Kokkranikal, 2015). The hygiene factors symbolized the physiological needs which the individuals wanted and expected to be fulfilled. Brief definitions of hygine factors are stated with pay referring to the salary structure established by organizations and reasonably given to employees based on their services offered; company and administrative policies are clear and just policies that governs the organization's operations often evidenced by operations manual and other related regulations; fringe benefits embodies employee benefits such as provision of family benefits, health care plans, health insurances, etc. Physical working conditions refer to clean, hygenic, and safe workplace with updated and maintained equipment and physical resources existing in organizations; status describes the employees' status in the company; interpersonal relations consider the relationship of employees towards, supervisors, peers, and subordinates; and security which defines the employees' job security.
Furthermore, motivator factors are job satisfaction factors and these are briefly defined: recognition describes the praise and rewards for employee achievements; sense of achievement encompasses the employees' emotional feeling of accomplishing certain tasks with fulfilment and happiness; growth and opportunities involves oportunities for employees to improve in their career and personal growth; responsibility which means that employees must hold themselves responsible for the work which also means that employees should realize that they have responsibility and accountability of their work done; and meaningfulness of work which rests on how the work itself can be meaningful, challenging, and interesting for employees as a way to motivate them.

Research Framework
When conducting the qualitative research, considering the previous studies with the same topic, the author found out that many factors affecting motivation have been put into the research model, such as work nature, work condition, salary and benefit policy, recognition and reward policy, relationship with the co-worker, company culture, etc. However, when summarizing all of those factors, eliminating coincided elements, looking at the essence as well as the homology between the factors together with the real-life experience working at Groz-Beckert Vietnam Co. Ltd, the factors affecting employee's motivation can be categorized into three main categories: Work-related factors, including work nature, work condition, work safety, etc. With the particularity of a manufacturing plant: the majority of employees belong to production departments, working regularly with industrial machines, devices as well as industrial chemicals during the metal processing, one of the basic need of workers is a need of a safe working environment and conditions. Hence, the factor Work Condition is taken into consideration in the research model. Jackman & Oldham demonstrated a significant effect of factor nature of work upon the motivation of employees. This is also what the author observed, realized at the time working at Groz-Beckert Vietnam Co. Ltd. The people who are assigned jobs that promotes the best of their skills possess high enthusiasm at work or the low performers in a specific position show higher efficiency after appointed new tasks that are compatible with their skills. Consequently is the factor Nature of work taken into consideration in this research model. During the process of studying the theme at Groz-Beckert Vietnam Co. Ltd, together with the author's personal working experience in the company, the author realized that employees who perform well in work, achieving good results tend to exert even more of what they are capable of as well as showing higher motivation. The author believes that the motivation of worker is affected by their work result. Once the worker has attained a positive outcome, the confidence is gained, the desire to express themselves is also bigger and the work motivation is thereby enhanced. This encourages the author to add the factor Work Result into the research model. This is a new factor which has never been mentioned in other previous studies with the same subject.
Company-related factors, such as salary policy, benefit, reward programs, training and development program, etc...In the scope of this study, the factors Salary-benefit, Training-promotion are included since they are the crucial requirement for every labourer.
Relationship related factor, including the relationship with colleagues, relationship with their superior. Based on the theoretical basis, background research and synthesis of other researches on the same topic as well as my findings, the proposed research model for factors affecting employee's motivation at Groz-Beckert Vietnam Co. Ltd. is as follows:

Research design and sampling method
This study utlized the descriptive research design employing mainly the self-administered questionnaire with descriptive and inferrential statistical methods. Set of questionnaires were printed and handed over to the respondents who were the official staff of Groz-Beckert Vietnam Co. Ltd. To meet the study objectives, researchers ensure that answers to the survey questionnaires reflect the true opinions of the respondents and not influenced by outsiders. Further, people who were surveyed focused on respondents who worked in normal shift (working from 7:00 AM until 3:30 PM), and early shift (working from 6:00 AM until 2:00 PM) at the time of the survey. Because the errors due to sampling can be calculated, thus, hypotheses testing were developed in data processing and extrapolated the sample of the population.

Sample size
Sample size depends on the methods analyzed in this study. It uses exploratory factor analysis (EFA). This method also requires at least 200 observations (Gorsuch, 1997). Hatcher (1994) determines the minimal sample size to be equal to five times the observations. Other experience in defining the sample size for EFA is that the number of observations must be at least five times as much as the number of factors (Trọng & Ngọc, 2005). Besides, according to Tabachnick and Fidell (2007), to get the best outcome from the regression, the minimal sample size must meet the requirement: n ≥8m+50 (where n is the sample size, m is the number of independent variables of a model). This study has 7 independent variables and 35 observations. The authors distributed 300 questionnaires but received 265 validated responses. Therefore, the sample size met the requirement for factor analysis. The survey was conducted at Groz-Beckert Vietnam Co. Ltd from March 21th, 2019 until April 20th, 2019.

The Instrument
The instrument was divided into two main parts. The first part consists of demograhic profile such as age, gender, education, and department while the second part consists of the independent and dependent variables measured using the 5-point Likert Scale (1=Strongly Disagree and 5=Strong Agree).

