Motivation intrinsic motivation x extrinsic

applying the scale WPI in the context of public sector portuguese

Abstract

Much of the literature that study ‘motivation’ in the public sector context feeds the idea that organizational singularities and peculiarities of the individuals who constitute the labor force in this sector result in higher preponderance of intrinsic motivation and rewards of intrinsic type. However this assumption has never been scrutinized in the reality of Portuguese public sector, which means that the purpose of this work is to fill this gap, ie to obtain an answer to the following question: ‘in general terms, what is the type of predominant motivation among civil servants Portuguese: intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation?’. For such we opt to a case study, based on the scale ‘The work preference inventory’ developed by Amabile, Hill, Hennessey and Tighe (1994). The results point towards to high levels, in general, of intrinsic motivation, although the extrinsic motivation of Portuguese officials also reaches reasonable levels.