A Temporal Analysis of Employees’ Situational Work Motivation and Well- Being

Abstract

Work scheduling is a challenge to manage under the perceptions that employees dislike unconventional working hours for sociocultural and economic reasons. This research used a complete temporal approach (Shipp & Cole, 2015) to answer the research question of how time (subjective and objective time of the workday, day of the workweek) predicts employees’ daily/weekly well-being (vitality and affect; Ryan & Deci, 2001; Ryan & Frederick, 1997), basic needs satisfaction, and situational work motivation under the framework of self- determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Ryan & Deci, 2000) and hierarchical model of self-determined motivation (Vallerand, 1997; Vallerand & Ratelle, 2002) at work. We collected the multi-level data using the survey structure outlined under the day reconstruction method (Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, 2004) with part-time working undergraduate students. Multi-level structural equation modeling results showed that vitality started out at a high level and decreased with both subjective and objective time of the workday and day of the workweek. Affective well-being didn’t demonstrate similar daily/weekly temporal patterns. In addition, work events scheduled during the weekend also had a significant positive indirect effect on vitality and positive affect through increasing basic needs satisfaction and situational autonomous motivation. We discussed the implications and limitations of this study.