Team Motivation Research

There is a considerable difference between the operational mode of team and that of group. It is hard to put the individual-oriented motivational theory to full effect in the practice of team.Due to the comparatively serious phenomenon, information asymmetry, which exists in team production, "personal information" owned by agent is only available to him, whereas unknown or incomprehensible to principal because of excessively high information cost. In the team production, therefore, it is difficult to apply effectively traditional performance evaluation methods, and the distributive means according to individual evaluation result doesn't work. In addition, there exists the phenomenon of "Free Rider" as a result of information asymmetry.In order to solve these problems, this paper does following works from the angles of management, organizational behavior and information economics.1. In order to solve the problems of under-commitment and inadequate effort of team members to team goal, this paper applies Commitment and Necessary Effort (CANE), a model brought forth by Richard E. Clark, into team motivation and comes up with seven principles to solve the problems in it, through the summary of motivational theories and analysis of teamwork.2. Furthermore, employing principal-agent model, this paper makes a discussion about how the supervisory mechanism influences team motivation. The point is that it is necessary to introduce proper supervisory mechanism into teamwork.3. At last, it studies the motivational characteristics of knowledge workers and R&D team, according to which it presents motivational methods.This paper manages to make a comprehensive discussion about team motivational problem, which is expected to be helpful to the practice of team management in Chinese enterprises.