Employee Motivation in Contemporary Academic Literature: A Narrative Literature Review

Jarkovská Petra () and Jarkovská Martina ()
Additional contact information
Jarkovská Petra: Škoda Auto University, Department of Human Resources Management, Mladá Boleslav, Czech Republic
Jarkovská Martina: Faculty of Economics and Management, Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, Czech Republic

Organizacija, 2024, vol. 57, issue 2, 185-201

Abstract: Background Using the correct type of motivation is pivotal in triggering employees’ affirmative work attitudes, such as work performance, job satisfaction, or voluntary retention, ultimately leading to increasing the organization’s overall efficiency. Despite the ongoing academic debate, academics provide practitioners with mixed results on which motivation factors are relevant for targeted employee groups whose needs are under the economic and socio-psychological pressure of the rapidly evolving environment. Elton Mayo was the first to acknowledge these socio-psychological factors as significant motivation drivers almost a century ago. Methods Therefore, the purpose of this paper, using the narrative literature review method (supported by a systematic search strategy) on 83 articles, is to evaluate the research findings on employees’ motivation (related to their affirmative work attitudes) and to unfold the motivation theory’s advancement. Results Key motivation drivers were identified and unified into five motivation sets applicable to different employee groups. The findings also suggest that most academic works, theoretically grounded in classical motivational concepts, are quantitative analysis-based. Conclusion To increase the efficiency of employees’ performance, internal motivation or internalization of external motivation seems to be the best solution. Employees’ “floating” needs call for practitioners to be trained in techniques from psychology.

Keywords: Elton Mayo; Employee motivation; Motivation factor; Motivation theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2478/orga-2024-0013 (text/html)

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:vrs:organi:v:57:y:2024:i:2:p:185-201:n:6

DOI: 10.2478/orga-2024-0013

Access Statistics for this article

Organizacija is currently edited by Jože Zupančič

More articles in Organizacija from Sciendo
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().