What Motivates the Employee Filipinos?

According to Santrock (2005), “Motivation moves people to behave, think and feel the way they do” (p. 425). The study Rewards that Matter focused on what motivates the Filipino employees to perform their tasks and performances satisfactory to very satisfactory. Knowing what to reward to your employees, whether intrinsically or extrinsically, is not only to done to improve their motivations and influence their behaviors and outcome in the long run but to “understand different reasons behind every important job-related behaviors such as job performance and absenteeism”.

The study shows that cash was the employee’s top choice of external rewards. Money has been used not only by the organizations to motivate people. My parents usually motivate me to do house hold chores every weekends by giving me money or additional allowance for the week. When I was the president of our provincial organization, we motivate our members to sell brownies and candies by giving them part of the profit. We also do this during UP Fair. My fraternity taps other organizations to sell tickets and the more tickets they sell, the more money they could get from the profit. In addition the study also showed that the Filipino employees will use the cash for a long-term purpose. People tend to save for their future needs, when the time comes that they cannot perform their work or they cannot be able to do certain tasks and responsibilities. Employees’ need for self-sufficiency and self-determination with regards to their financial security is very important. I think this is the reason why companies sell stocks to their employees, when companies decide to open their stocks to public bidding. Certain companies also give rewards to tenured employees who rendered long service to the organization by offering them to become stock holders and such.

However, as indicated in the study, Filipino employees are more intrinsically motivated than external factors like money and other tangible