Intrinsic Task Motivation Research Articles

Need for Growth, Achievement, Power and Affiliation

Empowerment is giving frontline employee discretion to take decisions instantly, keeping in mind the organizational consequences. In service organizations attracting and retaining customer is a daunting task. Empowering employees psychologically will help them in taking proactive actions to serve customers better. The objective of the present article is to study the influence of motivational needs on psychological empowerment. The independent variable is motivational needs (need for growth, achievement, power and affiliation). Psychological empowerment, a dependent variable, in the present study, has been studied by intrinsic task motivation (which is measured by meaning, competence, self-determination and impact). It is hypothesized that the four motivational needs that is, need for achievement, power, affiliation and growth will positively influence psychological empowerment. Standard instruments are administered to measure different variables and to investigate the influence of chosen variables on psychological empowerment. Several statistical techniques like correlation, multiple regression and canonical correlation are used to measure the significance and strength of relationship between identified independent and dependent variables. The main conclusion is that all motivational needs, other than the need for affiliation, are significantly and positively related to psychological empowerment (intrinsic task motivation). The positive relationship between psychological empowerment and need for affiliation was hypothesized thinking five star hotels as the source of sample where employees are required to demonstrate high degree of need for affiliation.

Management Control and Strategic Renewal in the Front End of Innovation

Should management control the front end of innovation in companies, and, if so, how? This paper examines the use of management control in the front end of innovation, how the different mechanisms of control are associated with generating strategic renewal, and what the moderating effect of technology and market uncertainty is. The front end of innovation has been characterized as highly uncertain and creative, thereby requiring high levels of freedom and independence for those executing front‐end activities. However, a certain amount of control appears necessary to secure the effective use of resources and the achievement of the company's long‐term objectives. The current findings of management control and its influence on performance in new product development context in general are conflicting. While many authors argue that behavioral control kills creativity, some others emphasize advantages of improved communication and coordination created by process formalization. Some authors stress the importance of setting specific and challenging strategic goals for development work, but some papers indicate that this inhibits creativity and learning. One challenge of interpreting the conflicting results of existing management control research in new product development context is that most studies treat the front‐end phase simultaneously with product development projects, thereby averaging the totally different characteristics of these two innovation phases. Studies that would have investigated management control in the front end of innovation are still scarce. This study develops a framework for management control in the front end of innovation and tests hypotheses on the relationship between different control mechanisms and achieving strategic renewal. The role of technology and market uncertainty as potential moderators of this relationship is investigated. Management control is covered through seven constructs: input control; front‐end process formalization; outcome‐based rewarding; strategic vision; informal communication; participative planning; and intrinsic task motivation. Strategic renewal is used as a front‐end performance indicator. Data from the front‐end phase of 133 new product development projects from different large and medium‐sized companies were collected and analyzed. A factor model was used to test the validity of the management control framework, and a moderated regression analysis was used for hypothesis testing. The results show that input control is positively associated with achieving strategic renewal in the front‐end phase. The results also confirm the importance of intrinsic task motivation of the front‐end group. Under high technology uncertainty, the use of outcome‐based rewarding or front‐end process formalization has a negative influence on strategic renewal.

Regulatory mode and the joys of doing: effects of ‘locomotion’ and ‘assessment’ on intrinsic and extrinsic task‐motivation

This research investigates the relation between regulatory‐mode (Higgins, Kruglanski, & Pierro, 2003; Kruglanski et al., 2000) and task motivation. Four studies conducted in diverse field and laboratory settings support the notions that ‘locomotion’, i.e. a self‐regulatory emphasis on movement from state to state, is positively related to intrinsic task motivation, whereas ‘assessment’, i.e. a self‐regulatory tendency to emphasize comparative appraisal of entities and states (such as goals and means) is positively related to extrinsic motivation. It is further found that ‘locomotion’, but not ‘assessment’, is positively related to effort investment, which, in turn, is positively related to goal attainment. Attainment is, additionally, predicted by an interaction of locomotion and assessment, such that individuals are most likely to reach their goals if they are high on both these dimensions. Taken as a body, these findings highlight the relevance of regulatory‐mode concepts to the study of task motivation and activity experience. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Teachers’ Personal and Team Empowerment and Their Relations to Organizational Outcomes: Contradictory or Compatible Constructs?

To date most models of empowerment have focused on teachers’ personal empowerment, which is defined as intrinsic task motivation reflecting an employee’s orientation to his or her work role. Interestingly, little scholarly attention has been turned to the interaction of empowerment and work-team membership, that is, to empowerment acquired from work in an empowered team. The study reported here juxtaposed these two forms of empowerment—personal and team—in an integrated model of organizational outputs (performance, organizational commitment, and professional commitment). The results from a sample of 983 teachers at 25 middle schools and 27 high schools indicated that teachers’ performance benefited most from the joint effect of high personal empowerment and team empowerment. Organizational commitment gained from high personal empowerment and team empowerment, as well as from low/high interaction; and professional commitment benefited most from high personal empowerment/low team empowerment or low personal empowerment/high team empowerment.

