Abstract
This research focuses upon non-financial work motivation against the background of the debate about the introduction of a basic income. We focus on work commitment; that is the question what binds workers to the employment system except for the wage. We argue that work commitment measures intrinsic work motivation, and that intrinsic work motivation is dependent on the extent to which paid work satisfies the human needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness. Empirical analyses on ESS 2010 for 26 countries show that 55% of the European employees would go on working if means would allow not to and about 25% not. Workers who answer affirmatively work in jobs with high levels of autonomy, good development opportunities, and have co-worker support. Greater autonomy, not only in the job, but also in decisions about work times and the number of work hours, is associated with greater work commitment. Workers in temporary jobs and workers in financial problems have low work commitment. We conclude by arguing that the introduction of a basic income will increase work commitment, because it will relieve workers’ strains and stresses, and will be an incentive for employers to improve the quality of work.
Highlights
During the last decades employment relationships in Western countries have become more flexible and more precarious (Kalleberg 2011; Standing 2011)
Since part-time work is most frequent in countries where workers have the legal right to choose the own number of work hours, our results indicate that not the extent of worklife conflict itself harms work commitment, but that the autonomy in decisions about work times and work hours is decisive for work commitment
We have argued and presented evidence that good quality jobs lead to high work commitment, and we were not able to account for the effect that high work commitment leads to better quality jobs
Summary
During the last decades employment relationships in Western countries have become more flexible and more precarious (Kalleberg 2011; Standing 2011). The expectation is that due to automation the coming years the number of paid hours of work per worker will decrease and that the share of flexible employment relationships will further increase. Against this backdrop it is argued that a basic income should be provided as the alternative for the present system of employment relationships During the last decades the dominant view in human resource management on work motivation has been that to ensure a strong work motivation, performance and pay should be directly coupled, since it was shown that performance pay can have strong positive effects on performance (Lazear 2018). The argument that workers have goals and motivations besides earning a good income was and is generally accepted, but has not got much attention lately due to the prominence of the focus on pay in labour market and hr-policies
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