Ph.D. candidate Kameliia Petrova presented "Does Motivation Trigger Autonomy, or Vice Versa? at the annual meetings of the Southwestern Economic Association in Corpus Christi, Texas. Her paper was awarded the second prize in the association's Student Paper contest for 2003-04 in a field of 80 papers. Petrova will also present the paper this May at the annual meetings of the Austrian Economic Association in Vienna.
Her paper deals with an interesting topic: in the words of its abstract, "Do firms use autonomy to motivate workers, or do they give autonomous jobs to workers who are already especially motivated? A standard result in economics is that firms offer autonomous jobs to promote worker motivation. But surprisingly, little attention has been given to the details of this practice of giving autonomy to especially motivated workers: for example, does autonomy in fact trigger motivation? In contrast, findings from social psychology demonstrate that how people handle new information is closely related to what motivates them. I argue in this study that motivation may trigger autonomy, and thus that firms may benefit from screening for intrinsically motivated workers by offering autonomous jobs with possibly lower monetary incentives. I assume that workers differ in their degree of motivation, and that motivated workers have a lower cost of processing information than unmotivated ones. While a motivated worker concentrates on searching for available information, an unmotivated one focuses on ignoring certain information as irrelevant. Therefore, firms would gain efficiency from giving the more motivated workers a higher degree of autonomy."
Petrova will be an instructor at Wellesley College during the 2004-2005 academic year.
21 Jun 2004