Effects of age and achievement goals on children's motives for attending to peers' work

Children often look at one another's work, but it is not always clear why they do so. It was proposed that attending to peers' work serves both informational and motivational functions. First, such attention can provide information relevant either to improving one's products or to self‐evaluation. Second, interest in both product improvement and self‐evaluation may be guided either by strivings to develop competence (mastery goal), or by strivings to demonstrate superior ability (performance goal). Ninety‐eight K1 (mean age 5.10) and 196 grade 4 (mean age 9.9) Israeli children attending either urban or kibbutz schools were filmed as they worked on an activity in either a mastery or a performance goal condition. They then explained two of their filmed glances, one at an earlier and one at a later stage of task engagement. As predicted, the degree to which children gave product improvement or self‐evaluation reasons differed by age and stages of task engagement, since self‐evaluation reasons were more common at grade 4 and for later glances. In contrast, the frequency of mastery versus performance reasons depended on the experimental goal conditions and on the degree to which the school environment emphasized mastery learning goals (kibbutz schools) or performance learning goals (urban schools). Thus, mastery reasons were more common in the mastery than in the performance condition and among kibbutz rather than urban children. Children who gave mastery reasons displayed higher intrinsic task motivation. Implications for the development of social comparison and optimal motivation for learning are discussed.

Meaningfulness and Community in the Classroom: The Role of Teamwork in Business Education

Abstract This research proposes that teams benefit the business education process because they enhance the task assessments that are suggested to be the basis for intrinsic task motivation or empowerment. Presented in this article is a theory supporting the use of teams to create a sense of meaningfulness and community in the classroom. The results of this study suggest that teams successfully enhance students' sense of meaningfulness and their sense of community. This study also supports the role of individual differences (global assessments of meaningfulness) as influential on how students respond to teams. Implications and directions for future research are also addressed.

Cognitive Elements of Empowerment: An "Interpretive" Model of Intrinsic Task Motivation

This article presents a cognitive model of empowerment. Here, empowerment is defined as increased intrinsic task motivation, and our subsequent model identifies four cognitions (task assessments) as the basis for worker empowerment: sense of impact, competence, meaningfulness, and choice. Adopting an interpretive perspective, we have used the model also to describe cognitive processes through which workers reach these conclusions. Central to the processes we describe are workers' interpretive styles and global beliefs. Both preliminary evidence for the model and general implications for research are discussed.

Cognitive Elements of Empowerment: An “Interpretive” Model of Intrinsic Task Motivation

This article presents a cognitive model of empowerment. Here, empowerment is defined as increased intrinsic task motivation, and our subsequent model identifies four cognitions (task assessments) as the basis for worker empowerment: sense of impact, competence, meaningfulness, and choice. Adopting an interpretive perspective, we have used the model also to describe cognitive processes through which workers reach these conclusions. Central to the processes we describe are workers' interpretive styles and global beliefs. Both preliminary evidence for the model and general implications for research are discussed.

Further examinations of the relationship between reward contingency and intrinsic motivation

A series of laboratory studies were conducted to examine the effect of contingent monetary reward on the occurrence of behavior presumably determined by intrinsic task motivation. A general hypothesis that contingent monetary rewards would reduce the frequency of such behaviors was derived from a postulate of cognitive evaluation theory. For all of the studies, intrinsic task motivation was operationally defined as the amount of free time a subject spent working on a task without receiving reward. Study 1 investigated the effects of reward contingency and reward magnitude upon the behavioral measure of intrinsic motivation and upon related attitudinal variables. Study 2 examined the effects of reward contingency and two individual difference variables (self-esteem and perceived locus of control) on intrinsic motivation and attitudinal measures. Although Study 2 showed no significant results, Study 1 demonstrated support for the hypothesis with the behavioral measure of intrinsic motivation, but not with the attitudinal measures. Further examination of the behavioral measure of intrinsic motivation suggested that this variable was bimodally distributed in both Studies 1 and 2. A test for normality indicated that the distributions were significantly non-normal and that parametric analyses of mean differences were inappropriate. Study 3 reported the results of nonparametric reanalyses of Studies 1 and 2 and of data previously published by Deci as supportive of the postulate under examination. Deci's data were also found to be generally bimodal. The nonparametric analyses were nonsignificant for all data sets. Theoretical implications of these results are discussed and future directions for research are suggested.

Task characteristics, reward contingency, and intrinsic motivation

A factorial laboratory study investigated the effects of task characteristics and reward contingency upon intrinsic task motivation. Task characteristics were varied along the core dimensions suggested by Hackman and Lawler 1971 with three levels used: Low, High except for Feedback, and High including Feedback. Two levels of reward contingency were used: Contingent (piece-rate) and Noncontingent (hourly). Intrinsic task motivation was measured by the subjects volunteering for a nonrewarded work session and by productivity data. It was hypothesized, following Deci 1972, that contingent pay would lead to decreased intrinsic motivation due to a change in subjects' attributions of the causes of task motivation and performance. Neither the psychological process nor the behavior prediction was supported. Contingent pay did result in higher levels of productivity. It was also hypothesized that the High on Core Dimensions conditions would lead to higher levels of intrinsic motivation than the Low condition. This hypothesis received some support. It was concluded that contingent reward systems combined with tasks designed to be high on the core dimensions appeared to be both extrinsically and intrinsically motivating to task performers.

Are intrinsic and extrinsic rewards additive: A test of Deci's cognitive evaluation theory of task motivation

Expectancy theory and reinforcement theory of task motivation have assumed that the effect of extrinsic and intrinsic reinforcement are additive in nature. Deci (1971, 1972a, 1972b, 1972c) has recently presented tentative evidence that reportedly shows that contingent monetary rewards actually reduced intrinsic task motivation. This paper reexamines the evidence presented by Deci and then tests his cognitive evaluation theory explanation in both a boring and nonboring task setting. The evidence presented here along with a reexamination of Deci's previous findings indicate that contingent monetary payments that are not delayed have an additive effect with intrinsic rewards on task motivation. The results were discussed in relation to their implication to management.