Descriptive statistics
There is no significant deviation in the male-female respondent ratio (53.2% versus 46.8%). While 85% of the respondent is under 40 years old, only 15% is above 40 years old. With regards to educational level: 26.4% of respondent possesses college or university level and 73.4% has a lower educational level (See Fig. 2). Of all the respondents, 64.9% is from the three production departments namely Production (SMN), Production (KN), and Production (SP).

Gender
Age Education Department Fig. 2. Demographic profile of the respondents Table 1 shows the test of adequacy of the sampled population using the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) and the Barlett's test of sphericity to ensure data suitability. The result for KMO depicts 0.893 which is more than the minimum criterion of 0.600 and Barlett's test with α=0.000<0.05 (Ambulkar, Blackhurst, Grawe, 2015;Hair, Black, Babin, & Anderson, 2010). This means that the sampling is adequate for factoring (Maat, Zakaria, Nordin, & Meeran, 2011). Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was used with Principal Component Analysis (PCA) application to originally forty items extracted with Varimax rotation. Eight factors were extracted with Eigenvalues greater than 1 resulting to cumulative percentage explained of 67.69% which is ≥ 50%. Almost all the factors have factor loadings greater than 0.500 except for two items: CON4 and SUP6 (See Table 2). Thus, the instrument is valid for statistical application.

Cronbach's alpha analysis
Research model contains 7 independent variables and 1 dependent variable, with 38 observations. All of them comply with the Cronbach's alpha reliability requirement (Cronbach's alpha coefficient > 0.7, corrected item-total correlation ≥ 0.3).

Linear regression analysis
According to the final research model, the dependent variable Motivation is affected by the independent variables: Work nature, Work results, Work condition, Training-promotion, Income-benefit, Superior, Coworker. The general equation is as follows: Y= β0 + β1.JOB + β2.OUT + β3. CON

Linear regression analysis, model summary table
Regression analysis was employed to determine the fitness of the model and the significant impact of independent variables on the dependent variable. The result of R² shows that 72.2% of the changes in the dependent variable (MOT) depends on independent variables (JOB, OUT, CON, PRO, INC, SUP, and COL). This means that the independent variables influence that variation of the dependent variable.   Table 6 depicts the impact of individual independent variables on dependent variable. Test of collinearity were also undertaken and results revealed that all the factors have Tolerance values of more than 0.2 (Hair, Black, Babin, & Anderson, 2010) and VIF values less than the maximum limit of 5 (Ringle, Wende, & Becker, 2015), thus, no issues of multicollinearity. Moreover, it showed that all the independent variables: JOB (p=0.

Conclusion and Recommendations
The study aimed at investigating the impact of the factors that affects motivation. Findings showed that all the independent variables: JOB (p=0.047<0.05); OUT (p=0.000<0.05); CON (p=0.001<0.05); PRO (p=0.004); INC (p=0.000); SUP (p=0.000); and COL (p=0.000) significantly and positively impacts the dependent variable (MOT). These findings confirmed various studies indicating the significant impact of the above-mentioned variables on employee motivation (Armstrong, 2006;Gagne & Deci, 2005;Kozioł 2018;Powel & Kokkranikal, 2015). The study has made certain theoretical contributions, helping to clarify the factors affecting employee motivation at Groz-Beckert Vietnam Co., Ltd. in particular and has brought preliminary images for companies in the manufacturing sector in general. At the same time, the authors have also introduced a new factor, which is Work Result, that affects employee's motivation. The research also has certain practical contributions to the identification and measurements of these factors at Groz-Beckert Vietnam Co. Ltd. Based on the research outcomes, the company can consider the following policy implications to improve employee's motivation. For the Income-benefit factor, the company should: (1) pay attention to ensuring the salary is worth the efforts and contributions of employees, (2) ensuring fairness in salary policy, and (3) building life difficulties sharing programs. One of the problems of the employee is to take care of children when both mother and father have to work at the same time. This might be a little easier for ones who still have the support of the grandparents. However, the majority have to deal with this issue. Besides, the lack of qualified kindergartens in the area makes it even more difficult. Therefore, in the long-run, the company may consider helping their people with this issue. If this problem is adequately addressed, this will be a big motivator for them and creates real benefit that fits with the actual situation of the employees. Concerning the factor Superior, the company needs to make sure that: (1) the people are fairly treated among subordinates, (2) the superior shows the ability to lead and keep the work runs smoothly, (3) the superior always encourages the people to perform at their best and shows recognition with every contribution of employees, even the smallest ones, etc. With regards to factors Work results: (1) always provide adequate necessary equipment for employees, (2) assuring that employees understand the work, tasks and goals to be achieved, (3) In case the employees were not sure about how to solve the company-related problems or do not have enough knowledge to do it, the superiors need to make clear instructions to them. About the factor Colleague, the company can create a good and interactive environment to promote good relationship between the coworkers, and thereby enhancing the solidarity among team members, willing to support others not only in work but also in private life. For the factor Work conditions, the company should always make sure that employees are always well equipped towards their work, provide training for employees to be able to identify the risks of labour accidents, and others. With regards to factor Training-promotion, the company should build policies that allow the people to improve themselves and their career as well as gradually accumulate standards for advancement, perfecting the training programs that help develop employee's skills, etc. Concerning the factor Work nature, the company should: (1) always provide timely and accurate feedback on the level of employee's performance, (2) always explain clearly, emphasize the importance, level of the impact of the work that employees are doing, (3) show employees that they play an important role in the company, and (4) set goals that meet SMART requirements when assigning employees tasks: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time.