DISCERNING SAINTS: MORALIZATION OF INTRINSIC MOTIVATION AND SELECTIVE PROSOCIALITY AT WORK

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Kwon, Mijeong; Cunningham, Julia Lee; Jachimowicz, Jon M.
• 署名单位: University of Colorado System; University of Colorado Denver; University of Michigan System; University of Michigan; Harvard University
• 刊物名称: ACADEMY OF MANAGEMENT JOURNAL
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0001-4273
• DOI: 10.5465/amj.2020.1761
• 发表日期: 2023
• 页码: 1625-1650
• 关键词: SELF-DETERMINATION THEORY; Extrinsic motivation; MORAL EMOTIONS; ORGANIZATIONAL CITIZENSHIP; scale; job; performance; PERSPECTIVE; others; goals

摘要

Intrinsic motivation has received widespread attention as a predictor of positive work outcomes, including employees' prosocial behavior. We offer a more nuanced view by proposing that intrinsic motivation does not uniformly increase prosocial behavior toward all others. Specifically, we argue that employeeswith higher intrinsicmotivation aremore likely to value intrinsicmotivation and associate it with having higher morality (i.e., they moralize it). When employees moralize intrinsic motivation, they perceive others with higher intrinsic motivation as being more moral and thus engage in more prosocial behavior toward those others, and judge others who are less intrinsically motivated as less moral and thereby engage in less prosocial behaviors toward them. We provide empirical support for our theoretical model across a large-scale, team-level field study in a Latin American financial institution (n = 784, k = 185) and a set of three online studies, including a preregistered experiment (n = 245, 243, and 1,245), where we develop a measure of the moralization of intrinsic motivation and provide both causal and mediating evidence. This research complicates our understanding of intrinsic motivation by revealing how its moralization may at times dim the positive light of intrinsic motivation itself.