Motivation and motivation-related factors: A structural equation modelling application on white-collar employees

Motivation has become one of the main concepts in today's business life. In the literature of recent years, it is clear that too many researchers have developed new theories and many others have worked for motivation researches. The researchers still continue working on this subject today. In additon to sole motivation, motivation related concepts have also been investigated in order to analyze their relationships with motivation. These concepts can be seperated in two parts, one of which is the concepts affecting motivation and the other one is the concepts affected by motivation. The main purpose of this research is to evaluate and analyze the relationships between motivation and mentioned motivation related concepts which take place in today's business life. Especially white-collar employees, who are generally well-educated, have some ideas and expectations about their professional lives since their education years. So, when these people, who have high motivation at the time of their graduation from university, face with real business life their motivation levels are affected positively or negatively by the work environment. Positive and negative changes at motivation level can be the reason for these people to continue or quit their position or their organization. These can also affect some other work related decisions and behaviors, for instance, their work effort and emotional situation can also be affected by motivation levels. Today's business life requires people spend most of their time at work. This situation brings them to have a social environment at work place. These social interactions contain relationships with managers and coworkers in different positions and with different experience levels. Thus these people have to build methods of communication both with their co-workers and managers at different hierarchical levels. In their work environment, positive and negative interactions and relationships can easily result in changes at motivation level and as a consequence well-being of people. Another factor that can influence motivation of white-collar employees is how the job requirements and their skill set fit each other. For a new graduate, it is very difficult to understand his/her convenience with the work requirements because sub group of work characteristics like importance, composition, structure of the job and course of implication can be understood only when the job is actually done by him/her. As a result of mentioned implications obtained through literature research, scope of this study and the structure of the model to be investigated were defined. As mentioned before, the model construction was made up on three phases. These phases are simply, motivation itself, the factors affecting motivaton and finally factors influenced by motivation that are known as motivation related attitudes. The motivation concept was investigated through Self Determination Theory of motivation. In additon to this theory, other motivation theories were also explained in detail in the related part of this study. Self-determination theory was chosen because this is one of the most accepted and contemporary theories explaining motivation. Self Determination Theory defines motivation in two groups which are autonomous motivation and controlled motivation. Beyond these two main groups, there are five sub-groups forming these two groups, which are intrinsic, integrated, identified, introjected and external regulation forms of motivation. Intrinsic and external regulation forms of motivation constitute the opposite edges of this motivation theory. Intrinsic motivation is generated by the positive feelings of the people on their job, on the other hand external regulation is completely caused by environmental effects and considerations. These concepts were also explained in detail in the related section. Two concepts which have influence on motivation, were included in the scope of this study. Job design concept, which is also studied in the literature widespread, was considered under Job Characteristics Model as the first concept. One and core part of this model was chosen to be analyzed, which is called job meaningfulness containing three sub groups. The second concept is called Social Support factor which includes two important groups which are managers' support and co-workers' support on employees. This factor also takes place in the literature because in general well-being of people in their work environment is expected to be affected by approaches of their managers and attitudes of their co-workers since they spend most of their time with these people. Three other concepts, which are influenced by the motivation of people, were taken place in this study. First one is named as intention to quit job, the second is work effort of people and finally the third one is the emotional exhaustion which is the core part of burnout concept. These three factors are commonly analyzed with motivation concept and in this study these were taken together to be analyzed in the same structural model. When the recent literature examined, it is observed that motivation concept is tried to be measured or analyzed in many different occupational groups in different sectors. As a result of the observations on white-collar employees' work lives, the motivation theory and the factors decided to be analyzed, as the consequence of the literature research, were combined in order to create research model. Structural equation modelling method was chosen to analyze the research model, since this method is one of the accepted methods to explain the relationships between conceptual factors which cannot be directly measured. So, it can be supposed that the aim of this study is to understand and test the relationships between mentioned factors and motivation on chosen target sample. In the literature research, it is obvious that there is no unique common solution to test and measure the motivation concept. On the base of Self Determination Theory and commonly mentioned methods, a measurement model, namely survey questions were compiled for all sub groups of proposed theory. In addition to motivation, a similar way was followed to measure other factors that affect or are affected form motivation. So, from mentioned methods coming from the literature review, survey questions for each sub groups were generated. As a consequence, the questions of all subgroups were combined and an extensive questionnaire was built. After pilot applications and improvements phases, questionnaire was published on the internet. Totally 241 white-collar employees responded the survey completely and the necessary analysis started with demographics results. With the purpose of the analysis of questionnaire in terms of reliability and normality, IBM SPSS program was used. Cronbach alpha values for each measurement model, which means all sub groups of main factors, were analyzed. At this stage, for only one variable modification was required before the next sections, namely structural modelling steps. The details of the conducted modification are explained in the related section. At the next section, each first order measurement models were tested on AMOS program and according to the results, some modifications including adding covariances between survey questions of each construct were done. In addition to these, the second order measurement models, which are autonomous motivation, controlled motivation, social support and job meaningfulness, were also tested in the same way by using their own first order measurement models in higher level. All results and the methods are explained in detail in the relevant part. At the next stage on AMOS program, by combining the modified measurement models, structural equation model was built. In this step, at first without putting arrows between variables, confirmatory factor analysis was executed after having done the necessary modifications in the previous stages. The results of goodness of fit tests for confirmatory factor analysis were found in the accepted intervals. Secondly, convergent validity, discriminant validity and reliability tests were executed by using the results of confirmatory factor analysis on Microsoft Excel. These test results were also accepted according to the proposed test methods. Having passed all necessary tests until this step, path analysis tool of AMOS program was executed by putting the proposed arrows for each hypothesis. The extracted results of path analysis goodness of fit tests were found in accepted intervals. This means the proposed hyphothesis is suitable to be analyzed through the results of the program. As a result, the evaluation of the hypothesis of the proposed model that successfully passed through necessary goodness of fit test constitutes the final stage of this study. Among the proposed 11 hypothesis, all of them except one were supported by analysis results. Only one hypothesis was rejected because of its p value exceeding the limits. To sum up, it is observed that, as it is mentioned at literature review sections, effects of autonomous motivation and controlled motivation on model factors were different, moreover results showed opposite direction at some cases for two main types of motivation. In addition, the motivation variables were influenced differently, even in different direction, from affecting factors of the model. These differences with the underlying reasons are interpreted and suggestions for the further researches are stated at the end of the study.