The Expectancy Theory is concerned with work motivation and focuses on how employees make choices regarding alternative levels of efforts and behaviors. It focuses on how the employees decide the specific behaviors to perform or the effort to exert. Following the expectancy theory, workers productivity and commitment in any organization can be based on his or her responses to basic questions. These questions include; is the desire for outcome provided by the organization high? Is the high performance necessary in obtaining these outcomes? Are the expectancies high? There are three components or concepts in the expectancy theory. They include valence, expectancy and instrumentality. .
Valence can be portrayed as the desirability of an outcome to an employee. A worker can get several outcomes out of their jobs like pay, benefits, job security, and promotions among other things. It can be negative, positive or none and, can vary in magnitude and size. Valence is a key factor to consider while deciding the motivation of an employee. The other module of the expectancy theory is considered to be instrumentality. This refers to the perception on the degree to which the performance of a given behavior will lead to a particular outcome. Instrumentality is the association between level of job performance of a worker and receipt of a given outcome. .
In some cases, employees do not get motivated to perform to a high level since they do not believe that the high performance will yield high outcomes. The third part of expectancy theory is considered to be expectancy. It refers to the employees' perception on the extent to which their efforts could result to a given level of job performance. Employees get motivated to perform a certain behavior at a given level if and only if they believe that they can do so. If the expectancy is zero, it means that the workers do not have a belief that the efforts they put will yield certain levels of performances.
