Sun, Brenda C
(2006)
Motivation under uncertainty and risks: Evaluation of the effects of China's employment and wage reforms.
PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Abstract
This dissertation is set out to evaluate the effectiveness of China's wage and employment reforms against a major objective - the revival of motivation among individuals to adapt to new and changing environmental demands and challenges in their jobs in the face of intensifying global competition and increased resource constraints. It extends existing motivation research in several important ways. First, although the reforms began as early as the late 1970s and have had a profound impact on the nation's 100 million-strong industrial workforce, their dual impact on motivation was only empirically explored for the first time in this study due to extremely high research barriers. Second, since motivation research tends to focus on pay systems and especially rewards, this thesis also represents the first empirical attempt assessing the simultaneous motivational impact of wage and employment systems reform in the world. Third, with the advantage of an interdisciplinary approach, I developed a research model that accounts for uncertainty and risks, thus setting the model apart from existing frameworks. By testing a primary dataset of more than 1,000 units of analysis on the proposed framework of Environmental Perception and Adaptive Motivation against leading theories, I was able to establish that the proposed model is a superior and, indeed, more fitting framework for predicting individuals' motivation to adapt to new demands and challenges in their jobs in a fast-changing and turbulent workplace. These results in turn lend confidence to my concluding argument for the future role of risks in motivation research.
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