(a) Explain, with the help of the expectancy theory, why a lot of workers are not motivated on their jobs and do only the minimum…

(a) Vroom’s Expectancy Theory and Worker Demotivation

Victor Vroom’s Expectancy Theory (Work and Motivation, 1964) posits that an individual’s motivation to exert effort is a multiplicative function: Motivation = Expectancy (E) × Instrumentality (I) × Valence (V). Because the relationship is multiplicative, if an employee perceives any single component to be zero or negligible, overall motivational force drops to near zero, leading workers to perform only the minimum necessary to retain their jobs.

First, Expectancy (E → P) represents the perceived probability that effort will lead to performance. When workers face ambiguous role definitions, obsolete infrastructure, or inadequate training, their expectancy collapses. They calculate that increased effort will not translate into successful task completion. Second, Instrumentality (P → O) is the belief that high performance will lead to specific rewards. In organizations where appraisals and promotions depend on seniority, nepotism, or opaque metrics rather than merit, instrumentality breaks down. Workers realize that top performance yields the same rewards as mediocre performance. Third, Valence (V) reflects the personal value attached to the offered outcomes. If organizations provide rewards that workers do not value—such as lateral transfers or generic praise instead of salary increments, career advancement, or autonomy—valence remains low or negative. Consequently, workers adopt a rational strategy of minimal compliance to avoid disciplinary action while withholding discretionary effort.

(b) Organizational Culture: Nature, Positive, and Negative Impacts

Organizational culture represents the shared assumptions, values, and norms guiding member behavior. Edgar Schein models culture across three levels: visible artifacts (structures and processes), espoused values (stated strategies and philosophies), and underlying basic assumptions (unconscious, taken-for-granted beliefs).

Positive impacts: A strong culture acts as a social glue, generating high organizational commitment, shared identity, and intrinsic motivation. It serves as an informal control mechanism that reduces agency costs and standardizes behavior without excessive bureaucracy. For instance, the Tata Group’s culture of ethical stewardship and community trusteeship provides a lasting competitive advantage and stakeholder credibility. Similarly, Infosys leveraged a culture of transparency and continuous learning to establish global software delivery standards.

Negative impacts: Conversely, an entrenched culture can become an organizational liability. It breeds resistance to change, creating structural inertia when market environments shift. It fosters groupthink by suppressing dissenting views and critical risk assessments, as observed in the corporate governance failure at Satyam. Furthermore, during mergers and acquisitions, deep-seated cultural incompatibilities frequently derail integration, destroying enterprise value.

(c) Critical Examination of Freudian Personality Stages

Freud placed development within a structure of id (pleasure principle), ego (reality principle) and superego (internalised moral standards), driven by libido, the psychic energy that shifts across erogenous zones. He conceptualized personality development through five psychosexual stages: oral (dependency and feeding), anal (control and autonomy), phallic (identification and gender roles), latency (socialization and skill acquisition), and genital (mature sexual and interpersonal relations). Freud argued that over-gratification or under-gratification at any stage causes fixation, shaping adult personality traits such as excessive compliance (oral), obsessive perfectionism or extreme disorderliness (anal), and aggression or vanity (phallic), the stage of the Oedipus complex, resolved by identification with the same-sex parent and formation of the superego.

Critically, Freud’s theory suffers from methodological limitations: it lacks empirical falsifiability, relies on non-representative retrospective adult clinical cases, and overemphasizes biological-sexual determinism while ignoring lifelong cognitive and socio-cultural developments. Neo-Freudians such as Adler, Horney and Erikson shifted the focus to social and cultural forces, Horney rejecting penis envy as culturally biased, and Erikson extending development across eight psychosocial stages over the whole life span. However, its lasting contribution to organizational behavior lies in highlighting the influence of unconscious drives, defense mechanisms, and early childhood coping patterns on workplace interpersonal conflicts, leadership styles, and stress responses.