Intro

Scholars and practitioners care about cultivating, increasing, and maintaining work motivation.

Motivation research has a long history of considering employee motives and needs (Alderfer, 1969; Maslow,

1954; McClelland, 1961). Interest in these areas peaked in the 1970s and early 1980s, and the last fifteen

years has seen little empirical or theoretical research. The majority of work on motives and needs in the

1990s falls into three areas: an examination of the job attributes that motivate individuals, research that

examines need for achievement, and research on the Protestant work ethic. Employee performance is

frequently described as a joint function of ability and motivation, and one of the primary tasks facing a

manager is motivating employees to perform to the best of their ability (Moorhead & Griffin, 1998).

Pinder (1998) describes work motivation as the set of internal and external forces that initiate workrelated

behaviour, and determine its form, direction, intensity, and duration. Work motivation is a middlerange

concept that deals only with events and phenomena related to people in a work context. The definition

recognizes the influence of both environmental forces (e.g., organizational reward systems, the nature of the

work being performed) and forces inherent in the person (e.g., individual needs and motives) on work-related

behaviour. An essential feature of the definition is that it views work motivation as an invisible, internal,

hypothetical construct (Pinder, 1998). We cannot actually see work motivation nor can we measure it

directly. The paper contributes theoretically by providing a rich description of many different factors that

contribute to work motivation.