Work motivation and professional life in turbulent times

Objectives: When the speed of socioeconomic transformation is too high, professional life and work motivation may change erratically. The employee’s inner motives and attitudes towards their job might evolve in unknown directions. This could be happening in our turbulent time, as has happened in the past. Here we seek to understand which aspects of motivation remain stable and which become unpredictable. Methods: We examine anew data from a longitudinal study in Bulgaria, collected before and after the 1997 hyperinflation and radical economic reforms. At the time, a research project investigated work motivation and professional life in several European countries. A measurement instrument of 53 psychological and demographic variables, composed of 370 items, was administered in two waves to nation-wide representative samples of the working populations. Because of the period’s uniqueness, two additional study waves were conducted in Bulgaria only. Now we perform a lagged-panel regression analysis of that data. Results: Analysing statistical links among the psychological variables we find that, in hard times, people retain their personal dispositions and performance levels yet rethink unpredictably their relationship with the organization. In particular, the strength of each Maslow-type need, which is a personal characteristic, remains stable. However, the opportunity to satisfy a need – a feature of the organization – can change in times of transformation and become less predictable. Finally, the actual need satisfaction, which is the outcome of the interplay between the above two, also varies considerably, and so does its predictability. Conclusions: Underpinned by period studies across Europe, we believe that our findings are rather country-invariant and can carry over to other kinds of economic shocks. It may be that when the speed of change is quite high, phenomena similar to what we report here might reoccur. Drawing insights for today’s AI-driven restructuring, we anticipate employees to become more autonomous in the job and less loyal to their employers’ values and goals. On the other hand, professional communities could grow in influence.