The results indicated that prosocial motivation is important in identifying with the profession but not necessarily for personal involvement in the job. The study gives important knowledge on how a commonly reported motivation for entering nursing relates to the nurses' attitudes about their work life.

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Nesje, K. (2017). Professional commitment: Does it buffer or intensify job demands? Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 58,[185][186][187][188][189][190][191] The purpose of this study is to investigate whether professional commitment can be seen as a moderator in the relationship between job demands and emotional exhaustion among Norwegian nurses. Inspired by the job demands-resources model, this study explores whether having a strong commitment to the nursing profession can be seen as a resource that buffers the effect of job demands on emotional exhaustion or, conversely, intensifies the impact of job demands. A survey that comprised Norwegian nurses who had graduated three years previously (N = 388) was conducted. Multiple regression was performed to test the hypothesis. The results provide support to a buffering effect; thus, individuals with a higher degree of professional commitment conveyed a weaker association between job demands and emotional exhaustion compared with nurses with a lower degree of commitment. Developing a better understanding of the potential buffering effect of professional commitment is of great interest. The present study is the first to utilize professional commitment as a resource within the job demands-resources framework.

This study compares the transition from education to work for Norwegian graduates with a professional STEM master’s degree to that of their peers with a non-professional STEM master’s degree. We find that professional STEM graduates tend to have better labour market outcomes than other STEM graduates. However, the unemployment rate of professional STEM graduates is more sensitive to business cycle fluctuations. The findings suggest that a professional STEM degree does not protect against unemployment, in contrast to findings from studies of other professional degrees.

While intrinsic motivation is often seen as the ideal form of motivation for entering higher education, students may also have external motivations related to the life after graduation. There has been limited focus on how different enrolment motivations are related to dropping out of higher education. In this study, we investigated how motivations and dropping out are related in nursing programmes versus business administration programmes. The study demonstrates that type of motivation predicts the risk of dropping out differently for students of the two study programmes. For nursing students, intrinsic motivation reduces the risk of leaving the programme before completion, while for business administration students an instrumental type of motivation related to status and money reduces this. The study nuances the assumption that intrinsic motivation for choosing a study programme is the most favourable form of motivation when it comes to persistence through the programme.