Implicit and Explicit Motivation Crowding in Prosocial Work

Abstract

Public and nonprofit organizations often emphasize the prosociality of their employees as critical to performance, given the prosocial nature of the missions of these organizations. However, whether prosocial motivations translate to prosocial work behaviors is not always clear. Such assessments are complicated by the inherent difficulty in accurately assessing prosociality in the workplace, as it is potentially prone to social desirability bias. In this article, we examine whether one’s explicit, or stated, prosocial motivation is as resilient to motivation crowding as one’s implicit motivation. We find that explicit prosocial motivation is much more susceptible to motivation crowding than implicit prosocial motivation when performance expectations allow material self-interest to be more easily maximized. Moreover, mission match, or the extent to which an individual agrees with the specific mission of an organization, shows consistency across performance regimes. These findings have implications for our theoretical understanding of prosocial motivation and for its value in real-world applications. Additionally, our research highlights the importance of considering implicit dimensions of work motivation in relation to explicit dimensions in the potential for motivation crowding.