I Love My Job! Exploring Employees’ Intentional Display of Intrinsic Motivation to Others
研究了员工为何向他人表达对工作的热爱，发现主要动机是利他（激励、鼓舞他人）而非功利，并提出了内在动机展示的双重动机框架。
Why do employees express their love for work to others? While books, blog posts, and business articles frequently highlight this behavior, prior research has typically emphasized its tangible benefits, suggesting that instrumental motives underlie such displays of intrinsic motivation. Conceptualizing intrinsic motivation display as employees’ deliberate efforts to communicate their intrinsic motivation to others at work, we use state-of-the-art natural language processing to analyze over 500 discrete instances of this behavior—examining to whom and when it occurs, why and how it is expressed, and its perceived outcomes. To our surprise, and contrary to prevailing assumptions, our findings reveal that the dominant motive driving employees’ intrinsic motivation display is prosocial—a desire to inspire, uplift, or connect with others at work—rather than instrumental. Building on this core discovery, we propose a novel understanding of intrinsic motivation display as a phenomenon shaped by dual motives: prosocial and instrumental. We conclude by discussing how this dual-motive framework advances research on social dimensions of intrinsic motivation in organizational life.