WMBA 6627 Week 5 Workplace Motivation Analysis Example

Thirty-One Percent Against Eighty-Eight: Why Commercial Producers Log So Few Client Contacts in the Shared System While Account Managers Log Nearly All, Read Through Expectancy Theory and Self-Determination Theory

Student Name

Walden University

WMBA 6627: Stakeholder Management and Organizational Behavior

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Thirty-One Percent Against Eighty-Eight: Why Commercial Producers Log So Few Client Contacts in the Shared System While Account Managers Log Nearly All, Read Through Expectancy Theory and Self-Determination Theory

The Behavior in Observable Terms

The first three offices joined Harbor Point's shared agency system in March 2027, the opening phase of One Book (the brokerage is composite). The system lets anyone serving a client see every contact, quote and renewal note. Its value depends on people recording what they do.

Three months after cutover, two groups behaved very differently. Account managers, the staff who service policies, logged about 88 percent of their client contacts in the shared system, measured against phone records and email logs. Commercial producers, who sell and own client relationships, logged about 31 percent. Producers' logging was 40 percent in the first month and has fallen since. Over the same period, account managers in the new service center volunteered about 120 hours of overtime a month to clear a renewal backlog, while producers in the same offices recorded new business at the same pace as before.

Behavior and the Incentive That Rewards It

Table 1

Observed Behavior Beside the Incentive That Now Rewards It

Logging rates are measured against phone and email records for three offices, March to June 2027; the firm is composite.

Expectancy Theory

In expectancy theory (Vroom, 1964), people put in effort when they believe the effort will pay off in results, believe the results will be rewarded and care about the reward. Pooling the empirical tests of Vroom's model, Van Eerde and Thierry (1996) found its components related to performance, effort and intentions, though more weakly than the theory's founders expected.

For account managers, all three links hold. Logging a contact takes a few seconds, the system counts it as a closed ticket and closed tickets drive their reviews and raises. The outcome is valued, and the path is short.

For producers, the second and third links fail. Logging a contact produces no outcome they value: commission is paid on premium, not on records. Worse, the outcome logging does produce, clients visible to colleagues, has negative value for producers whose income and future book sale depend on owning relationships. Expectancy theory predicts what the data show: logging falls as producers learn that it costs them something and pays nothing.

Self-Determination Theory

Self-determination theory adds a second explanation. Gagné and Deci (2005) describe motivation as ranging from controlled, driven by pressure or reward, to autonomous, driven by values or interest, and argue that autonomy, competence and relatedness support autonomous motivation. Producers at Harbor Point have built their careers on autonomy: they choose their clients, their hours and their methods. A mandate to record every contact in a system watched by managers is experienced as control, which undermines whatever autonomous reasons they might have had to share information.

The service center account managers show the other side. Their team is new, their supervisor recognizes their work and they can see the backlog falling, which supports both competence and relatedness. Their overtime is not only for pay.

Alternative Explanations Considered

Before settling on incentives, I checked two simpler explanations. The first was usability: perhaps the system is harder for producers to use. But producers and account managers use the same screens, and account managers log nearly everything, so the interface is unlikely to explain a gap this large. Producers' logging also fell over time, while a usability problem would more likely improve as people learn the system.

The second was time pressure: producers spend much of their day with clients and may simply lack time to log. This explains some of the gap, since producers do have less desk time. But producers in the founding offices, with similar workloads and no history of owning their books outright, log about 62 percent of contacts. Time pressure cannot explain why acquired-office producers log half as much as founding-office producers doing the same job. The incentive explanation fits the comparison better.

What Neither Theory Fully Explains

Neither theory accounts for the earn-out. Former owners still serving as producers in two offices are paid partly on their office's revenue, and they fear that a shared system will let revenue be attributed to service centers instead. Their low logging may be a rational protection of a contract, not a motivational problem at all. That calls for a contractual answer, not a motivational one.

Implications

The analysis suggests three changes. First, make logging produce a valued outcome for producers: credit a client relationship to the producer who logs it, so the system protects their book rather than exposing it. Second, reduce the sense of control: let producers keep private notes in a protected field, and present the shared log as a tool for their clients' service rather than a monitoring device. Third, settle earn-out attribution in writing, so former owners know that service center work will not reduce their payments. Each change addresses a specific link the theories identify, rather than repeating the instruction to log more.

The effect of each change can be measured with data the firm already collects. Logging rates by producer, compared with phone and email records, will show whether relationship credit changes behavior within one commission cycle. If logging rises among founding-office producers but not among former owners, the earn-out explanation will have been confirmed, and the contractual fix becomes the priority.

References

Gagné, M., & Deci, E. L. (2005). Self-determination theory and work motivation. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 26(4), 331-362. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.322

Van Eerde, W., & Thierry, H. (1996). Vroom's expectancy models and work-related criteria: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 81(5), 575-586. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.81.5.575

Vroom, V. H. (1964). Work and motivation. Wiley.