Regional Sustainability, Individual Expectations and Work Motivation: A Multilevel Analysis

Abstract

In the context of the recent labor shortages in Eastern European countries, Romania included, companies, organizations and decision makers need to strongly address the issue of labor motivation for increasing worker performance and also for attracting the scarce labor resources. The main goal of the research is to explore new determinants of work motivation, such as regional sustainability and also individual factors related to individual expectations. Therefore, the responsive methodology used for this purpose implies a multilevel econometric modelling, in which the first level regards individuals, and the second one consists in development regions. Moreover, the role of individual factors is tested using Vroom’s theory of expectations and filling a gap in the existing literature on work motivation in developing, post-communist economies. The main findings prove that one dimension of sustainability, namely social sustainability has a significant impact on work motivation, alongside with four dimensions of individual factors. Economic and environmental sustainability have no significant impact on work motivation in the case of Romanian workers.

Modelling the occupational and educational choices of young people in Poland using Bayesian multinomial logit models

“…The occupational and educational choices of young people depend on many different factors related to both individual characteristics of these people including their work motivation (Davidescu, Roman, Strat and Mosora, 2019) as well as the socioeconomic situation of a country. This work focuses on this first group of factors except for work motivation, due to the lack of relevant data for Poland in this regard.…”

Advancing the sustainability agenda through strategic human resource management: Insights and suggestions for future research

“…It is important to bear in mind that not all sustainable HRM practices will necessarily yield the same effect on employees and/or organizations. For example, Davidescu, Roman, Strat, and Mosora's (2019, p. 1) study of regional sustainability, individual expectations, and work motivation in the Romanian context found that “social sustainability has a significant impact on work motivation,” but economic and environmental sustainability “have no significant impact on work motivation.”…”

Sustainable Careers: Reliability of Job Satisfaction Predictors for Employees Aged 50+. Evidence from Romanian Development Regions

“…Life satisfaction is a mental construct that evaluates well-being of life in general [59]. Several scholars have investigated this relationship and found it to be directly propor between life and job satisfaction [14,60,61].…”