Work Motivation in the Academe: The Case of Albanian Public Universities

Abstract

Work redesign is becoming increasingly prominent as a strategy for attempting to improve simultaneously the motivation and the quality of the work experience of employees in nowadays organizations. Although the benefits of work redesign are widely touted in the management literature, in fact little is known about the reasons why "enriched" work sometimes leads to positive outcomes for workers and for their employing organizations. Even less is known about the relative effectiveness of various strategies for carrying out the redesign of work (Hackman, 1975). A model is proposed that specifies the conditions under which individuals will become internally motivated to perform effectively on their jobs. The model focuses on the interaction among three classes of variables: (a) the psychological states of employees that must be present for internally motivated work behavior to develop; (b) the characteristics of jobs that can create these psychological states; and (c) the attributes of individuals that determine how positively a person will respond to a complex and challenging job. The model was tested for academic staff who work on different public universities allover Albania and results support its validity. A number of special features of the model are discussed and the model is compared to other theories of job design.