Decoding the drivers of work motivation: Exploring the interplay of procedural constraints, job characteristics, and self-efficacy within wright's framework

Whereas work motivation has been a widely studied topic in psychology and other disciplines, it remains grossly understudied in public administration decades after Behn (Behn, 1995), Rainey (Rainey & Steinbauer, 1999), and Wright (Wright, 2004) raised this concern. Part of this could be due to the different lenses that could be applied to the understanding of motivation and the absence of an overarching theory of motivation (Wright, 2004; Rainey, 1993). However, one common understanding, drawing on motivation in general as being the ability to stay interested, engaged and continually energized to achieve a goal (Cambridge English Dictionary), is to perceive work motivation as referring to the direction, intensity and persistence of work-related behaviors generally aimed toward the achievement of organizational goals. To provide a way forward, Wright leveraged on the work of others to develop and present a conceptual model drawn on the integration of goal and social cognitive theories, with the aim of showing how work context may influence work motivation (Wright, 2001, 2004). The idea of the model was to provide a framework for testing the influence of the employee's work context - goal conflict, procedural constraints and goal ambiguity, on work motivation indirectly through their influence on job attitudes and job characteristics as important antecedents. To provide empirical support, Wright's model of work motivation was tested in a Structural Equation Model, with data from 267 self-administered questionnaires.