Portfolio and Reflection Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4000 words

Portfolio and Reflection - Essay Example It was a very good experience doing social work; it was different from the usual corporate sector and it gave me lot of opportunities to learn a lot. I gained knowledge about variety of tasks and explored myself about my strengths and weaknesses. My job title was Business Organizer which incorporated a variety of tasks of different types which are explained in this report. Motivation First of all, I would like to discuss about motivation and how this motivation works for a social work environment. If we go to theoretical background we will have a look about McGregor and Maslow’s work and I will apply it on a social work context. According to McGregor, in his theory X which he gave in his book in 1960, work is distasteful and people do it just for money and security, they can only work when being observed. On the other hand theory Y people are self motivated to learn and accept responsibility for work.(The Human Side of Enterprise, 1960).I found myself as theory Y worker who wa nts more participative kind of environment given to me at Hadfield. I applied for this job because I wanted to improve my employability skills and I wanted to gain experience. I wanted to know how I work even when my job is not clearly defined. My job was more like a record keeping an administrative job where I had to do tasks like photocopying and filing. Still I was able to satisfy my supervisor about my competencies and hard work. There was more participation from workforce and I got my communication skills improved The first couple of days were hectic for me as I did not know about the organization; I searched on internet about the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. But tasks included variety and depending on the need I had to do different tasks. At first I got confused about the administrative and recordkeeping work because my tasks kept on changing in first few days. But then I realized that jobs at higher levels are even more competitive so I decided to develop stami na of working for variety of tasks so that I could be able for higher jobs. I was given full chance of communicating my point of view and my ideas and the colleagues and supervisor treated me very nicely. There were certain things which I did not know about myself before the experience at Hadfield e.g. my tasks were not hard but required lot of determination and I found myself to be fairly responsible about the tasks given to me. I had never thought of using my creativity to problem solving to such an extent before. The supervisor tried to test my capability, and this proved very helpful for me because I discovered and explored my own capabilities. If motivation concept is seen with a different perspective we can take Maslow’s hierarchy. According to Maslow, in his hierarchy of motivation given in his research paper, different people have different level of needs which motivates them to work. Money and security needs are the lower level needs and when they are fulfilled, peop le earn to fulfill their higher order needs. At the stage of self actualization, a person derives his identity from work and he works because he is intrinsically motivated to work (A Theory of human Motivation, 1943). I found myself on the esteem needs of Maslow’s hierarchy. Self-Actualization Esteem Needs Social Needs Safety Needs Physiological Needs I have reached that point in my career where I started deriving my identity from my work. I worked for satisfying myself as social work gives me satisfaction. Context of social work is little bit different from the usual jobs, here money is not the motivator but inner self is. So the higher order needs are in some way related to social work. I applied for this job to gain experience and to improve my