Date of Award

6-2020

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Psychology

Department

Psychology

First Reader/Committee Chair

Shultz, Kenneth

Abstract

Much research has been done on work motivation in a variety of employment settings, with most of the research focused on full-time employees. Being that there are an increasing number of employees who work in contingent work settings, such as part time jobs, it is important to better understand what motivational factors are salient in these situations. In addition, researchers have looked at why employees choose to work part time and they have found that there are voluntary and involuntary reasons they choose to do so. Therefore, in the present study, I examined work motivation in part time workers. I examined how motivation applies to the Self-Determination Theory; more specifically, which motivational aspects (external regulation, introjected regulation, identified regulation, and intrinsic motivation) can be more commonly seen in part time employees. In this study, I also examined if there was any relationship between voluntariness and age and intrinsic motivation; as well as if voluntariness had an incremental effect over age in the prediction of various forms of work motivation. Based on a sample of 177 workers gathered from MTurk, I found that part time employees have higher intrinsic motivation. In addition, I found that there was a significant positive linear relationship between voluntariness and intrinsic motivation, however, there was a curvilinear (u-shaped) relationship between age and intrinsic motivation. Finally, there were incremental effects of voluntariness over age in all four motivational levels. Overall, the findings from this research provide important additions to the literature that had never been researched before, as well as providing theoretical and practical implications, and directions for future research.

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