A MOTIVATION STUDY OF THE CHEMICAL ENGINEERING STUDENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CASTILLA LA MANCHA

The Vroom's theory [1] assumes that human behaviour results from conscious choices among alternatives whose purpose it is to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. The key elements to this theory are referred to as Expectancy, Instrumentality and Valence.
In this work the empiric method of Vroom has been employed to measure the motivation force of the students of the Chemical Engineering degree of the University of Castilla La Mancha in Spain. Thus, an anonymous inquiry has been filled by the students of the five courses of the degree in the second term of the present academic course 2009-2010. The inquiry has considered: intrinsic factors, extrinsic factors and transcendental factors according to a previous one developed for the analysis of the motivation force in a company [2]. In addition, it has also been divided in three main sections which valuate:

1) The interest for the students of the considered motivation factors.
2) The value of those motivation factors.
3) The expectations of the students.

Thus, with the information provided by the inquiry the motivation force of the students can be calculated according to the Vromm´s equation (1):

Motivation Force = Expectancy x (Valence x Instrumentality) (1)

Where:

-Expectancy refers to the different expectations and levels of confidence about what they are capable of doing. Management must discover what resources, training, or supervision employees need.
-Valence refers to the emotional orientations people hold with respect to outcomes [rewards]. The depth of the want of an employee for extrinsic [money, praise, promotion, time-off, benefits] or intrinsic [satisfaction] rewards. Not all of the outcomes possess a positive valence; getting a promotion, coupled with a transfer to an undesirable location, may well result in a negative valence. Effective managers thus seek to discover what employees value.
-Instrumentality, the perception of students expressed as a probability that there will actually be an outcome associated with completing the assigned task.

Thus in this work the influence of different parameters such as: sex, age, student course and the university access mark has been investigated on the measured values of the motivation forces with the following general conclusions:

- There is almost no influence of the age and the university access mark on the motivation force values.
- The motivation forces values of men are higher than the motivation force of women.
-There is a slight increase in the motivation force with the year of the degree (course) except for the first course. In this latter case the highest value of the motivation force value has been obtained in comparison with the other years of the degree which can be attributed to the novelty, illusion and expectative of the novel students.

References

[1] Vroom, V. Work and motivation. Krieger. Florida. 1984
[2] Pin, J.R. Consistencia. Pearson Education, S.A. Madrid. 2007