Employee Motivations, Managerial Trustworthiness, and Work Attitudes
Yoon Jik Cho
Assistant Professor
Department of Public Management and Policy
Andrew Young School of Policy Studies
Georgia State University
yoonjik@gsu.edu
James L. Perry
Distinguished Professor
Chancellor’s Professor of Public and Environmental Affairs
School of Public and Environmental Affairs
Indiana University, Bloomington
perry@indiana.edu
and
Yonsei University
Department of Public Administration
Prepared for the 10th Public Management Research Association Conference, Columbus, OH,
October 1-3, 2009.
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Employee Motivations, Managerial Trustworthiness, and Work Attitudes
Abstract
Scholars and practitioners have emphasized the benefits of a highly motivated workforce.
Although scholars have studied the causes and consequences of high employee motivation, many
questions associated with this phenomenon remain unanswered. One question involves the
conditions under which employee motivation is elevated or depressed. Recently, Grant and
Sumanth (forthcoming) demonstrated experimentally that prosocial motivation increased when
the trustworthiness of managers was high. Higher prosocial motivation was, in turn, associated
with increased employee performance. We replicate this model in a public setting to assess the
effects of trustworthy managers on employee motivation.
This research considers both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, and tests how managerial
trustworthiness interacts with those two motivations. At the individual level, work attitudes
including satisfaction and intent to leave are used as outcome variables. To address the common
source bias from the first analysis, the research also tests whether employee motivations are still
influential at the organizational level by using the Best Places to Work index and the Program
Assessment Rating Tool (PART).
Analysis results demonstrate that both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations matter for
em