Work motivation studies of its determinants and outcomes

Sammanfattning: Work motivation has most often been defined operationally as job satisfaction, but this dimension has shown to be unrelated to job performance. Therefore, a new measure of work motivation defined as willingness to work was developed. Two main questions were investigated in this thesis. Three work groups were included in the studies.The first purpose was to explore willingness to work and related variables for two groups, people employed in pre-schools (Study1) and employees of an insurance company (Study 2). The variance in willingness to work was explained to 59% for the pre-school employees, and to 69% for the employees in an insurance company. Work interest, affective organizational commitment, perceived competence and risk burden were predictors of willingness to work in both of the groups. Other factors related to willingness to work in this study were, for the employees in pre-schools, positive evaluation of the job, normative organizational commitment, general intrinsic motivation and accepted risks. Additional factors that contributed to the explanation of the variance in willingness to work for the employees in an insurance company were job satisfaction, spontaneous creativity, work environment and opinions about one’s job.A second purpose was to investigate the construct validity of willingness to work dimension by examining its relationships with absenteeism, number of hours worked, intention to quit, and job performance. In Study 1 and Study 2, the relationship between absenteeism, number of hours worked, intention to quit and willingness to work was examined. The result showed that willingness to work was strongly related to intention to quit and number of hours worked in both of the studies. The relationship between willingness to work and job performance (subjective and objective) was also investigated. Participants in this study were insurance sales people. The correlation of willingness to work and objective as well as subjective job performance was quite high (r=.41 and .57, respectively). According to the results, the work motivation measure could be considered as being a quite valid assessment of work motivation.