All Work Intensity is Not Created Equal: Effort Motives and Well-Being at a Grocery Chain

Abstract

Prior research has documented that in contexts in which work intensity is high, employee well-being varies with the extent to which different jobs afford discretion on how and when to carry out the work. We move beyond the job characteristic of discretion and argue in this paper that in high-intensity contexts, employee well-being also varies with employees’ motives for working intensively. Specifically, introducing self-determination theory to the domain of work intensity, we predict that job satisfaction is higher, and quit intentions are lower, when intensive work is motivated by explicit or implicit incentives rather than job demands, and by intrinsic reasons rather than explicit or implicit incentives. Original data from a Greek grocery chain – a setting in which work intensity is well above the European average – generate corroborative evidence. Our inferences are generally robust to adjustments for a rich set of individual, job, and workplace characteristics, and once instrumenting the motives for intensive work. We conclude that well-being in high-intensity work settings varies with employee motives independently from the job characteristic of discretion.