510 Chapter 14 The Major Motives of Life: Food, Love, Sex, and work
one-third. What you see, apparently, influences
what you want—and what you think you can get.
In the United States, when law, veterinary
medicine, pharmacy, and bartending were almost
entirely male professions, and nursing, teaching,
and child care were almost entirely female, few
women aspired to enter the “male” professions.
When job segregation became illegal, however,
people’s career motivations changed. Today, it is
common to see a female lawyer, vet, pharmacist,
and bartender. And although women are still a
minority in engineering, math, and science, their
numbers have been rising (Cox & Alm, 2005). In
1960, women earned only 0.4 percent of the doc-
torates in engineering; in 2010, 43 percent of the
younger cohorts of people in engineering were
women. As these numbers have increased, the old
view that women are not “naturally” suited to en-
gineering, math, and science has been fading fast.
Unhappily, as women attain greater numbers
in fields that once were closed to them, today it is
men who are more likely to be suffering from dis-
satisfaction and low motivation to succeed, reject-
ing college or dropping out of school. Women are
far more likely than men to educate themselves
for the careers of the future in service industries,
health care, and education; men are still reluctant
to go into “women’s work.”
This gender shift is occurring in developing
as well as developed nations, a result of changes
in the global economy—the slow erosion of tra-
ditionally male jobs in construction, manufactur-
ing, and high finance and the expanding need for
people who are educated and have good com-
munication and “people” skills. In 2010, young
American women had a median income higher
than that of their male peers in 1,997 out of
2,000 metropolitan regions. In Brazil, one-third
of married women earn more than their husbands.
Women are the majorities in colleges and profes-
sional schools on every continent except Africa; in
Bahrain, Qatar, and Guyana, women are 70 per-
cent of college graduates (Rosin, 2012).Working Conditions. Imagine that you live in
a town that has one famous company, Boopsie’s
Biscuits & Buns. Everyone in the town is grateful
for the 3B company and goes to work there with
high hopes. Soon, however, an odd thing starts
happening to many employees. They complain of
fatigue and irritability. They are taking lots of sick
leave. Productivity
declines. What’s go-
ing on at Boopsie’s
Biscuits & Buns? Is
everybody suffering
from sheer laziness?No one is born with a feeling of confidence, or
self- efficacy. You acquire it through experience in
mastering new skills (by making mistakes!), over-
coming obstacles, and learning from occasional
failures. Self-efficacy also comes from having suc-
cessful role models who teach you that your ambi-
tions are possible and from having people around
to give you constructive feedback and encourage-
ment (Bandura, 2006).
People who have a strong sense of self-
efficacy are quick to cope with problems rather
than stewing and brooding about them. Studies
in North America, Europe, and Russia find that
self-efficacy has a positive effect on just about
every aspect of people’s lives: how well they do on
a task, the grades they earn, how persistently they
pursue their goals, the kind of career choices they
make, their ability to solve complex problems,
their motivation to work for political and social
goals, their health habits, and even their chances
of recovery from heart attack. Self-efficacy and
the setting of ambitious but achievable goals
are the strongest predictors of learning and ac-
complishment (Lanaj, Chang, & Johnson, 2012;
Sitzmann & Ely, 2011).The Effects of Work on
Motivation LO 14.13
Many people think the relationship between
work and motivation runs in one direction: You
are motivated, so you choose a career and you
work hard to get it. But psychological scientists
have also studied the reverse direction: How
the availability of careers affects motivation. For
example, one simple but powerful external factor
that affects many people’s motivation to work
in a particular field is the proportion of men
and women in that occupation (Kanter, 2006).
When occupations are segregated by gender,
many people form gender stereotypes about the
requirements of such careers: Female jobs re-
quire kindness and nurturance; male jobs require
strength and smarts. These stereotypes, in turn,
stifle many people’s aspirations to enter a non-
traditional career and also create self-fulfilling
prejudices in employers (Agars, 2004; Cejka &
Eagly, 1999; Eccles, 2011).
A natural experiment in India showed the
powerful influence of female role models on ado-
lescents’ educational and achievement ambitions
(Beaman et al., 2012). In 1993, a law was passed
reserving leadership positions for women in
nearly 500 randomly selected villages. Years later,
a survey of 8,453 adolescents (ages 11 to 15) found
that in villages with the female leaders, the gender
gap in educational aspirations had closed by nearlyself-efficacy A person’s
belief that he or she is
capable of producing
desired results, such as
mastering new skills and
reaching goals.
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