Work Motivation and Its Antecedents: A Comparative Study of Chinese and Korean Employees
The purpose of this study is to analyze the relations between work motivation and compensation system, psychological contract, job characteristics, and to com...
Work Motivation and Its Antecedents: A Comparative Study of Chinese and Korean Employees
The purpose of this study is to analyze the relations between work motivation and compensation system, psychological contract, job characteristics, and to compare concretely what differences there are between Chinese employees and Korean employee in order to find out the reason which cause the difference and improve their job performance.
This study distributed 244 written surveys and conducted SPSS 20.0 with the returned surveys. The results of this study are summarized as follows.
First, compensation system, psychological contract and job characteristics have positive effects on work motivation. Therefore both Chinese employee and Korean employees’ work motivation will be higher if compensation system, psychological contract or job characteristics is higher and better. Moreover, compensation system, transactional contract can affect employees’ extrinsic motivation, on the other hand, relational contract, job characteristics can affect employees’ integrated motivation and intrinsic motivation.
Second, the relations between psychological contract and job performance have the mediated effect of work motivation. In addition, psychological contract includes transactional contract which has positive effects on extrinsic motivation , and relational contract which has effects on integrated motivation and intrinsic motivation. As a result, work motivation is an important factor between psychological contract and job performance.
Third, comparing exploratively Chinese employees with Korean employees, considering age, gender, work period as the moderating variable, the results show that the degree of salary and welfare have stronger positive effects on the extrinsic motivation of Chinese employees. However, the degree of job characteristics has stronger positive effects on integrated motivation and intrinsic motivation of Korean employees. Also, according to results, there is the difference only on personal transactional contract and organizational relational contract between Chinese employees and Korean employees. That is to say, high salary, good welfare or transactional contract which employees like can effectively enhance Chinese employees’ extrinsic motivation so that improve their job performance. On the other hand, in order to improving Korean employees’ job performance, making relational contract which employees acknowledge or adding meaningful job characteristics is the effective and helpful method.