Relationship between Job Satisfaction and Motivation in Islam among IIUM Employees Introduction Essay

Work motivation is important to encourage a worker to improve productivity and achieve organizational goals. In Islamic perspective, motivation is a form of drive that can influence humans to performance act. In work place, employers are faced with the task which is motivating employees and creating high job satisfaction among their staff. Program and policy can develop job satisfaction and motivate employees. When the employer understands the benefits of job satisfaction and motivation in the workplace, though, the investment in employee-related policies can be justified (Anderson, 2012). Therefore, researchers believe that there are relationship between job satisfaction and motivation. This paper is to study work motivation in Islam the definition of motivation in Islamic terms and how it can improve or decrease the work motivation among Muslim employees. The objective of this study is mainly focus on the elements that can contribute into work satisfaction and work motivation in an Islamic environment such as: job satisfaction, marital status, religiosity and experience, these are all the independent variables that we would like to study their effect on work motivation among IIUM staff members. Hypotheses of this study are: 1. Thos who are married may be motivated to excel the task than those who are single. 2. The more experience the person has the more motivated he became. 3. The more job satisfaction increase among workers they tend to be motivated to do the task. 4. The more religious the worker is the more he/she motivated to excel in work. Moreover, this paper is intended to answer questions: 1. How can marital status effect work motivation? 2. What is the role of religion in work motivation? 3. What is the relationship between experience and work motivation? 4. How can job satisfaction increase work motivation? Therefore, the core objectives of this paper are: 1. To find out the impact of job satisfaction on work motivation. 2. To investigate the importance of experience in work motivation. 3. To figure out the effect of marital status on work motivation 4. To determine the role of religion on work motivation 5. To answer these questions and to study the relationship between these variables and work motivation. LITERATURE REVIEW Conceptualization Motivation Motivation is derived from motive which means needs, desires, wants or drives within the individuals. It is the process of stimulating people to actions to accomplish the goals and later reinforced by motivate. Motivation literally is reasons for acting or behaving in a particular way, desire or willingness to do something (Oxford dictionaries, 2012). Mahmoud (2000) refers motivation as inner process that activates, energies, drive behavior to goal. It is what causes us to act, whether it is getting food to reduce hungry or reading book to do assignment. Motivation in this research means motivation as drive to achieve goal in work field. Therefore, this research focuses on motivation in work place. Technically, Ryan and Deci (2000) states that motivation means someone needs at least desire to inspire him or her to do some action. This person who is energized toward an end is considered motivated while if this person has no inspiration to act is considered as unmotivated. They also distinguish general types of motivation based on different goal and reasons which are intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation is doing something because of internal factor for example person has interest on it or like it and want to do it while extrinsic refers to doing something because of external factor such as he or she will get salary. Fundamentally, we have to know motivation theory in order to understand motivation. The following paragraph is about motivation theories which relates to our research. Motivation Theories