Motivation in caring labor: Implications for the well-being and employment outcomes of nurses

Janette Dill, Rebecca J. Erickson and James M. Diefendorff

Social Science & Medicine, 2016, vol. 167, issue C, 99-106

Abstract: For nurses and other caregivers there is a strong emphasis on prosocial forms of motivation, or doing the job because you want to help others, even in formal, institutionalized care settings. This emphasis is based in gendered assumptions that altruistic motivations are the “right” reasons for being a nurse and lead to the best outcomes for workers and patients. Other motivations for pursuing care work, particularly extrinsic motivation, depart from the prosocial model of care and may be indicative of substandard outcomes, but little research has examined variation in care workers' motivations for doing their jobs. In this study, we use survey data collected from 730 acute care hospital nurses working within one health care system in the Midwestern United States to examine whether different sources of motivation for being a nurse are related to nurse job burnout, negative physical symptoms, and turnover intentions. Our findings suggest that nurses who have high intrinsic and extrinsic motivation actually have better perceived health and employment outcomes (i.e., less likely to say that they will leave, lower burnout, fewer negative physical symptoms) than those with high prosocial motivation, who are more likely to report job burnout.

Keywords: United States; Nursing workforce; Care work; Job burnout; Intent to turnover; Prosocial motivation; Intrinsic motivation; Extrinsic motivation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953616303896
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:167:y:2016:i:c:p:99-106

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
http://www.elsevier. ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2016.07.028

Access Statistics for this article

Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian

More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().