Cultural Socialization as a Source of Intrinsic Work Motivation

Abstract

Intrinsic motivation depends not only on innate qualities common to all people, but also on socialization into aspects of national culture that support proactive work behavior. Constructs from comparative research from the Meaning of Working project—work centrality, work goals, and societal norms—predict attitudes and aspects of performance that reflect intrinsic motivation beyond what is predicted by constructs based on traditional cognitive evaluation and job characteristics approaches to intrinsic motivation. Results predicting attitude criteria are quite similar for supervisor-level employees of local governments in the United States, Japan, and Hungary. Results predicting evaluated performance are stronger in the first two countries.