*Corresponding author. Tel: +98 21 82884674 E-mail addresses: re_ghaffari@yahoo.com (R. Ghaffari Tabar) © 2013 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved. doi: 10.5267/j.msl.2013.05.043 Management Science Letters 3 (2013) 1511–1520 Contents lists available at GrowingScience Management Science Letters homepage: www.GrowingScience.com/msl A study on effective factors on employee motivation Hassan Ghodrati a and Reza Ghaffari Tabar b* a Accounting & Management Department, Kashan Branch, Islamic Azad University, Kashan, Iran b Department of Management, Naragh Branch, Islamic Azad University, Naragh, Iran C H R O N I C L E A B S T R A C T Article history: Received January 22, 2013 Received in revised format 26 April 2013 Accepted 20 May 2013 Available online May 28 2013 Management is often considered as collaboration with others and this requires knowing about employers' behavior and the factors influencing their behaviors to motivate them for obtaining some predicted aims. This paper presents a study to detect important factors influencing motivation of some employees who work for a public offices in city of Kashan, Iran. The study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributes it among 160 randomly selected participants. The questions are divided into two groups of management performance and motivational factors. To evaluate the effect of demographic factors on the quality of respondents' statements, a rating analysis based on Kruskal–Wallis test is used. To measure the effective vote, the motivation levels are divided into three groups of highly motivated, motivated and not motivated and they are analyzed based on rating mean variance with freedman scale. The results indicate that interesting job, job security, good salary and benefits and promotions, etc. are important factors to impact on the employers' motivation. For the newly – employed personal, job security is the most important motivation factor and for old – established employees, job attractive and sense of being considered is the most effective factor. © 2013 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Motivation factors Management performance Factorial analysis 1. Introduction Management is often considered as collaboration with others and this requires knowing about employers' behavior and the factors influencing their behaviors to motivate them for obtaining some predicted aims. There are many evidences to believe that many human resources only use a small amount of their work experiences to contribute to their work. In some public offices such as municipalities and other offices, permanent workers are less motivated and in some cases, they do not have good motivation to contribute to their working environment (Chyung, 2001). There are cases where human resources work only for a few minutes in their office. Schwab et al. (1971) conducted some researches on the relationship between job satisfaction and performance. They selected a sample including 124 employees of accounting and management department and reported that there was no distinguishable performance originated from motivational and environment factors. Ewen et al. (1966) selected 800 male employees from various jobs and found that using Herzberg discussions