Factors of work motivation of aerospace employees in the context of digitalization and robotization

Abstract

The article is aimed to analyze the work motivation of employees of modern Russian aerospace enterprises engaged in automated and non-automated production sites. The authors give an overview of the existing approaches to the analysis of work motivation and provide data from the pilot sociological study conducted in October 2023 (N=86), when theoretical and applied problems were solved. Theoretically, the hypothesis about the influence of digitalization and robotization processes on the factors of labor motivation was tested. The applied task of the study was connected with the approbation of the tools of sociological research and methods of factor and cluster analysis to the data obtained during the survey of employees. The conducted research enabled the authors to conclude about 3 main groups of motives that form the factors of the employees’ work motivation of the surveyed enterprise: 1) motivation of professional realization; 2) material motivation and 3) socially-oriented motivation. As a result of the cluster analysis, two groups of employees were identified, depending on the type of dominant motives: those who are materially oriented towards professional self-realization ("pragmatists") and those who expect approval and support from their superiors and their colleagues in the course of their work ("conformists"). Despite the fact that the hypothesis about the influence of the automation level of a production site on the type of the employee’s dominant motivation has been confirmed using the discriminant analysis method, it needs additional verification on a larger sample scale.