Labour Motivation: Empirical Typology and Differentiation Perspectives

Abstract

In the article, labor motivation is analyzed as a phenomenon of social consciousness connected with the specifics of individuals’ participation in social production and with their place in social structure. The the association between a certain type of labor motivation, social-economic status and specificities of economic morality possessed by individuals is revealed; the possibilities of analytical use of labor motivation as an indicator of a person’s place in the social structure are defined. Based on the results of the second wave of European social survey (ESS), the HoRoIn index is introduced that takes into account a complex of features regarding the extent to which favorable toward employees working conditions in a particular country were ensured. Index includes indicators of distribution of workload, income, and unemployment, as well as current job and life satisfaction. A comparative analysis of four countries with different index values (Ukraine, Portugal, Finland, and Denmark) is performed in order to reveal universal patterns independent of the locally specific context. Labor motivation is defined based on the features which respondents consider more or less important when choosing a job. The results of cluster analysis are provided that has shown different types of labor motivation having distinctive profiles – the distribution graphs of mean values in groups. It is emphasized that the set and volume of these types change with the HoRoIn index value, based on which the conclusion about the association between the structure of labor motivation and the structure of employment and inequalities is formulated. For analyzing the association between the defined types of labor motivation, social-economic status (according to E. Wright’s model), and economic morality (according to ESS methodology), discriminatory analysis and classification trees method are used. It is being noted that the results of these procedures show high probability for the association between the characteristics in question that has selective rather than systematical nature, in other words, that is expressed in the interdependence between separate features. A conclusion is made about good perspectives of further research of the labor motivation type as a factor and indicator of individual’s place in social structure.