A Romanian approach of the program "Employee of the month"

Work motivation was and remained a "hot topic" for management and organizational behavior studies, as well as a major concern for practice of Human Resource Management. While such studies have evidenced a lot of factors of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation having different influences on different people, the motivating practices within organizations were long time focused on common extrinsic motivators such as usual rewards (in the form of money or promotion to higher grades/functions) and threat of punishment. However, during the past few decades more and more organizations worldwide became interested to use some forms and tools of intrinsic motivation for their employees, including recognition programs. Our paper aims to present and discuss how a Romanian organization developed and implemented such a program, based on the popular U.S. organizational practices of contests type "Employee of the Month". Particularly, the study focuses on the specificity of this approach which combines elements of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and also attempts to sketch a "profile of the winner employee", based on statistical analysis of data for people who benefited the awards through the program application during 2008-2011.