Sustainability, Vol. 11, Pages 3331: Regional Sustainability, Individual Expectations and Work Motivation: A Multilevel Analysis (Sustainability)

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.