Research

Mijeong Kwon & Laura Sonday

Academy of Management Review (Link)

Scholars have traditionally treated motivation as a value-neutral state divorced from normative considerations. Yet, research across the social sciences suggests a growing moral imperative to love work, which carries with it the social expectation of intrinsic motivation. This normative pressure stems from the moralization of intrinsic motivation, wherein enjoyment of work is converted into a virtue. While research and practice emphasize positive work outcomes associated with intrinsic motivation, we argue that the moralization of intrinsic motivation is not wholly beneficial. Normative pressure to do what you love can encourage people to pursue and cultivate highly satisfying work for themselves and others. At the same time, however, it can lead to the neglect of security-related concerns (e.g., stable employment) and uninteresting tasks. Moreover, it can elicit discriminatory behavior against those who are presumed to lack intrinsic motivation or who exhibit other viable forms of motivation, impacting overall cohesion and conflict within organizations. Our framework explains how intrinsic motivation becomes morally laden, and the opportunities and perils it presents at intrapersonal, interpersonal, and organizational levels.

Mijeong Kwon, Julia Lee Cunningham, & Jon Jachimowicz

Academy of Management Journal (Link)

Intrinsic motivation has received widespread attention as a predictor of positive work outcomes, including employees’ prosocial behavior. In the current research, we offer a more nuanced view by proposing that intrinsic motivation does not uniformly increase prosocial behavior toward all others. Specifically, we argue that employees with higher intrinsic motivation are more likely to value intrinsic motivation and associate it with having higher morality (i.e., they moralize it). When employees moralize intrinsic motivation, we suggest, they perceive others with higher intrinsic motivation as being more moral and deserving of their help and thus engage in more prosocial behavior toward those others. We provide empirical support for our theoretical model across a large-scale, team-level field study in a Latin American financial institution (N = 781, k = 185) and a set of three online studies, including a pre-registered experiment (Ns = 245, 243, and 1,245), where we develop a measure of the moralization of intrinsic motivation and provide both causal and mediating evidence. Our theory and results reveal that employees with higher intrinsic motivation are more likely to moralize their own motivation and are more attuned to others’ intrinsic motivation as a signal of morality, which underlies their decision to help them selectively. This research therefore complicates our understanding of intrinsic motivation by unveiling how its moralization may at times dim the positive light of intrinsic motivation itself.

Mijeong Kwon, Julia Lee Cunningham, & Jon Jachimowicz

Harvard Business Review (Link)

Research shows that employees who are passionate about their work are more productive, innovative, and collaborative. New research suggests that these employees also see passion for work as a moral imperative, and they’re more likely to judge colleagues who are motivated by other reasons, such as financial stability, social status, or familial obligations. The research also found that these employees were more likely to offer help to their more passionate colleagues. Leaders must recognize the diverse motivations that drive their workforce and create an inclusive environment that supports and values all forms of motivation, rather than penalizing those who do not fit the passion-centric mold.